Multi-Domain Defense: Countering the Convergent Threat Landscape

By Jessica McFate, Vice President Director of Intelligence Operations at Babel Street

The new battlespace is networked, cognitive, and economically intertwined – necessitating the scale, agility, and innovation of the commercial sector

The nation is confronting an unprecedented convergent threat environment. Adversarial state actors increasingly operate in parallel with transnational criminal organizations, cyber mercenaries, and proxy networks. These actors are not formally unified, but they are strategically aligned. They exchange tools, infrastructure, financing pathways, and narratives, and they collaborate across cognitive, cyber, economic, and legal domains to erode U.S. strategic advantage — often below the threshold of armed conflict.

For the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) community, this convergence fundamentally alters the operating environment. No longer confined to physical domains of land, sea, air, and space, the battlefronts include domestic arenas, such as social networks, financial systems, global supply chains, legal institutions, and information ecosystems. While C4ISR professionals warn that bad actors’ speed of adaptation is measured in weeks, traditional defense acquisition cycles typically span years.

To mitigate the inherent convergent threats, the Department of War (DoW) and intelligence communities must turn the tables on adversarial exploitation by switching from reactive dependency to proactive integration, leveraging the speed-to-agility advantage of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies as core enablers of multi-domain defense.

Uses and Limitations of Existing Systems

Historically, mission-critical defense systems were purpose-built to meet narrowly defined operational requirements. Custom hardware and software stacks were optimized for survivability, determinism, and certification rigor. That model remains appropriate for many kinetic platforms and safety-critical systems.

However, legacy defense platforms were not designed to counter adversaries that weaponize commercial technology. When adversaries exploit the same cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) tools, and data ecosystems that power global commerce, defending with purpose-built systems alone leads to compounding blind spots.

Convergent threat campaigns that are information-centric and networked mutate daily. An intelligence platform fielded after a multi-year development cycle risks irrelevance upon deployment. By contrast, commercial cloud, analytics, and AI ecosystems iterate continuously, incorporating threat intelligence, model improvements, and software updates at global scale.

Ruth Harris, executive director for national security and data science at RAND Europe, the European arm of RAND, and James Black, deputy director of the defense, security, and justice research group at RAND Europe, in an article titled, “Maneuver in the Marketplace: The Changing Economic Dimension of Warfare,” speak to the changing nature of warfare and the growing recognition of the benefits of commercial technologies in this fight. “Discretionary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, focused on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, did not require large-scale mobilization and redirection of the commercial tech sector beyond traditional defense primes. Nor did they see campaigns to subvert and impose costs on the industrial ecosystems of adversary nations to undermine their military capacity for reconstitution, innovation, and adaptation, or to degrade their will-to-fight.

“Western militaries need an urgent mindset shift … in how they conceptualize the role of the commercial sector and the mobilization of private firms in support of operations … the agile use of commercial relationships should be seen as a form of maneuver; an integrated part of joint action, not just a precursor to it. This means warfighters working hand-in-glove with innovators; procurement managers acting with a wartime urgency and sense of mission; and business leaders planning how they’ll contribute to crisis response or a war economy.”

The question is no longer whether commercial technology can be used in defense missions; it is how to best integrate it effectively within C4ISR architectures while preserving security, interoperability, and mission assurance.

Intelligent Insights at Industrial Scale

Effective counterstrategy requires mapping networks across signals intelligence, financial transactions, supply chain movements, social media narratives, and cyber infrastructure.

Modern intelligence fusion platforms leverage commercial data lake architectures, graph databases, and distributed processing frameworks to correlate structured and unstructured data at scale. The results go far beyond faster reporting to provide operationally relevant network mapping that exposes relationships among state actors, criminal intermediaries, and proxy entities in near real-time.

Influence operations now operate at industrial scale. State-aligned actors leverage botnets, generative AI, and coordinated inauthentic behavior to manipulate narratives across multiple languages and platforms. Machine learning frameworks, natural language processing (NLP) libraries, and commercial GPU acceleration provide the computational backbone to detect anomalies in narrative propagation patterns. Cloud-native analytics pipelines can ingest high-volume social data streams; flag coordinated amplification; and identify cross-platform signature reuse.

For C4ISR engineers, the challenge lies in integrating these capabilities into secure operational environments. Edge-to-cloud architectures must ensure that sensitive analytic results can be disseminated without exposing classified sources and methods. Zero-trust access controls, role-based authentication, and encryption at rest and in transit are architectural requirements.

By leveraging commercial innovation cycles in AI while enforcing mission-grade security controls, defense organizations can counter influence operations at comparable scale and velocity.

Secure Coalition Information Sharing

Convergent threats target alliances as much as individual states, making interoperability a strategic necessity. Effective counterstrategy depends on timely intelligence sharing across coalition partners, yet classification barriers and incompatible systems impede mitigation.

Commercial platforms, zero-trust network architectures, and software-defined access controls offer a path forward. Rather than relying solely on rigid network segmentation, modern architectures enforce identity-centric security models. Data tagging and attribute-based access control allow granular sharing while preserving compartmentalization.

For embedded system designers, this means building platforms that support standardized interfaces, encryption modules compliant with federal standards, and modular cross-domain guards that can be updated as coalition requirements evolve.

Implementation Best Practices

Adopting commercial platforms for mission-critical defense environments must comply with myriad requirements. Some of these include:

• Security Certification: Commercial software evolves rapidly, while Authority to Operate (ATO) processes can be lengthy. Continuous ATO models, automated compliance monitoring, and pre-certified secure baselines can reduce friction.
• Interoperability and Standards: Open standards, modular open systems approaches (MOSA), and well-defined application programming interfaces (APIs) enable extensibility and vendor competition.
• Cultural Resistance: Trust in commercial technology is imperative. Demonstrating mission assurance through pilot deployments and operational testing can build confidence.

Capturing Strategic Advantage

Adversaries collaborate across integrated and networked domains and adapt in weeks. Organizations that integrate and operationalize commercial innovation are the ones able to achieve a strategic advantage.

Properly integrated, hardened, and governed commercial capabilities offer myriad benefits: agility aligned with adversary adaptation cycles; scalability to handle global data volumes; cost efficiencies that enable broader deployment; and access to commercial innovation ecosystems.

The current battlespace is networked, cognitive, and economically intertwined. This requires powerful technology capable of fusing intelligence, defending infrastructure, countering influence operations, and evolving at operational speed.

Leveraging commercial technology can flip the switch from reactive defense to strategic advantage to deliver agility, scalability, and innovation access needed to outpace adversaries in today’s new battlespace.

About the Author

Jessica Lewis McFate is Vice President Director of Intelligence Operations at Babel Street and a career intelligence professional, specializing in OSINT for national security. At the Institute for the Study of War, her research won acclaim for forecasting the rise of ISIS. She has authored over 50 publications, briefed top U.S. government agencies, appeared in print and broadcast media, and testified before Congress. A West Point graduate, she served as a U.S. Army officer with 34 months in country deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan supporting signals intelligence, human intelligence, and counter-corruption roles.