PROTECTION AND WEALTH BUILDING STRATEGIES 207maps on which the landing zone had to be drawn in by hand.
Communications between the military branches broke down.
As a result, the Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act
in 1986, which enshrined the concept of joint operations and
joint command. Today, it is not unusual to find an Army ma-
jor general reporting to a Navy admiral who happens to be a
combatant commander in one of the major commands such
as Centcom. These reforms have made the U.S. military a far
more effective and lethal force than it was in the 1980s.
A similar method is being used today in financial warfare.
Major-threat finance initiatives typically involve participants
from the Pentagon, CIA, U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve and pri-
vate-sector experts from Wall Street, major banks and the hedge
fund community, all working together. Our CSIF team is using
exactly such an approach to confront future financial threats.
Even as the United States and its allies are refining their
ability to counteract financial threats, the bad guys and rival
state actors are not standing still.
New technologies such as crypto currencies, Bitcoin being
the best known, are being used by the Islamic State and other
enemies to buy weapons and pay troops without interdiction
by global bank regulators.
Large Russian and Chinese cyber brigades have been mus-
tered to put those countries on the leading edge of cyber financial
warfare. Wealth can also be moved around the world undetected
using accounting games such as inflated transfer prices in the
sale of mundane goods and services. Forensic expertise in law,
accounting and taxation is needed to counter those threats.
Ironically, the most ancient financial techniques can be just
as effective at avoiding sanctions as the most modern. Classic
stores of wealth such as gold, silver, jewels, fine art and land
are effective ways to transfer and hide wealth without mov-
ing assets through modern digital payments systems. Gold is
scarce and valuable at about $1,300 per ounce.