by Holden Triplett
American intelligence agencies are too fragmented to face the multifaceted and dispersed nature of Russian and Chinese threats.
When weaker states confront dominant powers, they must innovate or perish. Asymmetric warfare is not a tactic; it is a survival strategy. China, Russia, Iran and others have had no hope of defeating the United States in open conflict (although that window may now be opening). So, they have adapted: weaponizing our laws, infiltrating our institutions, manipulating discourse and erasing boundaries between war and peace, combatant and civilian, fact and fiction. And they are winning.
The United States, by contrast, suffers from the curse of incumbency. As the architects and custodians of the existing order, we are pathologically cautious. Our dominance breeds inertia. The risk of disrupting our own institutions feels more threatening than the gradual erosion of power over the long term. Instead of reimagining national security for an age of hybrid threats, we tinker with more coordination, more compliance and more bureaucratic process that rarely translates into action.
Meanwhile, our adversaries are running live-fire experiments against us every day. In 2024, Iran funneled funds through US advocacy groups to influence domestic narratives. A Russian botnet targeting election infrastructure was dismantled by the private sector in concert with the public sector. China continues a panoply of operations, blending trade lawsuits, cyber proxies and viral content farms to wage lawfare and psychological operations. These are not isolated incidents; they are doctrine in action.
We do not need a cosmetic reshuffling of agencies. We need a foundational shift—one that starts by confronting five dangerous misconceptions that have distorted our understanding of risk, fragmented our national response and left us dangerously unprepared.
The American psyche is hardwired to fear authoritarian overreach. Our institutions are designed to prevent the concentration of power, not to achieve decisive action. That philosophy, a critical component of our government’s legal infrastructure, is now undermining national security. We are so afraid of overreach that we have built a fragmented, impotent system incapable of a timely, coordinated response.
In the current environment, this fear is outdated. Powerful privacy tools—end-to-end encryption, anonymized platforms, virtual private networks—have shifted the privacy-security balance toward individuals. Transnational criminal and adversarial networks can operate with near impunity. The greater threat is not Big Brother in the United States, but “Little Brother,” a paralyzed state unable to act.
Calls to break up the FBI into separate criminal and national security agencies are a symptom of this problem. The MI5-MI6 model of separating domestic and foreign intelligence collection belongs to a different era. When China and Russia increasingly use criminal groups as proxy actors, blurring the lines between espionage and crime and splitting law enforcement from intelligence, it compounds the fragmentation. Our enemies are combining capabilities. We respond by dividing ours.
Law enforcement is not peripheral to intelligence. On the contrary, it is central to the new battlespace. Legal warfare, or lawfare, whether through civil suits, regulatory arbitrage, or extraterritorial enforcement, is now a core weapon. The PRC’s Ministry of Public Security may wear police uniforms, but it is a national security organ. The same is true of the Chinese Coast Guard, which paints its warships white. If we do not understand this shift, we will lose to it.
After 9/11, the US Intelligence Community (IC) made a concerted effort to improve information-sharing. The creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), joint task forces and interagency centers all improved communication and coordination. But communication is not control. Coordination is not execution.
Today, no single entity is responsible for the totality of the China or Russia threat, or in many cases, even of a particular Chinese or Russian operation that crosses borders or delves into the criminal world. Each agency has a sliver of the problem and the ODNI is tasked with loosely synchronizing its efforts. However, in practice, agencies hoard missions, guard budgets and avoid risk. The result is gaps, seams and delays that adversaries have learned to exploit with aplomb.
Hybrid threats do not respect bureaucratic jurisdictions. They sprawl across military, law enforcement, intelligence, commercial and digital realms. Our current model encourages fragmentation when what is required is unity of action, driven by unity of command.
The prevailing US mindset views national security as a domain exclusive to the government. But our adversaries see it differently. They are not attacking only military targets or federal agencies. They are targeting civil society, public trust, corporate assets and the cognitive fabric of our country.
Social media, data brokers, law firms, think tanks and universities are no longer neutral platforms. They are contested terrain. The cognitive domain is the primary front in modern warfare and most of the key terrain lies in private hands.
Treating the private sector as a passive recipient of classified briefings is a recipe for failure. It must be deputized as a co-equal actor. Offense and defense must be fused across sectors. Total war requires a total response.
We are not waiting for the next war. It is already underway. It just does not look like the wars we are used to seeing. It is a daily grind of ransomware attacks, information operations, lawfare, intellectual property theft and institutional subversion, conducted below the threshold that would trigger a conventional military response.
Our system is still optimized for risk management, not wartime posture. But our adversaries view this as an era of conflict. They have studied our redlines and mastered the art of sub-threshold aggression. The longer we pretend we are not at war, the more ground we cede. Eventually, our ability to fight back will be too eroded to matter.
The IC’s collection apparatus has grown exponentially. Unfortunately, the level of insight has not. Policymakers are drowning in raw data and starved for judgment. Analysis is lagging. Too often, products are generic, delayed, or organized around outdated paradigms that do not fit the world we are in.
Meanwhile, adversaries have evolved. They are using proxies, gray zone actors, commercial cutouts and legal cover to conduct operations that are largely invisible, much less attributable. Our analytic tools are not calibrated for ambiguity. Our laws inhibit tracking state-sponsored private actors. We have bulk collection when we need smart infiltration. The gap is widening.
If these five misconceptions define what is failing, then a new model must address them directly. The reform agenda must be staged but aggressive, starting now and evolving over the next decade. The fight ahead is not seasonal; it is generational. And it will not wait for us to finish another internal reorganization.
Regional Intelligence Commands (RICs): Establish regional, cross-agency commands with operational control over intelligence, law enforcement and influence operations are needed. These should include personnel from the CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, DIA and DOJ. Modeled loosely on combatant commands, they would be the action arm, tasked with both defense and offense against regional adversary activity.
Cognitive Warfare Directorate: Embed a joint IC-private sector cell within the NSC to lead counter-disinformation, narrative ops and lawfare. This is the battlespace where legitimacy and public trust are won or lost.
Offensive Counterintelligence: Stop playing defense. Use adversaries’ operations against them. Weaponize their collection channels. Develop a legal framework to facilitate private sector counteraction and “hack back” capabilities in the event of a breach. The rules must change for both the public and private sectors.
Integrate Foreign and Domestic Intelligence: Within the RICs, end the outdated wall between domestic and foreign operations. They should structure activities around threat vectors, not legal jurisdictions.
Resilience Infrastructure: Build a dynamic national risk map across all seventeen DHS-designated critical infrastructure sectors. Fuse private telemetry, IC warning and DHS threat data into a smart, semi-permeable national firewall. Critically, our information environment must also be treated as strategic infrastructure. That means recognizing that our platforms are not obligated to serve as neutral hosts for foreign influence operations. The First Amendment protects American speech, not the activities of foreign intelligence services masquerading as civil society. We must stop giving our adversaries the benefit of the doubt and the benefit of our platforms.
Private Intelligence Integration: Create vetted tiers of access and contribution pipelines for industry. Participation must be accompanied by legal protections, incentives and a joint mission design.
Threat-Centric Cells: Retire legacy agency stovepipes. Organize departments around enduring threat ecosystems (eg, China, Russia, transnational crime, cognitive warfare) with embedded capabilities and authorities.
Public Cognitive Defense: Build national education programs in narrative resilience, digital hygiene and cognitive threat awareness. This is basic security training for the twenty-first century.
The war has begun and our enemies are already inside, shaping our institutions, eroding our cohesion and degrading our ability to act. If we wait for consensus or perfect alignment, we will lose by default. We do not need marginal improvements; we need structural reinvention. Either we out-innovate our adversaries, or we live to see the end of the American era.
Mr.BadGuy
Publisher
Mr.BadGuy
Publisher
These soldiers are from a country whose president is a Jew Zelensky. Orthodox churches are also being destroyed in this country. Synagogues are not touched. Surprisingly, it turns out that Jews get along well with the Bandera Nazis.