convergence

Combating Transnational Organized Crime
Criminal networks are increasingly merging, blending, and cooperating with other
nefarious and violent nonstate actors including terrorist organizations and insurgent movements.
Crime is used to finance terrorism and is often how insurgencies raise revenue to
pay individual cadres. Terrorists and insurgents can tap into the global illicit marketplace to
underwrite their activities and acquire weapons and other supplies vital to their operations.
Criminals, in their search for profits, will turn almost anywhere for revenue. The net effect is
a crime-terror-insurgency nexus.
Examples of this nexus abound. As of November 2011, the Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA) had linked 19 of the 49 organizations on the State Department’s list of Foreign
Terrorist Organizations to the drug trade. 1 Similarly, in 2010, 29 of the 63 organizations on
the Justice Department’s Consolidated Priority Organization Targets list, which includes key
drug trafficking and criminal organizations, had associations with terrorism. 2 In January 2012,
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper concluded that “Terrorists and insurgents will
increasingly turn to crime and criminal networks for funding and logistics, in part because of
U.S. and Western success in attacking other sources of their funding. The criminal connections
and activities of Hezbollah and al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb illustrate this trend.” 3
Global crime networks coalesce with members of radical political movements in ungoverned
border regions in Central and South America; similar blending has occurred in the Balkans.
The crime-terror-insurgent nexus is changing the global security landscape and, more
importantly for DOD, is also altering the character of the battlespace. In Afghanistan, the
Taliban and a variety of criminal networks often operate in lockstep; illicit activities are an
important funding stream for the Taliban and its offshoots. Moreover, drug incomes corrupt
politicians, alienating populations who then become vulnerable to the messages of the Taliban
and its ilk. Crime and corruption thus perpetuate the Afghan insurgency and threaten coalition
forces’ ability to consolidate security gains and establish conditions for long-term stability. Of
direct concern to DOD are the criminal networks that provide the materials and financial
and logistical support for improvised explosive devices, which are among the most significant
threats to U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan.
More generally, hybrid criminal-terror-insurgent threats are forcing DOD to adapt its approaches
to conflict and adjust the type and level of resources it deploys around the world. War
against nebulous, networked threats that operate at the seams of war, instability, and peace; blur
the illicit and licit; and simultaneously display the characteristics of criminals, terrorists, and
insurgents requires DOD to think innovatively about how it plans, organizes, and operates.
A New Impetus for Combating Transnational Organized Crime
Largely because of the changing character of transnational criminal organizations, the national
security threats posed by TOC have expanded and become more dangerous. This finding is at
the core of the Obama administration’s July 2011 Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized
Crime, which concludes that “criminal networks are not only expanding their operations, but
they are also diversifying their activities. The result is a convergence of threats that have evolved
to become more complex, volatile, and destabilizing.” 4 In a clear articulation of the U.S. Government’s
position, the strategy declares that transnational organized crime poses “a significant
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