From Small Wars Journal, November 12:
....MUCH MOREIn an era where strategic competition has resurged as a driving force of international politics, no dimension of statecraft is more important than economics. This idea is rooted in American history with its origins in Hamiltonian thought about the central role of industry in building strong empires. The United States rose to power on the ability of the American Midwest to feed emerging cities on both sides of the Atlantic with inexpensive wheat, enabling the industrial revolution and transforming the global balance of power as American farmers and traders out-competed Russia on production, transportation, and the financial networks that supported both. Today, American policymakers are grappling with a difficult truth: though empires are built on trade and industry, this is also where they’re most vulnerable.
The conditions that underpinned America’s rise to power have changed, largely as a result of its own policy mistakes. The interconnected global economy and diversification of supply chains intended to facilitate the growth of partner states has resulted in two unintended consequences: those “partners” have grown into serious geostrategic rivals, and the divestment of U.S. domestic capacity has left its critical systems – including its food systems – susceptible to weaponization. Too long wedded to the religion of free-trade-above-all, Washington has finally come to realize it spent decades underwriting the rise of its greatest challengers, whose goals (and means) may not be as benign as once hoped. Still reeling from the revelation that letting the foxes into the henhouse didn’t turn them into hens, the United States is now struggling to get all its players and partners on one team.
The economic domain of contemporary conflict has both a defensive (identifying vulnerabilities and risks in critical industries) and an offensive (competing in global markets and translating wealth into power) component. In this context, hybrid warfare, which integrates conventional, irregular, and cyber tactics below the threshold of traditional warfare, is reshaping global conflicts. As nations grapple with evolving threats, food has emerged as a critical and underappreciated weapon in this landscape. The manipulation of food supplies for geopolitical leverage is a hallmark of hybrid warfare, enabling state and non-state actors to destabilize adversaries and advance strategic goals without direct military confrontation.
The United States has too long overlooked this component of grey zone conflict, leaving its critical domestic systems increasingly vulnerable while some of its biggest firms facilitate the transfer of strategic advantages to its geopolitical rivals. The time has come for U.S. industry to synergize its resource capacity and mitigate a serious emerging threat: the weaponization of food by state competitors.
Balancing Efficiency and Resiliency in Domestic Food Systems
The network of vertically integrated, highly consolidated conglomerates that makes up U.S. food systems, though efficient, leaves entire industries overly reliant on single-points-of-failure for critical goods and increasingly open to deliberate attack. The Department of Defense has been sounding this alarm bell over the defense industry for some time. With uncertainty over the future of Taiwan, the U.S. finally turned its attention to examining its defense industrial base for supply chain risks. But the hyperfocus on defense-industry risks, though rightly prioritized, has left broader risks that pose direct threats to security unaddressed. This is nowhere more prevalent than in food supply. In the same way microchips and semiconductors underly an industry that provides security for the United States, the agriculture industry provides human security at the most fundamental level. Agriculture is not the benign good it tends to be regarded as: it is in fact, both strategic and existential. The modern world was built on the ability of a small percentage of the population to feed the rest, and the systems that underpin that world will crumble without it.
U.S. policymakers have long understood that food falls into the category of strategic commodities along with oil, critical minerals, and now semiconductors. Yet abundance, not scarcity, is one of the sacred pillars of the American way of life: the ability to access food from around the world on demand is largely taken for granted. The truth is that the food we eat and the complex, interconnected system that grows, processes, and transports this most essential resource, is vulnerable. Today, U.S. food supply chains in key industries are increasingly brittle and opaque due to the industry-wide tendency toward hyper-consolidation. Though the collective memory is short, it was only a few years ago that a human virus shut down just a handful of domestic beef, pork, and poultry processing plants. Within days, stores began experiencing shortages, leading to rationing. The easy out was to blame consumer panic stocking, but this (perhaps deliberately) obfuscates the harsh reality: contemporary U.S. food systems lack sufficient resiliency to ensure stability. Overstocking was a symptom (albeit a self-exacerbating one), but the root cause was the amalgamation of U.S. food production into too few players and too few facilities. 85% of U.S. beef, 45% of poultry, and 67% of pork is processed by just four companies (colloquially called the ‘Big Four’). This means farmers and ranchers must often sell to, or directly produce for, these conglomerates, but it has the added effect of driving out smaller processing plants and creating chokepoints in the supply chain. When Covid-19 spread rapidly through the massive processing plants full of shoulder-to-shoulder workers, there was nowhere to funnel the instant excess capacity of live animals for processing and distribution. Within weeks, farmers were forced to kill and bury livestock they couldn’t get in to bottlenecked processing facilities.
U.S. producers would be wise to resist putting all its eggs in one basket (or cows in one pen, so to speak) because the food system isn’t just vulnerable to accidental shocks such as Covid-19. Adversaries undoubtedly noticed how quickly the U.S. supply chain for key food items broke down and how few targets are actually needed to trigger serious breakdowns in domestic food systems. The Covid-related supply issues were a result of shutting down just a few production plants. How might a cyber-attack replicate – and amplify – this effect when it can spread through linked company-wide computer systems faster than a human virus?
This near miss should have been a glaring warning sign that the U.S. has a serious risk to domestic stability embedded in its food systems, but instead, recent developments are exacerbating the problem. In the beef industry, sustained droughts have led to a smaller domestic herd, making the Big Four increasingly reliant on foreign suppliers. The immediate response by many U.S. ranchers has been to fill the gap by increasing the number of heifers sent to feed lots destined for beef production. This will mean fewer heifers reproducing on ranches for future years, which will lead to longer term issues in the ability of the domestic beef industry to meet demand. The pork industry is in a state of oversupply, leading Smithfield (which alone accounts for 26% of all U.S. pork production) to end contracts with its pig farmers, while keeping the company owned farms, further consolidating every link in the supply chain and risking the closing of small to mid-sized farms across the United States. This is problematic not just from a resiliency standpoint but from a geostrategic one: Smithfield is the largest U.S. pork producer; it’s vertically integrated; it was purchased by a Chinese investor in 2013, and it actually increased its pork exports to China during the pandemic meat shortages.
Risks Lurking Beneath the Surface...
