Author: Tanveer I. Kathawalla, Managing Partner Pioneer1890

The Urgent Need for Action:

• We face unprecedented challenges stemming from gray zone conflicts—subtle, non-kinetic threats that leverage digital warfare to destabilize open societies. Critical public and private organizations are choice targets for systematic distortion, confusion, and sabotage by authoritative adversaries.
• By infiltrating government contractors to healthcare providers. They use 1s and 0’s and turn off payroll systems like Aetna in February 2024. Create supply chain disruptions that create long-term volatility and uncertainty.
• Next, they flood social media with conflicting narratives that play to society's deepest divisions. If that is not enough, 7 trillion dollars of US IP has been stolen over the last ten years, negating the hard, labored, and expensive breakthroughs that companies and organizations have developed.
• The market share that is stolen lessens the technological advantage of the West. This will only become more frequent thanks to the dark side of AI, and our systems only need to fail once, and our adversary's attacks can fail 99 times out of 100.
• We now live in the age of gray zone conflicts, and democracy needs gray zone security and solutions more than ever before.

We Know How To Win

• Harry Hopkins, who was a key advisor to FDR during the lend-lease negotiations, was handed a briefcase by the British Government, which contained the UK’s most sensitive and advanced scientific breakthroughs from aviation designs to radar that enabled the United States than the 16th world military power to modernize at an unprecedented pace to win World War II.

• Harry Hopkins

  President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s emissary and closest personal adviser during World War II.

  •Importance of Radar: Radar (Radio Detection and Ranging) was a groundbreaking technology during World War II. It enabled the detection of enemy aircraft and ships at great distances, giving the Allies a crucial strategic advantage.

• We are in a similar situation as 1941 regarding proven gray zone capabilities and need a framework for fast-tracking foreign but proven gray zone solutions into American markets. This is the right moment to do this.

• Five Eyes agreements like AUKUS, or the US-India Space Cooperative, have created significant momentum to expand pathways for US market entry.

• By creating avenues for companies with proven disinformation, cyber, and supply chain products to enter the US Market, the national security capabilities can be enriched at the same scale that Harry Hopkins’s briefcase did 82 years ago.

Economic StateCraft Defined:

Source: Bush Texas A&M Center(https://bush.tamu.edu/economic-statecraft/what-is-economic-statecraft/)

Fast Forward Today

We are in a moment of transformation from AI, a generational transition, to moving to a multi-polar world.

We Need to Leverage Global Capabilities