In a corporate boardroom reviewing a high-stakes multinational deal, every financial risk was dissected — but no one in the room could see the classified intelligence that might have changed the decision entirely.
Right now, the United States is fighting an economic war without organizing itself for one.
While adversaries deliberately weaponize supply chains, capital flows, technology access, and industrial dependencies, the United States continues to operate its economic and national security systems along largely separate lines — managed through distinct authorities, processes, and intelligence channels. The result is a structural information gap between what the government knows and what private-sector decision-makers need to know. Closing that gap requires integrating national security intelligence with business intelligence in a disciplined, continuous way — before vulnerabilities harden into strategic disadvantage.
I first began to understand the depth of this problem while still in government. Intelligence reporting was increasingly clear about how competitors were using capital, supply chains, and commercial access to shape strategic outcomes. Yet there was no corresponding architecture to translate those insights into coordinated economic action. Authorities were dispersed. Jurisdictions overlapped. Intelligence was collected for national security purposes, but the companies making consequential economic decisions rarely had visibility into the risks identified by the government.
The gap was structural, not personal. It was not a failure of expertise. Rather, it was a failure of integration. In internal discussions, we could map adversarial behavior with precision — yet there was no parallel mechanism to inform the companies whose decisions were shaping the same strategic terrain.
The military trains to make choices in the field with incomplete information, to assess risk under uncertainty, and to act anyway, because waiting for perfect clarity is often the most dangerous choice available. My transition from government to the private sector exposed this as a gap in corporate decision making, both in boardrooms and throughout executive management. Working with companies, investors, boards, and technology firms, whose decisions sit directly on the front lines of a contested economic landscape, made it clear that the problem is not a lack of sophistication in mitigating the risks — it is a lack of visibility. Decisions with national security implications are made in boardrooms every day without access to the information that would fundamentally change the risk calculation. The government collects this information, called intelligence, and cannot reasonably share it with the companies that need it most.
The new National Security Strategy recognizes that economic security is fundamental to national security, but the government still operates systems as if they are separate. Fragmented authorities, siloed information, and no mechanism for fusing intelligence lead to increased risk and poor decisions. Treating business intelligence and national intelligence as distinct has created blind spots that adversaries are far more willing, and far more able, to exploit. It is critical to fuse U.S. intelligence community acumen with the private-sector knowledge to create action-oriented insights and mitigation plans.
Sharing Expertise
For years, government engagement with the private sector focused primarily on established defense contractors and technology vendors. That model reflected an era when national security risk was concentrated in traditional defense supply chains. Today, many of the most consequential decisions shaping strategic advantage are made by venture capital firms, private equity funds, institutional investors, and other capital allocators whose decisions determine which technologies scale, which firms survive, and which markets consolidate.
Government engagement with these communities expanded accordingly. Officials sought to understand how risk is assessed, how uncertainty is priced, and how investment committees make decisions under time pressure. In some cases, engagement moved beyond dialogue. Government personnel were placed on structured rotations inside venture funds and investment firms for defined periods not to influence outcomes, but to observe and learn. Those individuals gained direct exposure to how incentives drive capital allocation, how speed alters risk tolerance, and how competitive markets reward early positioning. In those settings, I watched investment committees debate risk in real time. Their speed and adaptability to adjust assumptions within hours as new information surfaced was striking. By contrast, government analytic processes were often optimized for deliberation rather than immediacy. The difference was not about competence, but about structure.
These personnel exchanges were valuable. They improved mutual understanding and clarified institutional constraints. But they also revealed a deeper problem: Insight without integration does not change outcomes.
Even when relationships are strong, national security intelligence remains confined to classified channels, and market intelligence remains proprietary and commercially guarded. Each side improves its understanding of the other, yet neither gains a fused picture of how adversarial intent, capital deployment, technology development, and supply-chain positioning intersect in real time.
The question is not limited to my experience in the boardroom. In 2020, Intel decided to outsource leading-edge fabrication to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company following delays in its internal process development. From a commercial perspective, the decision was rational — grounded in competitiveness, speed, and market positioning. But it raises a broader structural question: Would that calculation have been different if corporate leadership had access to the same insight the U.S. intelligence community had regarding Taiwan’s vulnerability, semiconductor concentration risk, and long-term leverage dynamics?
As long as engagement remains relational rather than structural, the system continues to rely on informal awareness rather than institutionalized synthesis. That may reduce friction but it does not close the information gap.
If economic security is to mature as a strategic discipline, integration cannot depend on periodic exchanges or goodwill. It should be embedded into analytic architecture.
The Risk of Inaction
Government institutions are well-practiced at identifying the risks associated with action: legal exposure, political consequences, compliance missteps, and reputational damage, to name a few. These risks are visible, measurable, and tied to discrete decisions. They are documented in memoranda and reviewed in oversight hearings.
The risks of inaction are different. They rarely trigger immediate consequences. They accumulate. I have sat in meetings where action was deferred because no single agency owned the full picture. Each stakeholder saw part of the risk. No one saw enough to compel decisive movement. The absence of integration made delay appear prudent.
In economic security, inaction does not mean doing nothing. It means allowing fragmented systems to operate without integration. It means observing capital flows as they reshape strategic sectors without pattern-level analysis. It means treating individual transactions as isolated events rather than components of a broader positioning strategy.
The costs surface slowly — in hardened supply-chain dependencies, in technology ecosystems that scale under alternative governance models, in minority investments that aggregate into influence, and in leverage that becomes apparent only after it has matured. By the time a vulnerability is visible within a single transaction, the pattern that created it is already well established.
Adversaries exploit precisely this gap between formation and recognition. In cybersecurity, we call this a zero-day vulnerability — a weakness that exists before defenses are calibrated to detect it. Economic vulnerabilities function similarly when intelligence and market data remain siloed.
The absence of integration is itself a risk multiplier. Without a sustained mechanism for fusing national security intelligence and business intelligence, decision-makers on both sides act within incomplete frameworks. Markets optimize for return. Government optimizes for compliance and statutory mandate. Neither sees the full strategic picture.
In a contested economic environment, that structural separation compounds over time. Economic security cannot rely on reactive correction. It requires anticipatory integration.
Due Diligence Without the Full Picture
Firms and investors conduct rigorous due diligence to mitigate risk based on many factors including examining financials, regulatory compliance, and market projections, but often without visibility into international and geopolitical dynamics. Due diligence is undermined when national security intelligence and private-sector business intelligence remain siloed. Nuanced insight from the national security enterprise for national purposes would perhaps shift corporate decisions. Additional risks could be factored into their calculations resulting in a more robust analysis.
During an executive meeting evaluating a cross-border technology merger, I watched a board conduct exhaustive financial and regulatory due diligence. Yet no one in the room was factoring adversarial capital influence, opaque state-linked investors, or downstream supply-chain dependencies. The transaction was compliant. It was profitable. It was rational. It was also strategically risky in ways invisible to those without access to national security intelligence.
The individuals in that room were neither careless nor uninformed. The gap was structural. The information that would have materially changed the risk calculus existed inside government systems. The process is not designed to inform private-sector decision-making, let alone doing it in real time.
In the private sector, market intelligence is a competitive asset and treated as confidential company information. Corporate engagement with government in any form is associated with regulatory exposure (high risk). Within the U.S. intelligence community, the same posture is true, but for different reasons. The intelligence community protects sources and methods which makes sharing information with industry inherently risky and less credible. These stances are understandable, yet together in the ecosystem they shatter the trust required for sustained collaboration because neither side sees enough return to justify the exposure.
Neither the U.S. government nor corporate America captures all the risks in their respective analyses, and it is not because their work is careless. Both sides operate with incomplete information. Deliberately fusing that information in near-real time would enhance our security and help safeguard our economy. Patterns only emerge when the data is integrated.
Why Existing Approaches Fall Short
Existing approaches to economic security fall short not because of lack of effort, but because they remain fragmented and largely transaction driven. The structure of the U.S. federal departments prevents sustained integration. Here we explore a few examples to highlight the disconnects across increasing hierarchy: committees, departments, communities, and strategic programs.
The interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States reviews foreign investment transactions and has expanded its authorities considerably in recent years, including under the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018. Yet the committee is inherently transaction-bound. Its mandate is to assess specific deals that are formally presented for review. In practice, that means analysis begins only once a transaction is visible. By the time a deal is filed, much of the strategic positioning may already be complete. It does not monitor broader capital flows across markets, nor was it designed to identify emerging patterns of strategic investment before leverage materializes. As a result, the mechanism functions as a gatekeeper, not as a sensing platform.
Consider minority investments in emerging technology firms. Individually, these stakes often fall below formal review thresholds and present no immediate national security trigger. The deals are structured to be non-controlling, compliant, and commercially routine. Collectively, however, they can provide technical and intellectual visibility, information access, supply-chain positioning, and long-term influence across an entire sector. No single transaction appears malicious. The accumulation of these investment deals reveals a pattern of strategic behavior. By the time influence is visible through a single transaction, the strategic posture is mature. Transaction-level review mechanisms will not detect pattern formation.
Federal departments with deep economic expertise, including the Department of the Treasury, Commerce, and State, collect and analyze substantial financial and commercial data. However, they are organized to serve their statutory missions, not to synthesize those insights into forward-looking national security assessments for private-sector decision-makers. No single institution is responsible for assembling a comprehensive picture of how capital deployment, technology transfer, and supply-chain positioning intersect strategically.
The intelligence community, for its part, excels at identifying adversarial intent, sanctions evasion, and covert financial networks. It is less structured to evaluate how adversaries use lawful capital investment, minority stakes, joint ventures, and commercial partnerships to advance long-term strategic objectives. Those activities often fall below traditional intelligence warning thresholds.
Meanwhile, various offices across government, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, provide valuable briefings and partnership initiatives. These efforts improve awareness. But awareness alone does not constitute integration. Information is shared in discrete engagements rather than synthesized into a sustained analytic framework to shape capital allocation and board-level decisions.
The result is not absence of action. It is absence of architecture.
What Fusion Actually Means
Fusing national security intelligence with business intelligence does not mean broadly sharing classified reporting or turning companies into extensions of the intelligence community. That framing has slowed serious discussion by conflating purposeful integration with unnecessary exposure.
In practice, fusion is disciplined and practical. Fusion means translating intelligence-derived patterns into sector-level risk indicators that can be shared responsibly. It means moving beyond transaction review toward strategic sensing. It means identifying how adversarial capital deployment, technology positioning, supply-chain concentration, and market consolidation interact over time.
Fusion is not firm-specific targeting. It is structured synthesis.
Information should move in both directions. Industry insight, such as market behavior, emerging technologies, pricing signals, and supply constraints, strengthens government analysis. National security intelligence, such as adversarial intent, covert financing patterns, and long-term strategic positioning, strengthens corporate risk assessment. The objective is not data exchange for its own sake. It is decision support. When intelligence informs operational decisions in government, outcomes improve measurably. Economic decision-making deserves the same analytic rigor.
There is precedent for this. Civil-military cooperation in cybersecurity evolved from ad hoc briefings into structured mechanisms for rapid information exchange and coordinated response. Economic security requires a similar maturation — one that embeds integration into analytic architecture rather than relying on periodic outreach.
Done well, fusion informs capital allocation, supply-chain design, technology partnerships, and foreign investment decisions before vulnerabilities harden into adversarial advantage. It allows leaders to see patterns rather than isolated events.
Integration does not eliminate risk. It reduces blind spots.
What Should Change
Economic security will not mature through episodic engagement or expanded transaction reviews alone. Structural integration is required. Three changes are essential.
First, establish a dedicated economic intelligence integration function staffed jointly by intelligence professionals, Treasury and Commerce analysts, and detailees with private-sector expertise to synthesize national security intelligence and commercial data into sector-level risk assessments. No single organization currently assembles this picture.
Second, shift from transaction review to pattern detection. Mechanisms like the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States are reactive and transaction-bound. Intelligence integration for economic security requires identifying strategic investment trends and dependency formation before leverage is exercised.
Third, identify and share the risk indicators of economic security to inform decision-making. We should normalize sector-level intelligence products for boards and investors.
A More Secure Way Forward
Economic security comes with clear articulation of risks, dependencies, and tradeoffs. Economic intelligence is an asset in decision support, not merely for alerting officials.
Addressing the information-sharing problem does not require dismantling existing legal frameworks or compromising civil liberties. It does not require broader sharing of sources or methods that may compromise intelligence-gathering activities. It simply requires more intentional use of the authorities and discretion already available. Analysts and policymakers should continue to investigate carefully and lawfully with fusion approaches to bring together national security intelligence, economic data, and commercial insight.
Decision-makers act within their respective authorities. Sharing intelligence to inform those decisions is in the best interest of the private sector and the national security enterprise. Fusing private and public sector data empowers leaders to make informed decisions about the future of the United States.
Public-private engagement, particularly with capital investors, is an ongoing learning opportunity for both sides. Government has much to learn about how risk is priced from the commercial perspective and how uncertainty is managed in any number of scenarios and markets. At the same time, public judgment, accountability, and strategic perspective remain essential correctives to purely market-driven outcomes. The federal government has the responsibility to make it easier to share decision-relevant insights with the private sector decision-makers who need it most. Excessive caution driven by fear of missteps can be as damaging as recklessness and inaction.
Finally, economic intelligence as a domain requires professionalization. Analysts and leaders who understand both markets and security, operating under clear doctrine and oversight, are essential if economic security is to mature beyond a collection of well-meaning initiatives.
Conclusion
Economic security and national security are mutually reinforcing. Ignoring that reality does not preserve values or reduce risk. It shifts risk into places the United States is less prepared to measure and mitigate. The greatest danger is not flawed engagement between government and industry. It is the institutional comfort of fragmentation.
Economic security cannot remain a collection of well-meaning initiatives. It should become a professionalized discipline with clear doctrine, integrated intelligence, and defined responsibility.
The United States has the tools. What it lacks is integration. In a contested economic environment, that gap is not theoretical — it is a strategic vulnerability.
The structural separation addressed here is primarily domestic. Yet adversarial systems do not operate with similar distinctions between commercial and state actors. In some models, civil and military capabilities are deliberately integrated in ways that amplify economic leverage. Understanding how that integration functions across borders — and how democratic systems can respond without compromising their own legal principles — is the next dimension of economic security and the focus of the next article in the series.
Karyn Eliot is a retired senior CIA executive with more than two decades of experience in intelligence leadership, interagency coordination, commercial partnerships, and allied engagement. She now works at the nexus of national security and economic decision-making, including as a strategic account executive at Rohirrim and as a partner at Five Eyes Group.
Jennifer Buss is the chief executive officer of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. She has worked across industry and government facilitating information sharing to advance national security.
Special thanks are due to Bradley Olson of George Mason University for providing research and administrative support for this publication.
Image: Petty Officer 2nd Class Connor Burns via DVIDS.
