Strategic competition from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy is a principal challenge to a free, open, secure, and prosperous world. The PRC is the only U.S. competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do so. Russia poses an immediate and ongoing threat to the regional security order in Europe and Eurasia and is a source of disruption and instability globally, but it lacks the across-the spectrum capabilities of the PRC.

Leadership in technology and innovation has long underpinned our economic prosperity and military strength, and will be critical to outcompeting our rivals, advancing our interests, and safeguarding democracy. The United States must be able to identify the applications and implications of emerging technologies, understand supply chains, and use economic statecraft tools—in coordination with our allies and partners—to ensure strategic competitors are not able to undermine our competitiveness and national security.

The IC must deepen and expand its expertise, strengthen its collection and analytic capabilities, and embrace new partnerships and external perspectives to address policymaker needs in this more competitive environment. The IC will invest in developing innovative methods and cultivating new sources, and work more systematically with allies and partners and public and private sector partners to facilitate a common understanding of technological and other risks and how to address them. Given the global nature of strategic competition, the IC will establish methods and systems that promote greater interoperability and understanding across traditional and distinct geographic and functional areas. These efforts are essential to the IC’s success as a key element of national power in this competition.

The IC will improve its ability to provide timely and accurate insights into competitor intentions, capabilities, and actions by strengthening capabilities in language, technical, and cultural expertise and harnessing open source, “big data,” artificial intelligence, and advanced analytics. The IC also must enhance its ability to understand how countries in every region of the world perceive, are implicated by, and seek to navigate this new landscape, and assess their opportunities to enhance strategic relationships with the United States. At the same time, the IC will improve its understanding of how non-state actors might use their growing resources and capacity to exert unilateral and collective influence in a way that could support or undermine U.S. national security. And above all else, the IC will use its authorities and capabilities in ways that strengthen our democratic foundations and principles as we seek to counter increasingly autocratic competitors.

The IC’s future success depends on its ability to attract and retain a highly technical and talented workforce that draws on one of our country’s unmatched reservoirs of strength: our diversity. Varied backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences strengthen our workforce, our ability to deliver on our Mission, and the trust of the American public.

The Community must overcome long-standing cultural, structural, bureaucratic, technical, and security challenges to reimagine and deliver the IC workforce of the future.

The IC will modernize recruiting, hiring, and vetting processes to ensure its ability to competitively and rapidly recruit and onboard a diverse, trusted, agile, and expert IC workforce. The IC will also build on efforts to implement continuous monitoring and security clearance reciprocity so the Community can operate in new ways, rapidly redistributing and better integrating expertise where and when it is most needed, taking advantage of greater workplace flexibilities, and leveraging skills from across the Community regardless of organizational affiliation.

Enhanced professional development opportunities at every level of the workforce are critical to building a shared strategic awareness of the IC’s full capabilities, its missions, and its challenges and ensuring greater literacy and expertise in emerging disciplines and fields. The IC must also incentivize, reward, and offer opportunities for regular joint duty rotations to produce officers more capable of formulating holistic and integrated solutions to intelligence problems.

Diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and other human capital initiatives will only succeed if they are subjected to rigorous and continuous analysis, evaluation, transparency, and learning. These efforts will build a workforce that fosters a shared commitment to U.S. national security and enhance its resilience.

Promoting technical and tradecraft competitiveness and innovation for the Intelligence Community requires sustained investment and rapid adaptation of interoperable solutions at scale.

The Community will remove barriers by establishing unified IC procurement authorities, centralized solicitation systems, and a Community-wide contracting system, all bolstered by automation tools. A Community-wide, data-centric approach based on common standards is crucial to realizing the full promise of new capabilities. In response to changing mission needs, the IC will foster a culture that embraces innovation and the application of tools, data, processes, and standards necessary to transform labor- and time-intensive work into more efficient and productive human-machine partnerships. These efforts will include initiatives to improve the discoverability, accessibility, and standardization of our data.

The IC will also pursue complementary efforts to anticipate adversaries’ over-the-horizon plans, capabilities, and intentions to inform Community research and development initiatives, guide capability development decisions, and avoid strategic surprise. The IC will also maximize the chances for technical breakthroughs and enhanced mission effectiveness by sustaining predictable funding for the research and development of new capabilities. This will require enhanced integration between the Community’s science and technology enterprise and its collection and analysis communities to optimize resource allocation through coordinated investments.

The IC’s emphasis on enterprise-wide solutions will benefit from expanded and diversified partnerships that the Community will leverage to develop and implement solutions that identify and anticipate capability gaps. These relationships will also allow the IC to harness state-of-the-art technology deliberately, lawfully, and ethically, in service of the Nation’s security.

Our unmatched network of alliances and partnerships around the world is our most important strategic asset—and a force multiplier for our intelligence mission. Our ability to leverage and work in concert with a broad set of partners enhances our operational capabilities, sharpens our insights, and strengthens the foundation for strategic relationships and common action between our governments.

That is why the Intelligence Community, like other members of the national security community, is committed to reaffirming, expanding, and enhancing our alliances and partnerships across regions and issues to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities of the future.

The IC has traditionally been organized and postured to understand the plans, intentions, and impacts of nation states and, following the 9/11 attacks, asymmetric threats from terrorist organizations. The series of interconnected and transnational threats facing the United States and its allies and partners requires a greater and more synchronized effort to enhance intelligence sharing across a broader swathe of issues and with a more diverse array of regional and local partners.

Even as we continue to invest in existing partnerships like those with our Five-Eyes partners and forge new ones, the evolving set of challenges—from cyberattacks and climate change to pandemics and foreign malign influence— also require investing in new and more diverse partnerships, especially with non-state and sub-national actors. From companies to cities to civil society organizations, these actors’ ideas, innovations, resources, and actions increasingly shape our societal, technological, and economic futures.

The IC must rethink its approach to exchanging information and insights with non-state actors that either have the responsibility to act or are the entities best postured to do so in defense of U.S. national security interests. This is especially true of non-state actors positioned to detect and defend against cyber threats to critical infrastructure. The IC must adopt new approaches that take full advantage of non-state actor expertise and insights that are necessary for the Community to fulfill its mission. To these ends, the IC must build new and restructure existing collaborative mechanisms with non-state actors and find ways to enhance the flow of information to and from these actors in ways that safeguard our national security and prosperity.

A highly connected and complex world means that transnational and transboundary challenges are having increasingly broad implications for U.S. interests in every region and in multiple domains. The world is facing more frequent and intense crises due to the effects of climate change, narcotics trafficking, financial crises, supply chain disruptions, corruption, new and recurring diseases, and emerging and disruptive technologies. Moreover, these cross-border challenges are increasingly interacting with and compounding traditional state-based political, economic, and security challenges with unexpected second consequences, from food and energy insecurity to irregular migration, and civil unrest to conflict.

The National Security Strategy makes it clear that these intensifying transnational challenges are at the core of national and international security. Accordingly, the IC is determined to improve its ability to understand, anticipate, and provide early warning about transnational threats, as well as identify opportunities for the United States, its allies, and partners. The IC will recruit, develop, and integrate expertise across a range of disciplines, such as climate and environmental security, global public health, biosecurity, science, and technology, to ensure it provides decision-makers actionable strategic foresight.

The IC must work across organizational boundaries and collaborate with other government agencies—both federal and local—to better integrate research, expertise, and data, and build the capacity to model and forecast potential cascading effects of these transnational challenges. The IC will build enduring partnerships with foreign partners, the private sector, academia, and others to leverage their unique capabilities and expertise and to augment its own ability to identify and prepare for challenges in both the near and long terms. The IC will leverage and enhance the tools, techniques, and procedures developed for other missions, such as counterterrorism, and apply lessons learned and best practices from these areas to evolving, transnational issues.

The IC has an expanding role in supporting the resilience of the Nation, its allies, and its partners, particularly in a world still emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. In this increasingly complex environment, risk assumed by one is effectively assumed by all, resulting in the need for a multifaceted, layered, and distributed approach that adapts as the threat evolves. Protecting the IC’s and the Nation’s critical infrastructure from complex threats requires a deeper understanding of the implications of destabilizing trends, and improved early warning to improve the Nation’s recovery and response.

Resilience also includes defending the Nation’s economic security and prosperity. That is why the IC is expanding its role in understanding threats and vulnerabilities to supply chains and helping to mitigate threats to government and industry partners’ infrastructure. And it is why the Community will enhance transparency with federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial governments; non-state actors; and allies with a stake in the Nation’s critical infrastructure. The Community will normalize information exchanges and research and development collaboration with governmental and non-state actors responsible for safeguarding critical infrastructure and systems that are vital to the Nation’s prosperity.

The IC’s resilience will be supported through modernization and hardening of its own infrastructure for adaptability, durability, redundancy, and interoperability. These efforts will ensure the Community has a continued ability to accomplish its mission and sustain its focus on the most important long-term threats in the face of inevitable crises such as pandemics, cyberattacks, climate shocks, and terrorist attacks. Equally important, the IC must sustain its counterintelligence capabilities and expertise against espionage and other damaging intelligence activities conducted by our foreign adversaries. Resilience will also involve safeguarding the IC workforce and upholding our sacred obligation to protect and care for officers and their families in harm’s way.