NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY defend, and when necessary defeat malicious actors who use cyberspace capabilities against the United States. When faced with the opportunity to take action against malicious actors in cyberspace, the United States will be risk informed, but not risk averse, in considering our options. The ability of the United States to modernize our military forces to overmatch our adversaries requires intelligence support. Intelligence is needed to understand and anticipate foreign doctrine and the intent of foreign leaders, prevent tactical and operational surprise, and ensure that U.S. capabilities are not compromised before they are fielded. In addition, virtually all modern weapon systems depend upon data derived from scientific and technical intelligence. Priority Actions I M P R O V E AT T R I B U T I O N , A C C O U N TA B I L I T Y, A N D We will invest in capabilities to support and improve our ability to attribute cyberattacks, to a llow for rapid response. RESPONSE: The IC, as well as the law enforcement community, offer unique abilities to defend against and mitigate threat actors operating below the threshold of open conflict. Both communities have exceptionally strong liaison relationships throughout the world, allowing the United States to cooperate with allies and partners to protect against adversaries. E N HANCE CYB E R TOOL S AN D E XPE RTISE : We will improve our cyber tools across the spectrum of conf lict to protect U.S. Government assets and U.S. critical infrastructure, and to protect the integrity of data and information. U.S. departments a nd agencies will recruit, tra in, a nd retain a workforce capable of operating across this spectrum of activity. Priority Actions To prevent the theft of sensitive and proprietary information and maintain supply chain integrity, the United States must increase our understanding of the economic policy priorities of our adversaries and improve our ability to detect and defeat their attempts to commit economic espionage. IMPROVE UNDERSTANDING: We w i l l improve the integration of authorities and procedures across the U.S. Government so that cyber operations against adversaries can be conducted as required. We will work with the Congress to address the challenges that continue to hinder timely intelligence and information sharing, planning and operations, and the development of necessary cyber tools. I M P R O V E I N T E G R AT I O N A N D A G I L I T Y : The United States will, in concert with allies and partners, use the information-rich open-source environment to deny the ability of state and non-state actors to attack our citizens, conduct offensive intelligence activities, and degrade America’s democratic institutions. HARNESS ALL INFORMATION AT OUR DISPOSAL: Intelligence America’s ability to identify and respond to geostrategic and regional shifts and their political, economic, military, and security implications requires that the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) gather, analyze, discern, and operationalize information. In this information-dominant era, the IC must continuously pursue strategic intelligence to anticipate geostrategic shifts, as well as shorter-term intelligence so that the United States can respond to the actions and provocations of rivals. FUSE INFORMATION AND ANALYSIS: The United States will fuse our analysis of information derived from the diplomatic, information, military, and economic domains to compete more effectively on the geopolitical stage. 32