The Office of Strategic Risk Assessment has published DSC-TR-2026-010, an assessment of interdependencies among critical global systems that describes how stress in one system propagates to others.
WASHINGTON — The Office of Strategic Risk Assessment (OSRA) today published Long-Term Systems Assessment: Interdependencies Among Critical Global Systems (DSC-TR-2026-010). The technical report examines how critical global systems, including energy, food and agriculture, water, finance and trade, supply chains, communications and computational systems, depend on one another, and how disruption in one can propagate to the others.
The assessment is a structural analysis. Rather than projecting future outcomes, it maps the connections between systems, characterizes how tightly each pair is coupled, and identifies the pathways along which stress has historically traveled and could travel in the future. It draws on the eleven coupled modules of the Department’s Integrated Civilizational Systems Model (ICSM), documented in DSC-TR-2026-003, and on historical episodes in which disruption crossed system boundaries.
“Most of the risk we study does not sit inside any one system,” said the Director of the Office of Strategic Risk Assessment. “It sits in the connections between them, which are often less visible and less well governed than the systems themselves. This report is our attempt to draw those connections clearly enough that they can be measured and discussed.”
Areas of attention
The report gives particular attention to several forms of interdependence:
- the growing reliance of grid, logistics and communications operations on automated and AI-assisted control, and the coupling of those systems to energy supply;
- concentration in the supply of semiconductors and critical minerals, which creates shared points of failure across otherwise separate industries;
- the potential for synchronized shocks to food production and distribution in several regions at once;
- channels of financial contagion through which stress in one market or institution can reach others rapidly; and
- the role of institutional capacity in absorbing or amplifying disruptions in other systems.
The report treats climate change as a factor that raises stress across many systems simultaneously, rather than as a separate pathway. It also identifies gaps in the data available to characterize several couplings, and recommends priorities for improving them.
Relation to the Outlook
The structural findings of this assessment inform the configuration of the ICSM for the Department’s forthcoming Civilizational Systems Outlook, which will present ensemble projections of systemic stress over the coming decade. The present report contains no such projections.
The report was prepared under the Integrated Systems Modeling Program. It is approved for public release; distribution unlimited. Media inquiries may be submitted through the Contact page.