A new article in PRISM is calling attention to agriculture as an increasingly strategic domain in global competition, arguing it should be treated as critical infrastructure rather than solely an economic issue.
In Agriculture as a Domain of Hybrid Warfare: China’s Strategy and U.S. Security Gaps, Dr. Alicia Ellis and Sarah Shoer examine how the People’s Republic of China is building leverage across key agricultural inputs such as seeds, fertilizer, and agtech. These upstream dependencies, they note, could become chokepoints in a crisis.
The analysis underscores a key point: disrupting food systems does not require targeting farms directly, but rather the inputs, infrastructure, and data they rely on.
The authors argue that while agriculture is already part of the competitive landscape, U.S. policy has not fully caught up. They propose an Agriculture Security (AgSec) framework focused on vulnerabilities across inputs, production, logistics, and data to better integrate food systems into the same conversation as energy, cyber, and semiconductors.
PRISM: The Journal of Complex Operations is the U.S. Department of War (DOW) Irregular Warfare Center’s (IWC) journal of national and international security affairs. PRISM, which is published semiannually, aims to “provide unique insight for current and future national security leaders on emerging security challenges beyond the strictly military domain of the joint force, including transnational, multi-domain threats, gray zone conflict, the technological innovation challenge, and geoeconomic competition among the great powers.”