If you lead a global supply chain and aren’t treating geopolitics like a core risk, you're planning for a world that no longer exists.

Twenty twenty-five is starkly different: the next global war has already begun, and it’s unfolding not on distant battlefields, but right through the supply chains that you rely on. Your supply chain is already directly in the line of fire. The recent port strike, the closed shipping lane that forced a shift to air transport, the bridge that blocked a port, even the grid brownout that slowed manufacturing, might have seemed like random disruptions.

But take a closer look.

The next attack on our country won’t be a dramatic airstrike or missile barrage. It will be quieter, more insidious. And it's already happening — both inside and outside our national borders. It’s an attack on the flow of commerce.

Ask yourself: Who owns the company that operates the port or airport you depend on? Who manufactured the switchboard that powers your grid? Who pays the crew of the ship that blocked your shipping lane? Start digging beneath the surface explanations, and you’ll find the true battlefield.

This may sound like alarmism. But as someone with a long history in national security, I can tell you our government remains blind to many of these threats. Worse, we lack a coherent strategy to counter this "long war" already underway.

We’ve seen this play out before. Before invading Georgia in 2008, Russia used cyberattacks to paralyze daily life — disabling ATMs, cutting power, interrupting communications. In Ukraine, before the full-scale invasion, similar commercial sabotage — amplified by coordinated social media disinformation — was used to erode public trust and paralyze logistics.

In 2024, the Houthis in Yemen launched more than 50 attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea, forcing shipping giants like Maersk and MSC to reroute traffic around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. That detour added up to 12 days of transit time and increased shipping costs by approximately $1 million per voyage, according to reporting from Bloomberg and Maersk’s own advisories. The knock-on effects included delivery delays, inventory shortfalls and price spikes across multiple industries.

In early 2025, Australia faced a similar form of non-kinetic warfare. A coordinated cyber offensive disabled its customs systems and shut down multiple ports. Agricultural exports sat idle for days, and it took weeks for throughput to return to normal levels. These are not isolated incidents; they’re test cases for a new kind of disruption targeting national economies through the veins of global commerce.

Let’s look at China. It produces more than 80% of the world’s active pharmaceutical ingredients, refines more than 60% of global rare earths, and accounts for 98% of U.S. gallium imports — a metal that’s critical for semiconductors and defense technology. China also supplies 60% of the world’s graphite, essential for electric vehicle batteries.

In 2024, China tightened export controls on gallium and germanium, choking semiconductor and defense supply chains and prompting widespread concern from the U.S. Trade Representative. Its 2024 Special 301 Report warned of Beijing's use of licensing discrimination and opaque enforcement to distort market access — tactics that extend beyond intellectual property protection into strategic industrial dominance.

The physical infrastructure is no less concerning. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China has spent over $1 trillion on strategic infrastructure and now operates or controls over 100 ports in more than 60 countries, according to the Council on Foreign Relations and CSIS. This includes key terminals in Europe, Africa, Latin America — and even the Freeport Container Port in the Bahamas, just 55 miles off the coast of Florida, run by a Hong Kong-based conglomerate.

While China gets most of the headlines, it’s not alone. Iran, North Korea and cybercriminal syndicates are adopting similar tactics, using logistics as an entry point to destabilize commerce and confidence. These actors understand that commercial flows are more fragile and target-rich than traditional military hardware.

The U.S. government would never ask General Electric to shut down a power grid in Asia, or Ports America to bottleneck cargo in Savannah. But China has no such separation between state and enterprise. Commercial disruption is a tool of statecraft. It’s all part of the long war.

This vulnerability extends into our defense apparatus. Nearly 90% of U.S. military logistics for overseas operations rely on commercial providers, according to the Department of Defense. Yet the Military Sealift Command operates only around 60 vessels, a fraction of the commercial tonnage needed to sustain real-world deployment scenarios.

The private sector is waking up to this threat — some faster than others. According to a 2024 survey by the National Association of Manufacturers, 72% of supply chain leaders now identify geopolitical instability as their top operational risk, up from just 28% in 2019. But fewer than 30% have integrated real-time threat monitoring into their day-to-day decision-making. The risk is clear; the response is not yet sufficient.

What can you do? Companies must automate analysis of their product flows and fixed global networks. They must integrate real-time threat intelligence with planning and execution systems. This includes knowing who owns and operates the critical infrastructure your business touches — ports, rails, airports, roads. It also means understanding how adversaries may influence those chokepoints.

They must marry these dynamic global threat layers with what is static or moving through their supply chain — today, tomorrow, and in the months ahead.

Supply chains aren’t just a business function; they’re a matter of national security. This war is already underway, and if we fail to act, we’ll lose without even realizing we were under attack.

Dennis Groseclose is chief executive officer of TransVoyant.