TOC as a Growing Threat to Regional, Global Security

Transnational organized crime (TOC) is a significant and growing threat to the security of the United States and a major security challenge in other critical regions of the world. TOC continues to expand dramatically in size, scope, and influence with major destabilizing effects. In recent years, TOC entities have embraced new, and often violent, practices and advanced strategies to circumvent the traditional norms of legal economies and evade security interventions often operating through a vast economic system of dark networks and economies—illicit and illegal sourcing, labor inputs, production, products and services, supply chains, and consumer operations.1 Within these clandestine systems, TOC entities are expanding their operations, diversifying their activities, as well as exploiting the increased blurring between illicit and licit activities. The rapid evolution of TOC entities in the past 15 years has engendered a more convoluted, violent, and destabilizing convergence of threat vectors challenging security regimes in detecting, disrupting, and dismantling the (il)licit and (il)legal of transnational criminal enterprises.

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