It’s long past time to stop treating counterintelligence (CI) like a legal compliance back office. In today’s battlespace, CI isn’t a support function—it’s a warfighting discipline. And if the Department of Defense wants to survive the next war with a near-peer adversary like China, it needs to start thinking of counterintelligence not as a protective layer but as an offensive tool—one capable of achieving real effects.
In other words, we need to start putting information warheads on enemy spy foreheads.
The New CI Fight: From Screens to Strategy
Foreign intelligence services aren’t just collecting secrets—they’re shaping the battlespace. Chinese and Russian intelligence campaigns aren’t isolated intrusions; they’re strategic efforts to undermine the United States through sabotage, influence, supply chain compromise, and cognitive manipulation. This is unrestricted warfare, and CI needs to respond in kind—not reactively, but offensively.
The idea is simple: if adversaries are using their intelligence services to wage war against us in the gray zone, we need to unleash ours with wartime discipline and operational authority.
CI Is Not Just Intelligence—It’s Operations
One of the most damaging misunderstandings about CI is that it’s just another intel product. It isn’t. Unlike traditional intelligence collection, counterintelligence is a blend of offense, defense, and exploitation. It doesn’t just collect information—it denies, deceives, manipulates, and disrupts adversary operations.
To be useful in the modern battlespace, CI must execute Operations, Activities, and Investments (OAIs) designed to produce kinetic and non-kinetic effects. These could include:
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Disrupting foreign intelligence recruitment pipelines inside industry or academia
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Turning hostile collection efforts into double-agent operations
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Leveraging influence operations to neutralize adversary narratives before they spread
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Targeting cyber-enabled espionage networks with offensive countermeasures
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Partnering with SOF and J-3 elements to execute CI-enabled raids or deny enemy ISR
This isn’t science fiction—it’s what CI already does on a limited scale. The problem is that we treat it as niche and episodic instead of doctrinal and scalable.
Reorganizing for Impact: CI as a Fires Function
The intelligence community has boxed CI into the J-2 corner for too long. But if we accept that CI is about delivering effects—on people, organizations, and information systems—then it belongs with the warfighters.
Just as cyber moved under J-3 for joint effects coordination, CI should be treated the same way. Think of CI as a precision munition against enemy spies, saboteurs, and influence agents. It needs targeting authority, prioritization frameworks, and real-time tasking. In other words, CI needs to be operationalized.
The Adversary Isn’t Waiting
The Chinese MSS and Russian GRU already understand this. They don’t treat intelligence operations as separate from military strategy—they’re fused. Chinese doctrine openly calls for merging peacetime and wartime activities, blending political, economic, and technological levers into a unified effort to weaken the West.
If we don’t adapt, we’re bringing a PowerPoint deck to a gunfight.
What Cleared Professionals Need to Know
Whether you’re in government, defense contracting, or a dual-use tech firm, this isn’t abstract. The CI threat touches your inbox, your facility, your network, and your workforce. If you’re not accounting for CI threats in your risk model, you’re underestimating your exposure.
And if you’re in a position to influence policy or strategy, the message is clear: put CI on the battlefield, not just in the SCIF.
Modern warfare isn’t just about missiles and tanks—it’s about access, influence, and control. And CI is the weapon the United States has underutilized for far too long. It’s time to stop playing defense and start putting info warheads on spy foreheads.
