Supply chains are on the geopolitical front lines: We’re not ready

As Russian missile and drone attacks left Kyiv in darkness, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky concluded his latest visit to the United States, where he secured support for crucial air defense capabilities. He returned home successful, with news of American funding for a Patriot missile battery included in a new $2 billion aid package, and $44 billion in emergency aid for Ukraine announced in the annual spending bill delivered by Congress last Tuesday. 

“The American people have been with you every step of the way, and we will stay with you. We will stay with you for as long as it takes,” President Biden said at their meeting in the White House. 

Patriot missiles will help blunt Russia’s deadly attacks on civilians. But they will not be enough. To stop Russia’s drones and missiles before they are launched, the U.S., Ukraine, and their allies need to staunch the flow of microelectronics entering Russia. 

New research published the week before the visit revealed that Western technology is at the heart of Moscow’s most destructive weapons. This comes as little surprise: For months RUSI, Altana — a company that is creating a searchable global supply chain database, and where one of us works — and others have documented how shadowy illicit networks continue to source sensitive microelectronics for Russia’s military-industrial complex despite a tightening web of trade restrictions. Fundamentally, they are able to do this due to a lack of supply chain visibility. 

Supply chains power our everyday lives — but they exist in a governance seam. Neither fully controlled by states or governments, they are opaque, sprawling and difficult to understand. Supply chain data is held by a myriad of actors, each unwilling to cede control over its information due to (perfectly valid) concerns about privacy and intellectual property. This creates gaps in the supply chain visibility of regulators and private firms alike, which malign actors exploit. This is why our supply chains are plagued by export control violations, forced labor, narcotics trafficking and all manner of abuses.

Today, supply chains are at the frontlines of great power competition. In response to the conflict with Russia and ongoing strategic competition with China, the United States and its allies have introduced an expansive regime of export controls without precedent. These measures are designed to deny our adversaries access to the world’s most sophisticated technologies, stunt their military-industrial complexes and degrade their expansive surveillance architectures. These mammoth objectives represent a paradigm shift in US export control policy.

Our enforcement systems are not ready. U.S. and allied enforcement agencies, though staffed with dedicated, heroic agents who routinely perform complicated work in hostile environments, are not being given the resources they need to detect and disrupt these illicit networks. In an age of AI and machine learning, U.S. enforcement agents should not be forced to rely primarily on “Google searches [and] Microsoft Excel,” or on “databases [that]  can perform only a fraction of the needed functionality and crash routinely,” as a recent study found.

We can do better. Today, the private sector and civil society are using state-of-the-art AI and machine learning to bring supply chains from the shadows into the light. As a result, supply chains are undergoing a quiet revolution, as sophisticated technology brings visibility and management from the analog age into the modern era. Today, multi-tier visibility can provide transparency into second and third-tier suppliers and customers. Sophisticated analytical capability can defeat obfuscatory tactics like transshipment and front company formation. And federated data architectures can enhance information-sharing and collaboration between regulators and firms. 

If the U.S. and its allies are serious about securing supply chains from malign actors, they had better invest accordingly. That means increasing access to supply chain visibility systems that amass, analyze and action relevant data and forging innovative public-private partnerships. Without this investment, we will continue to see some of our greatest technological assets used not to bring prosperity and peace, but instead death and destruction.

Thomas Ewing is the director of research at Altana, and James Byrne is the director of open-source intelligence and analysis at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).