Research Themes

Four questions the work keeps returning to.

The practice organizes around a small set of durable theses, each directed by Christopher Braccia, Founder and Director of Research. Each theme collects the research, the incidents, and the argument in one place.

Theme 01

Nation-State Infrastructure Operations

How states gain, hold and use access inside critical infrastructure.

The core of the practice: how nation-state operators acquire access to critical infrastructure, maintain it quietly, and convert it into espionage, disruption or coercion. The work reads campaigns across actors rather than treating each as an isolated incident.

PRCIranRussia where relevantPre-positioningDisruptionEspionageCoercive cyber operations
Theme 02

Pre-Positioning & Strategic Warning

What adversary preparation reveals before a crisis begins.

Living-off-the-land intrusions rarely serve espionage alone. They establish persistence to be exercised at a moment of the adversary’s choosing. Reading the preparation phase — including capability incubation — is the earliest available warning of a day-one threat.

Day-One threatsPersistent accessTaiwan contingency planningStrategic warning indicatorsCapability incubationRehearsal
Theme 03

Cross-Sector Infrastructure Risk

The threats that become visible only when infrastructure is studied as a connected system.

Platform vendors watch one sector at a time; the adversary does not. The most important signals sit in the movement between sectors — a technique proven in one domain, then reused across communications, energy, transportation, space and the cables beneath them.

CommunicationsEnergyTransportationSpaceSubsea cablesSupply chainsCascading dependencies
Theme 04

Indo-Pacific & Emerging Technology

How geography and technology reshape the next generation of infrastructure threats.

Twelve-plus years across the U.S. and Southeast Asia inform a reading of the Indo-Pacific as the proving ground for capabilities that reach Western infrastructure — where capability incubation, artificial intelligence and new satellite and quantum systems are rewriting the threat.

Indo-PacificSoutheast AsiaPRC strategic competitionArtificial intelligenceQuantumSatellite systemsEmerging infrastructure