convergence

Combating Transnational Organized Crime
Military Intelligence Support to Law Enforcement
Network mapping has become widely recognized as a key enabler in combating transnational
organized crime. Criminal organizations use multiple, overlapping transportation, logistics,
and financial networks to do business. Financial networks are particularly vital since money
is central to all criminal activities. Consequently, DOD has expanded its military intelligence
support to law enforcement on counterthreat finance initiatives that seek to identify, penetrate,
and exploit the critical nodes in the complex financial systems that enable global illicit networks.
DOD recognizes that countering the financial flows that facilitate trafficking groups, criminal
organizations, terrorists, and insurgents will produce cascading positive effects across the range
of networks these nefarious actors use.
A particular strength of DOD is integrating various forms of all-source intelligence to
facilitate a network-based approach to targeting. This is the approach used in the Afghan
Threat Finance Cell, through which DOD supports the DEA, Federal Bureau of Investigation,
Department of the Treasury, and other U.S. Government partners to identify insurgent
financiers, disrupt front companies, develop actionable financial intelligence, freeze and seize
illicit funds, and build criminal cases. These actions are vital to degrading and diminishing
the power of criminal-terrorist networks by enabling a judicial endgame—the prosecution
of adversaries, which often removes them from the battlefield for far longer than typical military-led
raids. The Afghan Threat Finance Cell is also designed to provide direct support to
the government of Afghanistan’s efforts to reclaim tainted money moving around the country,
which further undercuts the power of insurgent and terrorist networks. Importantly, these
types of approaches can be replicated and DOD’s experiences in Afghanistan have equipped it
with new tools, techniques, and institutional skill sets that add to the overall set of capabilities
the Department offers in support of law enforcement.
Direct Military Action with a Counter-Network Focus
In Afghanistan, DOD is taking direct action against a hybrid insurgent-criminal adversary in
partnership with law enforcement agencies and the government of Afghanistan. Over the past
10 years, there has been an evolution in how the Department thinks about and approaches
its missions there. DOD—and the interagency—have shifted from the paradigm that crime
oriented around narcotics production was an indelible feature of the national landscape but
disconnected from operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban, to a recognition that corruption,
narcotics production and trafficking, criminal organizations, and insurgency and terror are
mutually enabling and reinforcing and cannot be addressed in isolation. Ultimately, organized
crime and corruption threaten the viability of the Afghan state.
Consequently, DOD actions in Afghanistan emphasize counternetwork approaches:
attacking, degrading, and defeating the criminal networks that sustain the insurgency and
undermine the legitimacy and capacity of the Afghan government. Counterinsurgency,
counter–transnational organization crime missions, counterthreat finance activities, and capacity-building
efforts are part of an integrated U.S. Government effort led, in many cases, by
DOD. The Department’s role in the operation of the Afghan Threat Finance Cell is a critical
contribution to whole-of-government approaches to combating hybrid criminal-insurgent
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