This is the tenth article in an 11-part series examining how the United States should organize, lead, and integrate economic statecraft into strategy, defense practice, and the broader national security ecosystem. The special series is brought to you by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and War on the Rocks. Prior installments can be found at the War by Other Ledgers page.

The United States is fighting a new kind of global competition — over supply chains, chips, and sanctions. It barely has anyone trained to fight it.

No single country can untangle itself from the forces of global trade, and no industry can stabilize in isolation. Because of this dynamic, countries are increasingly leveraging and protecting their economies in pursuit of broader national objectives. This interconnectedness of global markets demands public and private sector professionals capable of thinking critically about economic security.

In the United States, the workforce and the pipeline to feed it does not yet exist at the scale the moment requires. Supply simply does not meet demand, and many of the practitioners dealing with economic threats have limited requisite formal education and training. Instead, they should be enterprising, working within organizational limits — and often on the periphery — with minimal or no resources, often in the absence of guiding strategies or doctrine. Compounding the challenge, economic security lacks an established professional track or workforce pipeline. Few people have the bona fides to move fluently across economics, security, finance, and technology. To remain a global leader, the United States should establish and maintain an economic security workforce, including by creating a new academic discipline, before the talent deficit hardens into a strategic liability.

Emergent fields like cybersecurity and biotechnology have developed into professions in recent years, but academia has been slow to adopt a path for economic statecraft as a discipline to follow suit. Success of that path will require rewarding interdisciplinary teams across the public and private sectors, embedding economic security in university curricula, and bringing scholars and practitioners into closer collaboration.

The Challenge: Economic Security as a Discipline

Economic security sits at the crossroads of economics, foreign affairs, security studies, finance, business, political science, and information science, among other subjects. This interdisciplinary nature makes economic security difficult to categorize and champion, complicating efforts to develop a workforce capable of thoughtfully addressing the myriad opportunities and challenges relating to economic statecraft.

Academia builds a future workforce using structure and discipline — an adherence to certain guiding concepts, principles, and paradigms – and then fosters and reinforces this through formal education and professional development. Existing academic disciplines tend to be largely siloed, and few universities offer integrated curricula designed to master a multidisciplinary field like economic security. A discipline carries its own body of theory, accepted methods, dedicated literature, and degree pathways. This scaffolding allows professors to teach, research, and professionalize a subject at scale.

Consider the following three seemingly unrelated sectors: supply chain, finance, and technology. Supply chain security is not simply the economic principles of supply and demand, rather it encompasses technological dependencies, international trade regulations, and geopolitical risks associated with sourcing materials. It might also involve employing economic tools, like sanctions, to pursue national policy objectives. During the novel coronavirus pandemic, decision-makers had to rapidly assess vulnerabilities in global supply chains for medical equipment, which required expertise spanning economics, logistics, public health, and international relations. The reality proved messier than the officials managing the response expected, as the public health experts who set policy were often unaware of broader challenges within the ecosystem.

To protect the financial system, specifically banking infrastructure, policymakers should also consider the risks posed by cyberattacks. This requires knowledge of finance, information science, cybersecurity, and international law. In 2016, hackers used the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication banking network to steal $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and attempted to move nearly $1 billion. Untangling it required bank officials, incident responders, lawyers, and diplomats. The attack, later tied to North Korea, required the same cross-disciplinary response that economic security routinely demands.

Finally, policymakers should balance national security interests and technological innovation against economic growth. The U.S. Department of Commerce’s October 2022 controls on advanced chips and chipmaking equipment bound for China, tightened and expanded over the following years, show how export policy in this area depends on the teamwork of engineers, economists, business analysts, and lawyers.

While the notion of economic security stands to reason, it isn’t explicitly taught in classrooms or in corporate on-the-job training. This leaves a knowledge gap and the ability to mitigate risk, highlighting the necessity of cross-disciplinary experience for both public and private sector leaders. Without preparation and exposure to the broader landscape, policymakers and business leaders make decisions in isolation, lacking the holistic perspective required to address complex economic security challenges.

Closing this gap is a shared responsibility. Business leaders and policymakers each bring distinct but complementary tools, and the work only succeeds when the public and private sectors treat it as a joint undertaking rather than a problem for someone else to solve.

We’ve Been Here Before

Economic security is not the first new discipline to arise from a changing global landscape. Whether geopolitically or technologically based, we’ve learned to teach new skills, identify new risks, and develop strategies and approaches to address related challenges.

As technology evolves, fields of study follow, expanding application to new sectors while also extending risk to larger subsets of the population. Consider three recent case studies where new disciplines emerged: cybersecurity, biotechnology, and semiconductors.

Cybersecurity

As cyber threats became more sophisticated and widespread, impacting financial systems and critical infrastructure, the federal government pressed the academy to respond. In the early 2000s, universities generally treated cybersecurity as a specialization within broader information technology curricula.

By 2010, the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security designated centers of academic excellence in cyber defense by establishing programs at dozens of universities including George Mason, Virginia Tech, and the University of Maryland. Today, cybersecurity is not only taught under computer science programs, but also within law, business, and public policy degree programs. Degree tracks integrate technical training with policy analysis, ethics, and risk management, reflecting the needs of the executives and lawmakers who must navigate complex regulatory and security environments. This academic transformation has produced a new generation of cyber-ready professionals equipped to address both technical and strategic challenges in the digital age.

Biotechnology

Similarly, advances in biotechnology spanning genetic engineering, pharmaceuticals, and bioinformatics have reshaped academic programs. The Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, helped turn a niche intersection of biology and chemistry into an array of academic disciplines. Universities across the world formed specialized degrees and certificates in biotechnology, bioethics, and biomedical engineering, as a response to the availability of genomic sequencing and editing. As policymakers grappled with issues such as genetic privacy, bioterrorism, and global health security, academic curricula evolved to include regulatory science, ethical frameworks, and international policy. These courses expose graduates to the broader implications of biotechnological innovation, further preparing them for the workforce. While employees in the biotech industry are often highly specialized in their technical field, however, they are not regularly exposed to higher-order, more abstract implications of their work — to include aspects of economic security — which can put a company at risk.

Semiconductors

The evolution of the semiconductor industry reveals how complex policy problems reshape academic programs. Semiconductors sit at the heart of technological innovation, powering everything from smartphones to fighter planes. However, their manufacture and regulation involve intersections of electrical engineering, materials science, international trade, economics, intellectual property law, and national security studies. Careers in semiconductors start with an electrical engineering degree, then require knowledge of scaling, supply chain, and business. The recent global chip shortages and the U.S. government’s efforts to control the export of advanced semiconductor technology for AI further emphasizes the need for an interdisciplinary approach to both research and policy, incorporating an understanding of geopolitics and geoeconomics. The Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act of 2022, which paired tens of billions of dollars in manufacturing incentives with money for workforce development, incentivized universities to stand up semiconductor programs and research centers that expose engineering majors to business, policy, and international affairs.

While these examples highlight technical developments, policy and workforce issues may arise in any emerging discipline. For the United States, the practical consequence is a shortfall in economic security expertise and practice — a strategic gap that demands deliberate remedy.

Professional Dialogue

The above examples demonstrate how emerging risks and policy challenges drive academic evolution, as well as how the resulting disciplines arose from societal needs, not organically from academia. In each case, grassroots campaigns emerged, recognizing a gap in professional societies’ or existing communities’ offerings in both the public and private sectors. Like-minded professionals sought each other out and created forums for problem solving and debate.

As the conversation evolves and more people join the dialogue, existing conferences begin adding panel discussions on the emerging topic. Further expansion of the community produces entire conferences dedicated to the developing topic. The end of this spectrum is just as instructive. The continuing-education regimes that govern accountants, attorneys, and physicians — required coursework, credentialing, and recertification — are part of what define those callings as professions and hold practitioners to a shared standard discipline throughout their career.

Through these interactions, passionate individuals build a shared framework bridging theory and practice. They then take this communal thought into their workplace, making decisions with their newfound broader experience. Sound decision-making relies on professionals educated in or experienced in many (or all) of the disciplines mentioned above. Strengthening experience in an emerging field such as economic security rests, for now, on the small number of people already working in the field. Ad hoc organization is not an enduring model for a discipline so vitally important to U.S. security and prosperity, which is why widening exposure and expertise across government and industry is so urgent.

Creating an Academic Discipline

By adapting degree programs to meet new demands, universities can deliver the cross-disciplinary expertise necessary to address evolving threats and establish a pipeline of professionals focused on economic security. University deans do not make light of offering new degree programs — it’s a business decision at its core. So, what is the business case for investing in economic security as an academic discipline?

Academic programs require a curriculum and a theoretical framework driven by professors, graduate students, and academic researchers. Practitioners also play a vital role, especially as catalysts, leveraged as adjunct teachers drawing on real-world experience. Many universities rely on adjuncts — part-time professors who work in the profession — to ground academic theory in practice. This is an important part of a holistic approach to developing curricula for economic security.

Individual courses and integrated degree programs in economic security have emerged at a handful of institutions, including Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, and Texas A&M University. Of those four, only the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M has a dedicated economic statecraft program. The others teach economic statecraft within existing security and economics degrees, as with Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, alongside its required international-economics core. Adjuncts at these schools are often former government officials, industry practitioners, or risk managers.

Scholars and practitioners are now debating the vernacular and scope of economic security. In existing courses, professors have started to include topics such as supply chain resilience, technological dominance, resource security, industrial policy, export controls, tariffs and trade restrictions, investment diligence, and the protection of infrastructure. Continued dialogue will help establish standards, smooth barriers between academic fields, and integrate lessons from the field into curricula.

The Incentive Hurdle

Creating a new academic discipline is disruptive. Academic incentives are currently misaligned against economic security, and that misalignment is largely why the field does not evolve, as the people best positioned to build it have every professional reason not to invest their time.

Traditionally, academics are incentivized by publishing papers with the goal of advancing knowledge and inviting others to build on their ideas — they are driven by reputation and scholarship, measuring their worth by their contributions to the subject matter and how far their ideas have spread. This impact requires sufficient funding from grants or donors to support a professor’s research and publish their results.

Academics also respond to earning tenure, citations, and status in a recognized field. Economic security offers none of this yet, because it is not an established discipline.

Meanwhile, revenue drives universities, operating as businesses within a competitive global landscape.
Universities attract the best talent, the most recognized experts in the field, with a strong compensation package often including modern offices and lab space, dedicated staff, and a competitive salary. They expect significant revenue, from donor contributions and/or federal grants, to the university based on the addition of new scholarship.

Here’s the catch: These incentives only align when a field of study is well defined. Expanding existing fields to include economic statecraft will be the first milestone to disrupt the siloed academic rigor required for publication. The more ambitious alternative is to stand up a wholly new integrated field built for this reality, one designed from scratch to produce the talent and leadership the United States needs to stay competitive in the world.

Recommendations for Building a Robust Economic Security Workforce

Three main recommendations arise to develop future economic security professionals.

First, reward interdisciplinary teams across the public and private sectors. Agencies and firms should require fluency across disciplines. It should be written into how they hire, promote, and award contracts, so that pairing technical and policy expertise becomes the norm rather than the exception. Business teams should include members with MBAs, Ph.D.s in technical fields, and social science degrees, to span the economic security ecosystem. The same logic applies in uniform. Combatant commanders and service chiefs should build economic security into planning the way they already account for logistics and intelligence. That means assessing how sanctions, supply chain exposure, and an adversary’s economic leverage bear on an operation, and staffing teams with people who can run that analysis. Professional military education should build the know-how to operate at the intersection of security and economics. This is why institutions like the National Defense University’s Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy — which aims to help government leaders better understand industry — have started including economic security issues in coursework, so commanders, planners, and strategists can weigh it in their decision-making.

Second, universities should incorporate economic security into academic programs. They should start with courses shared across departments and joint research that bridges economics, security studies, political science, business, and information science, then grow those into full graduate degrees in economic security and certificate programs that keep working professionals current. In the interim, public and private institutions should invest in focused professional development so the workforce can evolve to what universities will eventually produce, while also meeting urgent needs.

Third, incentivize collaboration between scholars and practitioners. Joint appointments, sabbaticals funded by the host agency or firm that let faculty and practitioners move between the campus and the field, and sponsored research from both government agencies and industry will help keep theory tied to practice. Corporate investments in university partnerships, associations, and conferences are also some of the most valuable paths to promoting dialogue and collaboration, a requirement for an effective societal-level approach to economic security.

A workforce adept in addressing complex public and private sector economic security challenges is a strategic necessity for the United States. Preparing the next generation of economic security-minded professionals requires a fundamental shift in academia and society. China has spent years cultivating talent and influence in U.S. universities, a phenomenon the House of Representatives’ Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party documented in a recent report. Economic security is gaining traction as a stand-alone discipline — an initial foundation for a community of academics and professionals across government and industry who share a common language. Degree programs, certificates, and continuing education to mature the field should sustain this community.

By investing in interdisciplinary education, fostering collaboration, and shifting incentives, the United States can build a workforce equipped to master the evolving landscape of economic statecraft, ensuring American interests remain secure in an increasingly interconnected world.

Jennifer Buss, Ph.D., is the Chairman and CEO of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. The Institute works with thought leaders to anticipate and address science and technology issues facing our society. She advises senior leaders in the public and private sectors and currently serves on the advisory boards of defense firms and startups. She has a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Maryland and is married with two children.