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For our final program, we're departing from the official Foreign Policy Association 2024 topics with a presentation via Zoom on ECONOMIC WARFARE by David Rader, Senior Advisor in the Defense Innovation Unit of the Department of Defense. He spoke recently on this subject for the Oatmeal Club at Eagle Harbor Congregational Church.

The Oxford English dictionary defines economic warfare as involving "an economic strategy based on the use of measures (e.g. blockade) of which the primary effect is to weaken the economy of another state." Economic warfare can be of the ham-fisted variety, ala the sack of Carthage, where the fleet was burned, the city razed, the populace sold into slavery, and the ground sown with salt. Or, economic warfare can be less sanguinary, yet still debilitating to a nation's economy, such as when an adversary gets a stranglehold on a crucial resource or technology. Economic warfare also includes theft of an adversary's intellectual property, economic sanctions, and subterfuges to evade economic sanctions.

The United States Department of Defense, the various U.S. intelligence agencies, and other cabinet departments, defend our country from foreign economic threats, enforce economic sanctions as imposed by Congress and the President, and identify and counter emerging economic threats. Unlike the traditional uniformed services, who must always be ready to engage, those charged with the economic defense of the country are always at war.

Suggested Readings:

Dollars, Tanks, and Banks: Modernizing the Economic Warfighting Domain, by David Rader. The Hamiltonian, March 8, 2022.

Economic warfare is hurting Russia. But it's risky for the US, too, by Aaron Klein and Norman Eisen. Brookings, March 2, 2022.

Economic Warfare: Lessons from Two World Wars, by Mark Harrison. Vox EU, October 10, 2023.