The Great Power Competition (GPC) is a term used in academic and geopolitical circles for more than two decades, and describes the struggle between the United States, China, and Russia for global influence and dominance. Since the post-Cold War era, this battle has largely played out at the national and international realms of macro-economics, defense, and diplomacy.
The battles have been fierce. Some U.S. experts have warned that we lacked the urgency and unity of purpose to keep up. The difference now is that it’s definitely home to roost: battles are being waged domestically, both against individual Americans and our way of life.
Homeland security is now in the game, and this is the new era: the smartphones we use every day; how groceries get on to supermarket shelves; the swab tests we mail in; the emails we open. None of these things looks like conflict, but when taken together, they represent how the GPC is now fought.
A group of recent graduates from the CHDS Master’s Program (Cohort 2401/2402) engaged with the GPC for their theses. Their work spanned maritime shipping lanes, supply chains, critical minerals, foreign land ownership, data brokerage, biotechnology, U.S. territories, and state-level governance. The findings of their research and analyses serves as a clarion call to all homeland security practitioners.
Maritime Chokepoints
Commander Lisa Woodman, a Prevention Department Head with the U.S. Coast Guard, explored global maritime shipping lanes, and examined how modern trade flows are far more fragile than they appear. Her research focused on maritime chokepoints—areas not traditionally classified as critical infrastructure, but are essential to economic and national security.
“We have seen disruptions manifest from drought at the Panama Canal, a container ship blocking the Suez Canal, and the insecurity situation in the Red Sea with ongoing Houthi attacks,” Woodman explained. “This really made it evident for me that maritime channels are critical infrastructure that sit a little outside what we traditionally think of.”
Woodman’s thesis argues that maritime trade routes function much like power grids: networked systems where disruption at a single node can create cascading failures across the economy. Those disruptions may come from natural events, cyber vulnerabilities, coercive economic pressure, or asymmetric attacks—and often well before a single shot is fired.
She also framed modern supply‑chain disruption as a feature of gray‑zone competition, rather than traditional warfare. “We’ve talked quite a bit in this program about asymmetric warfare, and some of the vulnerabilities and risks that manifest particularly relevant for trade flows—whether it’s lawfare, economic trade policies, sanctions, tariffs,” she said.
Cyberbiosecurity
Her classmate Brad Robertson, Detective Sergeant with the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office in Portland, Oregon, investigated cyberbiosecurity—a discipline which did not formally emerge in academic literature until 2016. For part of his research, he attended the Cyberbiosecurity Summit 2025 in Maryland. His thesis examined how biotechnology, cybersecurity, and data converge to create unprecedented opportunities and risks.
As an example, Robertson pointed to a 2020 open‑source report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence about China’s global distribution of COVID‑19 test kits—which could collect not just diagnostics, but also DNA sequencing.
“On the positive side, having large datasets allows you to do incredible things in precision medicine,” Robertson said. “But there’s also a pernicious side. What sort of weapons or actions could a country take if it started using this space to do harm?”
The potential, he warned, extends beyond mass harm to highly targeted threats.
“What becomes really alarming is the possibility of creating pathogenic weapons that could target a specific race—or even a specific individual,” he said.
Like Woodman, Robertson recommended treating the bioeconomy itself as a critical U.S. infrastructure, arguing that governance and foresight have not kept pace with technological acceleration.
Brad Robertson’s thesis
Cyberbiosecurity threat forecasting to highlight vulnerabilities in the bioeconomy
Weaponized Data
That same misuse of datasets that Robertson cautioned, also drove Jesse Yarbrough, Chief of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) with Louisville Metro EMS, to examine the weaponization of data. His research focused on how everyday devices (e.g., phones, vehicles, smart homes generate constant streams of information, which can put individuals at risk.
“Data in and of itself, as it becomes aggregated, stands a high potential to be weaponized,” Yarbrough warned. “Data is the most potent tool for exploitation.”
When combined with artificial intelligence, Yarborough explains, data aggregation enables surveillance, prediction, coercion, and targeting to occur at a large scale. Even though this data is acquired legally through commercial brokers, it raises profound questions about privacy, national security, and regulation—particularly when adversarial states are free to purchase it. Yarborough said even encrypted data isn’t safe.
“Data in and of itself, as it becomes aggregated, stands a high potential to be weaponized,” Yarbrough warned. “Data is the most potent tool for exploitation.”
–Jesse Yarbrough, Cohort 2401/2402
“The emerging threat with encrypting data is the advent of quantum computing. There’s a movement right now in which foreign governments and organizations are operating under a “We’ll capture it now and we’ll decrypt it later” model, because they know that [the] capability will soon exist,” he said.
Jesse Yarbrough’s thesis
Caveat Oculus: Data Brokers, Surveillance Capitalism, and the Threat to Homeland Security
U.S. Agricultural Land Ownership
Another emerging risk in the GPC is the ownership and acquisition of agricultural land in the U.S. by entities associated with adversarial nations, a topic that Kathryn Taylor, an emergency management professional, explored. She explained that while adversarial foreign governments themselves do not own land directly, she found that individuals and entities with ties to adversarial nations do acquire acreage, legally and often with minimal oversight.
Taylor noted that according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, approximately 46.3 million acres of U.S. agricultural land are owned by foreign entities, and this number is growing by about 2.6 million acres per year. At this rate, more than 76 million acres could be foreign-owned within a decade.
The greatest risk, Taylor argued, is not the amount of land owned, as most is held by individuals and entities friendly or neutral to the U.S., but where and how the land is acquired, as some of the land is near military installations.
“The problem is not necessarily the acreage, but the ambiguity of who controls what—and where,” she explained. “We need to be proactive in understanding the complete landscape of investments, and that just isn’t the reality right now.”
Taylor emphasized that fragmented, state-level responses are insufficient to address the issue. While states like Florida and Texas have enacted restrictions targeting specific foreign nationals, she cautioned that narrowly naming current adversaries “really limits us” as risks evolve.
“Executive action is helpful in the short-term,” Taylor noted, referencing recent interest in agricultural security, “but durable mitigation has to happen at the federal level through legislation that persists across administrations.”
Insider Threats
Putting durable policy in place at the state-level appeared again as a central solution in Chris Capone’s research. A detective with the New York City Police Department, Capone examined insider threats and foreign malign influence at the state and local levels—an area he described as the “soft underbelly” of homeland security.
“We understand there’s a really robust system at the federal level,” Capone said. “But as the last few years have unfolded, we’ve seen more and more cases happening state and locally. The longer we wait, the more vulnerable we leave ourselves to foreign adversaries.”
Capone found that many state and local agencies lack even basic insider threat awareness or reporting pathways, despite regularly handling sensitive, exploitable information. He recommended that state and local governments address insider threats by institutionalizing basic training and awareness and implementing legislation which can continue over time and across administrations.
Critical Minerals
For Tim Robb, who was previously the Governor of Nevada’s Homeland Security Advisor and Director of Strategic Initiatives, the GPC comes into sharp focus through critical minerals—which essentially anchor everything from consumer technology to defense systems.
“Critical minerals are the basic building blocks of our modern way of life,” Robb said, and explained in his thesis that the United States already possesses far more domestic mineral potential than is commonly recognized.
“The U.S. Geological Survey has identified about 60 critical minerals that are necessary for our national security,” he said. “Nevada alone can produce up to thirty of the critical minerals that are on that list—essentially half.”
“The United States does mining right. We just need to make it possible—and cheaper—to do it here.”
-Tim Robb, Cohort 2401/2402
Robb highlighted how adversarial nations can use minerals as economic leverage, such as cutting off supply during disputes or flooding markets to suppress prices and undermine U.S. industries.
“The way that we de‑risk this issue is [that] we bring home our extraction, our processing, our production, and our recycling,” he explained. With modernized regulations, clearer timelines, and strategic federal investment, Robb argued that expanding U.S. production is feasible while still maintaining environmental and labor standards.
“The United States does mining right,” he said. “We just need to make it possible—and cheaper—to do it here.”
U.S. Territories
The final research topic on the GPC came from Lieutenant Commander Creighton Chong of the U.S. Coast Guard, whose work examined American Samoa as both a strategic asset and a frontline U.S. territory in the Indo-Pacific. Chong described the territory as an ideal GPC testbed where maritime dominance, seafood security, and critical mineral strategy are deeply intertwined.
He noted recent presidential executive orders aimed at strengthening U.S. maritime power, expanding domestic seafood competitiveness, and advancing critical mineral policy all converge in American Samoa. Chong emphasized, however, that success will depend on both a sustained U.S. Coast Guard cutter presence and a modernized U.S. relationship between the United States and American Samoa: a relationship that treats the U.S. territory as a strategic partner, rather than just a location for critical mineral extraction.
“The Coast Guard has now received a historic $24.5 billion investment, far above its recent annual budget of $13.8 billion; and if we still fail to establish a permanent cutter presence in the only U.S. territory in the South Pacific, it will be a major strategic opportunity missed,” he said.
Chong added that U.S. credibility in the region will depend on collaboration and long-term investment in the territory.
Great Power Competition is Happening Now
Together, these seven graduates make one point unmistakably clear: the GPC is no longer confined to distant theaters or abstract strategy documents. It is unfolding quietly across ports and pipelines, farmland and data centers, genomes and governance structures, and our own personal devices within the United States.
