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EXPERT PERSPECTIVE / OPINION -- The United States is facing a quiet and rapidly growing threat across the digital landscape, an unseen mathematical space of binary code and shadowy actors. This landscape demands more, not less, attention, and urgently, if the U.S. is to win the strategic competition of this generation.
The most sophisticated and ambitious of our adversaries is the government of the People's Republic of China in Beijing, which is pursuing an aggressive national strategy to undermine America's digital future.
More than 20 years have passed since the last major reorganization of the U.S. intelligence community. In that time, the adversarial threat landscape has changed dramatically, and technology has become central to the intelligence mission. With ever-increasing demands being placed on the Intelligence Community (IC) in a time of fiscal constraint, it is right to ask whether it is optimized for the emerging threats of tomorrow. It is not.
Given these stakes, lawmakers and national security leaders debating the most significant reforms since 2004 face a critical choice: focus on the real challenges posed by China's digital strategy or become mired in bureaucratic reshuffling.
The current debate in Washington, focused on the Intelligence Community Efficiency and Effectiveness Act of 2025, exemplifies this risk. It proposes substantial cuts and a restructuring of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which has indeed grown beyond its envisioned size and narrow mission. While ODNI's future size and structure merit discussion, that topic should not distract policymakers with arguments over bureaucratic power, resources, and prestige while missing the bigger, more urgent picture.
The true measure of reform should not be judged by organizational charts, which rarely impact mission success. The core issues are aligning skills and resources with our most pressing challenges, eliminating bureaucracy that fails to contribute meaningfully to the mission, and unleashing American innovation. Importantly, it is also the candid acknowledgment that espionage demands audacity, agility and risk in the field and in the technical ops center, the so-called pointy end of the spear. Yet institutional incentives often discourage the calculated risks essential to effective intelligence work, creating structural barriers to the bold action required in today's digital intelligence mission.
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A central challenge faced by the IC is the PRC's aggressive national digital strategy, which explicitly aims for global dominance in artificial intelligence by 2030. Beijing views AI as critical infrastructure for national security and geopolitical influence, backing it with extensive state investment and a military-civil fusion program to weaponize civilian technology. To effectively counter this, the U.S. IC must achieve and maintain dominance in all digital domains where China's advancements are most pronounced.
Cyber Collection and Defense: China increasingly leverages AI-driven automation to conduct sophisticated cyber espionage, systematically compromising critical U.S. infrastructure, intellectual property, and defense-related information. Yet our current cyber capabilities are hampered by antiquated acquisition processes that treat software like hardware, sometimes taking years to field capabilities that adversaries deploy on rapid timelines.
Artificial Intelligence: Beijing uses powerful AI algorithms to analyze vast datasets, including the personal and biometric data of Americans, to significantly enhance the precision and scale of its espionage. Meanwhile, IC agencies struggle with bureaucratic barriers that prevent rapid adoption of commercial AI tools and make it difficult to partner with smaller tech companies who are leading innovation in this space.
Strategic Data Acquisition: China's comprehensive data strategy treats information as a strategic asset, harvesting it from commercial, governmental, and individual sources to fuel its AI systems. Naturally, the IC’s ability to leverage open-source data is limited by its available budget, but this is an area worthy of modest additional investment to benefit the mission of all IC members.
Information Operations: Chinese state actors utilize generative AI tools, including advanced deepfakes and social media manipulation, to propagate disinformation, deepen societal divisions, and reshape the global digital landscape to align with China's objectives. The IC must quickly improve its ability to identify and counter such efforts at scale and at machine speed, which will require investment in sophisticated technical capabilities now, not someday.
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Real reform demands breaking and rebuilding an outdated acquisitions process designed for analog-era weapon systems. Consider this reality: while China can deploy new cyber capabilities on rapid timelines, the IC can take up to two years to procure and field comparable digital tools due to processes designed for a bygone analog era. Creating fast-track authorities means establishing dedicated pathways where software and digital services can be evaluated, tested, and deployed within weeks rather than following traditional procurement timelines. This also requires a concerted effort to drive genuine partnerships between government and private industry, the true engines of innovation, by creating new pathways for tech talent to serve short tours in government and streamlining how the IC adopts commercial technology.
Critics rightfully worry that rapid acquisition could compromise security or oversight. The solution is not slower processes, but smarter ones that leverage new AI capabilities by creating streamlined security reviews specifically designed for software, implementing continuous monitoring instead of front-loaded approvals (the one-and-done approach), and building accountability mechanisms that match the speed of digital threats.
The goal of intelligence reform should be clear: promote a culture of bold risk-taking, eliminate bureaucracy where it merely perpetuates itself, ruthlessly drive efficiency to free up precious resources, and reallocate those resources to the challenges of the future rather than the structures of the past. This requires immediate action from Congress to establish new acquisition authorities, from IC leadership to restructure internal processes, and from the private sector to engage more deeply with national security missions.
It would be a mistake to squander precious time in debates over bureaucratic power while our adversaries move forward aggressively. The United States must match and surpass their speed, innovation, and audacity, focusing exclusively on the real challenges ahead to secure America's digital future. This is a moment for bold action.
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