Supply Chain Threat Intelligence

The objective of this proposal is to demonstrate the feasibility of a system for automatically harvesting, normalizing, enriching, and mining publicly available foreign national security data from public records on the deep web, with a specific focus on the defense and intelligence industrial base and the innovation economies of strategic rivals of the United States. The resulting system would be a lead and alert generation engine for US Air Force elements tasked with monitoring threats to US supply chains, both inbound (e.g. components of US military or contractor hardware manufactured in and imported from China) and outbound (e.g. potential diversion of controlled products re-exported from US government or contractors to strategic rivals via third countries). The initial study will assess the feasibility of a system to collect and process the data required to generate a picture of the Chinese defense and intelligence industrial base, classify potential threats to inbound US government and contractor supply chains, and do so with minimal human intervention.