The next major threat to U.S. national security won’t arrive through a missile silo or a cyberattack but through a port terminal, a biotechnology lab, or a cloud infrastructure contract. Because the threat masquerades as commerce, it is rarely recognized for what it is: a coordinated adversarial campaign to erode America’s latent power, or a state’s economic capacity to generate military power over time and embed influence across critical sectors in ways that could be activated or exploited in a future conflict. This is not hypothetical. In 2024, a House Committee on Homeland Security investigation found that some Chinese-made cranes already active in ports across the United States contained communications equipment that could be remotely activated to collect intelligence or disrupt port operations. In a conflict scenario, such disruptions could delay the movement of military equipment, block access to critical energy and food supplies, or paralyze logistics hubs that support both civilian life and defense mobilization.
Despite increasing efforts across the U.S. government to manage economic security, no department or agency has an integrated picture of adversarial economic behavior. What is missing is fused intelligence, or fully integrated all-source analysis that considers all data sources. To date, U.S. responses have not matched the scale or complexity of the challenge. In 2023, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence created the Office of Economic Security and Emerging Technology to close the gap. While it is a promising start, it is neither staffed, scoped, nor resourced to function as a true fusion center.
The United States has seen this play out before. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, 9/11 Commission chair Thomas Kean wrote that U.S. counter-terrorism efforts had been too fragmented, too siloed, and lacked a clear center of gravity. That institutional failure ultimately led to the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center to fuse intelligence and drive coordinated action. Today, the threat is economic, not only kinetic, but the institutional flaw remains the same. No entity fuses intelligence to detect, forecast, and disrupt adversarial economic activity. To avoid strategic surprise in this new domain, the United States should build a National Economic Intelligence and Security Center. Building new institutional muscle in the current climate of bureaucratic downsizing and political volatility will be difficult. That doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary. It means the window to do so is narrower, and the cost of hesitation is greater.
The Wrong Lens
Recent reforms, such as the expansion of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States under the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018, the Commerce Department’s export controls, and the establishment of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Office of Economic Security and Emerging Technology, reflect growing recognition that economic actions can be strategic threats. But these efforts are still stovepiped. Each institution operates from its legal authorities, data sets, and mission scope. No one wholly owns the economic battlespace.
Most approaches treat economic security as a regulatory problem. The result is a reactive, enforcement-driven system that is essentially blind to activity outside formal investment review. However, economic warfare increasingly operates at the seams through shell companies, passive capital, maritime logistics, data centers, and artificial intelligence supply chains. For example, there is the steady penetration of global port infrastructure by Chinese state-owned or state-affiliated companies, the quiet acquisition of U.S. biotechnology intellectual property, and the placement of Chinese-built telecom hardware near sensitive military sites. These are not just business decisions. They are battles for operational access, data control, and influence. Yet, they rarely trigger a coordinated response from the intelligence community because they don’t look like traditional threats.
Trump’s Partial Blueprint
The first Trump administration, despite its chaotic execution, took several unprecedented steps, recognizing that adversaries could weaponize economic openness. The Trump administration banned Huawei from U.S. networks and invoked Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 (19 U.S. Code § 1862) regarding steel and aluminum. The Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act, the foundation of modern investment screening, was also enacted during this period. The Biden administration largely continued this approach, maintaining export restrictions and prohibiting certain U.S. investments in Chinese companies involved in semiconductor production, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence through Executive Order 14105, “Addressing United States Investments in Certain National Security Technologies and Products in Countries of Concern.”
But these moves were tactical, not strategic. They lacked a lasting architecture. The Trump-era policies exposed critical vulnerabilities in U.S. economic interdependence. However, they did not establish the integrated infrastructure necessary to systematically understand or anticipate threats. In 2025, with global capital flowing more rapidly and geopolitical competition intensifying, the United States cannot afford another fragmented response. The next step should be structural.
Why Intelligence — Not Just Policy — Is the Missing Piece
China is playing a long game. It has acquired leverage over critical infrastructure, supply chains, and emerging technologies worldwide through state-aligned companies, sovereign wealth funds, and opaque financial networks. These efforts are not merely opportunistic. They are strategic, data-driven, and intentionally integrated across party, state, and military institutions, hallmarks of the Chinese Communist Party’s military-civil fusion strategy. That is precisely why a regulatory or enforcement mindset is insufficient. The United States cannot regulate itself out of a coordinated influence campaign. It should detect, map, and disrupt — using intelligence. Yet today, no joint center for economic intelligence exists to synthesize disparate data and deliver forward-looking answers. That is not to say that no one is examining this problem. The Department of the Treasury’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis monitors illicit finance, the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security leads U.S. efforts to restrict adversarial access to sensitive technologies, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigates economic espionage, but no one sees the whole picture.
The Case for a National Economic Intelligence and Security Center
The United States should create a dedicated fusion center for economic security threats, uniting analytical, technical, and operational capabilities across the interagency. This National Economic Intelligence and Security Center would not function as a policy shop or enforcement agency. Instead, its core mission would center on intelligence collection, data fusion, and strategic warning. Like the National Counterterrorism Center, it should operate at the intersection of the intelligence community and the policymaking apparatus.
Calls for such an institution are gaining traction. In 2022, the Special Competitive Studies Project, a bipartisan commission chaired by former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt, recommended creating a “National Techno-Economic Intelligence Center” modeled on the National Counterterrorism Center to fuse economic and technological threat intelligence. While that proposal focused on the techno-industrial base, this article reframes the issue as an acute intelligence gap, proposing a more operationally grounded institution with near-term mission sets.
The proposed center would complement, not duplicate, existing efforts such as the State Department’s China House or the Central Intelligence Agency’s China Mission Center. Those organizations focus on single-country priorities within traditional diplomatic and intelligence lanes. While China remains the pacing challenge, the fusion center’s mandate would be broader and cross-domain. It would track and assess economic threats globally — spanning ports, supply chains, critical technologies, and financial flows — regardless of the actor. Its mission is not country-specific but systemic: providing fused warning on adversarial economic influence and cross-sector vulnerabilities. To execute this mission, the center would maintain a common intelligence picture on foreign ownership and influence, and fuse classified, regulatory, and open-source data into forward-looking threat assessments. It would operate with strong data-sharing mandates with clear guidelines to protect privacy and civil liberties.
The most viable model may be to elevate the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Office of Economic Security and Emerging Technology. Elevation, in this case, would mean taking the office from a niche analytical shop to an enterprise-level center with codified authorities and dedicated resources to carry out interagency intelligence fusion while still a part and under the direct oversight of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Elevation also allows the center to take advantage of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s integrated structure and ability to fuse foreign intelligence with relevant reporting from domestic-facing agencies. To enhance practical viability and interagency buy-in, the center should leverage multiple funding sources and draw from interagency and private sector subject matter experts. Long-term maintenance should come through the National Intelligence Program, aligning the center with national-level intelligence priorities and ensuring sustained support.
Economic warfare unfolds in boardrooms as often as in bureaucracies. The U.S. government cannot defend against what it cannot see, and much of what matters is in private hands. The proposed center should establish itself as a trusted interlocutor for industry, fostering secure partnerships with ports, defense startups, microelectronics manufacturers, and telecommunications providers. In an era when adversaries embed themselves in supply chains and startups, an early warning may depend on a founder’s intuition as much as an analyst’s report.
Coordination between existing bodies will remain important but is insufficient to meet the threat. The National Security Council remains the best venue for aligning economic security policy across the interagency. Some have also proposed creating a civilian “Economic Joint Chiefs.” These structures can play important roles but are intended to coordinate policy, not generate or analyze intelligence. What the United States needs now is not another policy team, but a fusion center with real authority, one empowered to ask hard questions, cut across institutional silos, and deliver actionable threat intelligence to the president, Congress, and industry in real time.
Urgency Versus Political Realities
Several trends make this moment especially urgent. Global supply chains are fragmenting, yet the United States lacks an intelligence system capable of assessing whether this reshuffling enhances or erodes adversarial influence. At the same time, adversaries are increasingly evading capital controls and sanctions by channeling funds through avenues that traditional screening tools often fail to detect. Meanwhile, emerging technology ecosystems are built on global collaboration and often rely on foreign capital, placing U.S. innovation at risk.
The challenge is not a lack of tools — it is a lack of synthesis. Every department or agency holds a piece of the puzzle. Still, the United States will continue to face the risk of strategic surprise until it connects those pieces within a dedicated, all-source intelligence environment. In short, the landscape is primed for strategic surprise. A foreign adversary could gain hidden control or influence in ways that might only be detected after it is too late.
However, even the strongest institutional designs have to contend with political realities, especially in today’s climate. The fusion center concept faces several significant headwinds in the Trump administration. Against this backdrop, a potential fusion center faces four fundamental challenges.
First, the fusion center model presumes a willingness to invest in shared intelligence infrastructure. Yet, the Trump administration’s recent efforts to shrink or sideline national security institutions, such as the reduction of National Security Council staff, suggest that proposals to establish a new interagency center may be viewed not as pragmatic solutions but as bureaucratic overreach and politically unpalatable.
Second, the traditional fusion center model relies on interagency cooperation and organic intelligence integration, features that may not align with the Trump administration’s governing preferences. As it unfolds, the Trump administration exhibits a clear tendency toward a contradictory sort of centralized authority, favoring tightly controlled executive decision-making and reducing the autonomy of interagency processes (which are theoretically centrally led).
Institutions perceived as independent or out of step with the president’s direction face marginalization or active dismantlement. We may be seeing another example of that unfolding now with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. For an economic intelligence fusion center to function effectively, it requires a culture of analytic collaboration, one that thrives on horizontal relationships and the iterative sharing of intelligence. Without careful institutional alignment and clear value to presidential priorities, the center could be viewed as a bureaucratic encumbrance rather than a strategic asset. This doesn’t negate the need, but it does require a sober recognition that the merits of the argument may not match up with the realities of the political moment.
Third, there is a legitimate concern that intelligence under such a model may become politicized, rather than unbiased, anticipatory assessments. While analytic firewalls are essential, they are not always sufficient, as we have seen recently when a political appointee in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence asked National Intelligence Council analysts to “rethink” an assessment that contradicted policy objectives from the White House. In highly politicized environments, even well-guarded institutions can be bent to serve narrative rather than foresight.
Finally, the center’s success depends on establishing trust and cooperation with the private sector. Yet broad and sometimes adversarial economic actions, such as aggressive tariffs, unilateral trade actions, and public rebukes of business leaders, can inadvertently complicate the delicate task of fostering these public-private relationships. The Trump administration’s decision to disband or suspend key public-private bodies, such as the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Safety Review Board and the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council, underscores this fragility. Their removal signals not only a shift in operational priorities but also a governance approach that may hinder future cooperation, particularly in sensitive areas such as intelligence sharing and collaboration. Public-private collaboration is not simply a matter of structure — it is a function of credibility, predictability, and confidence. In adversarial or volatile contexts, even the most well-designed partnerships may wither.
These challenges are severe, but they do not render the concept fatally flawed. The Trump administration’s posture toward China and other adversarial economic actors creates political demand for better intelligence tools if properly framed. Standing up a center now would establish institutional foundations that can endure beyond any single administration. The alternative, leaving adversarial economic influence unchecked, is far riskier than trying to build imperfect but necessary analytic capacity under current constraints.
James Tingle was a special assistant in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security at the Pentagon and a special advisor in the Office of Trade and Economic Security at the Department of Homeland Security. He is an alum of the University of Maryland, Smith School of Business, and The Citadel, Military College of South Carolina. The views expressed are his own.
Image: FBI via Wikimedia Commons
