[Washington Examiner] American and European allies need to "merge" the intelligence gathered by national security and law enforcement officials in order to fend off nontraditional threats from China and Russia, according to a senior Pentagon official.
"Most of what our competitors and adversaries are doing in Europe to undermine our resilience and undermine our political cohesion is in the law enforcement realm," Michael Ryan, one of the Defense Department’s top officials for European and NATO policy, told the European Union Defense Washington Forum. "We need to find a way to merge that military intelligence and law enforcement intelligence, so that working between NATO and the EU, we get all of our tools moving in the right direction to deal with those efforts."
Ryan’s solution, in the broadest terms, involves enhanced "intelligence-sharing" not only between allied governments but between traditional national security entities and law enforcement agencies empowered to work within a country. His comments underscore the U.S. perception that China and Russia are targeting Western allies through nonmilitary means.
"A huge amount of these challenges are coming in private sector entities or civil society," said Center for Strategic and International Studies Senior Vice President Kathleen Hicks, building on Ryan’s suggestion.
Their suspicions dovetail with a statement from the 2017 White House National Security Strategy, which warned that Western "adversaries exploit our free and democratic system to harm the United States." Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been making that case to European allies, particularly in light of China’s push for a Beijing-backed telecommunications giant to win the contracts to build the 5G next-generation wireless technology infrastructure in leading European and developing countries.
"We must take off the golden blinders of economic ties and see that the China challenge isn’t just at the gates; it’s in every capital, it’s in every borough, it’s in every province," Pompeo told European officials and analysts last month. 
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