No Single Playbook: Why Integrated Threats Demand a New Model for Supply Chain Resilience

Businesses around the world are learning that a risk mitigation approach based on traditional models is insufficient to navigate the challenges that global supply chains are facing in 2026. This two-part Deep Dive series looks at the most serious supply chain risks for which organizations should be planning and what organizations can do to ensure stability and resiliency for customers.

When COVID-19 created unprecedented disruption to the global supply chain beginning in early 2020, logistics companies insisted that this black swan event had provided important lessons on building resilient, sustainable supply chains that can withstand future shocks.

In 2026, such assurances seem quaint. With ongoing wars in Europe and the Middle East causing catastrophic supply chain disruption, the consequences of climate change moving from future risks to present-day threats, and rapid advances in technology creating new attack surfaces, the global supply chain faces more danger than ever before.

“Clarity During Uncertainty: The Power of Establishing a Common Risk Framework,” the 2026 supply chain risks and opportunities report from BSI, provides insight into the most significant threats to today’s global supply chain, including geopolitical conflict, crime, and climate change.

In her introduction to the report, BSI CEO Susan Taylor Martin wrote, “Global supply chains face unprecedented disruption … These pressures are deeply interlinked, often striking simultaneously. Such an environment makes one thing clear: organizations cannot afford to manage risks in isolation. True resilience requires end-to-end visibility across supply networks and the ability to respond quickly, both of which hinge on taking a unified, enterprise-wide approach to risk management.” 2025 highlighted the need for a unified risk strategy that accounts for geopolitical, economic, social, security, and operational disruption, according to the report's introduction. Despite that urgency, however, BSI noted that only one in three organizations hit by disruption in 2025 had the systems in place to manage downstream impacts in real time, and this is playing out in 2026.

“The past year has demonstrated that modern disruptions rarely remain contained; risks increasingly intersect and intensify one another in ways that challenge even the most prepared organizations,” wrote BSI President Tim Wren. Part One of this two-part series on the BSI report summarizes some of the prominent risks BSI has identified to show that 2026 will be a year in which organizations will need to stop looking at risks in isolation and instead consider how they can respond holistically to a new generation of integrated threats.

Geopolitical Fragmentation

Last year and the first quarter of 2026 aptly demonstrated that the global nature of supply chains makes them vulnerable to adversarial relationships and strategies among key political players.

“If one word defined 2025, and now the first quarter of 2026, it is uncertainty. And not just in a single domain,” wrote Wren. “That's why we delayed the release of this year's report. We wanted to ensure it captured the most current global developments, from rapid technological disruption and escalating climate-driven disasters, to shifting tariffs and trade policy, ongoing geopolitical instability in Russia and Ukraine, the targeted military operation in Venezuela, cartel violence in Mexico, and the widening conflict across the Middle East and its global ramifications.”

These disruptions are contributing to voices calling for the acceleration of nearshoring and reshoring strategies that reshape how goods move, and for the mitigation of risks associated with global supply routes. In the short term, companies are using foreign trade zones and warehousing, but this strategy comes with its own risks, as areas with high concentrations of high-value goods are increasingly vulnerable to theft and organized cargo crime.

Supply chain disruptions evolved quickly in 2025, and 2026 appears set to provide more of the same. The war in Iran has impacted many supply chains, from energy to computer chips, by disrupting logistics traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

“What we're seeing is this cascade effect,” said David Fairnie, supply chain security consultant at BSI in a webinar. “What started regionally is now clearly systemic and interconnected. The key issue is not really severity; it's duration and uncertainty.”

On the same webinar, Tony Pelli, global practice director of supply chain resilience at BSI, broke the situation in the Middle East into stages that stretch along the entire supply chain, using the shipping industry as an example.

In first-order impacts, industries like oil, fertilizer, and agriculture cannot move products into or out of the Middle East. In second-order impacts, ships from Asia or Europe can no longer use the Middle East as a stopping point, forcing them to take longer routes that add time to the journey, causing delays and increasing threats from extreme weather and piracy. In third-order impacts, companies can no longer move parts and supplies to critical equipment like ships, causing production shutdowns and further transportation delays. Together, these three stages - which are typical for geopolitical disruption - can have catastrophic impacts on the global supply chain.

On the trade front, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is set for review in 2026, with the Trump administration signaling a desire to radically rework it to better suit U.S. interests and potentially threatening further trade disruption across North America. U.S. tariffs are a significant contributor to the current adversarial approach to the North American supply chains, and the recent decision from the U.S. Supreme Court undermining President Trump’s justification for the tariffs provides further uncertainty about the integrity of global supply chains as they have been known up to this point.

Materials and Sustainability Regulatory Manager Cassidy Spencer at 3E said that this type of fragmentation is also working its way into the regulatory environment.

“Since around 2025, governments have increasingly wrapped trade, regulation, industrial policy, and economic security into national competitiveness frameworks; from the EU's Competitiveness Compass to the UK's Modern Industrial Strategy, Japan's GX2040 Vision, and Australia's Future Made in Australia plan,” said Spencer. “Globally, regions and countries are acting more asynchronously, with different priorities, timelines, and intervention models. That fragmentation damages supply chains by increasing regulatory divergence, raising compliance costs, and undermining the predictability companies need to make long-term sourcing and investment decisions.”

The report noted that it has become essential for organizations to understand how geopolitical pressure is intersecting with their supply chains and how to respond.

“Working across risk, logistics, supply chain, legal, and compliance functions gives organizations a clearer view of where supplier relationships can be effectively managed as geopolitical issues arise and where capacity may be stretched thin,” said the report.

Operational Crime

Theft and organized crime are an age-old problem in any supply chain, but today's globalized supply chains and rapid advances in technology are quickly increasing the potential attack surface.

Food, electronics, automotive products, construction materials, and metals are the most common items targeted in the Americas and in Indonesia, while rare-earth elements dominate in China. Pharmaceuticals are the most commonly targeted item in India.

“Industries likely to be most impacted are those whose goods are high-value, easy to resell, essential to daily operations, or frequently moved through vulnerable logistics corridors,” said the report.

Different types of theft predominate in different regions. In-transit theft is more common in South and Central America, while insider involvement is more common in Asia. Rail theft accounts for 10% of thefts in the U.S., often coordinated by criminal groups and insider collusion. Maritime piracy has risen in Asia, particularly India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, while drug-smuggling patterns have shifted toward Australia, New Zealand, and African routes into Europe that exploit agricultural and food cargo.

Technological advances such as AI are both a blessing and a curse in the fight against supply chain crime. Criminals are increasingly taking advantage of these new tools to stage digital compromises of goods and facilitate real-world interceptions of freight. This includes using phishing attacks to reveal shipment data, GPS spoofing to create fraudulent delivery locations, and diverting trucks to ambush spots. These hybrid attacks show a rapidly converging threat profile for digital and physical security, including targeting undersea cables and operational technology systems.

Technology is also providing tools to fight theft, including essential zero-trust architecture, privileged-access minimization, and continuous telemetry across carriers and forwarders. Beyond just the tools, however, organizations must focus on awareness, training, and knowledge.

“The rising cost of cyberattacks makes it critical to properly vet suppliers for cybersecurity, assess where cyber risks create vulnerabilities in the supply chain, and work directly with at-risk suppliers to strengthen their defenses.”

Digital Exposure

Rapid technological innovation is also enhancing the ability of groups with political and financial motivations to exploit vulnerabilities in maritime shipping and critical infrastructure through GPS jamming, automatic identification system (AIS) spoofing, and zero-day exploits that target software vulnerabilities. There were 32 reported cyber incidents in the maritime sector in 2025, which resulted in delayed port operations, stalled cargo clearance, and increased insurance costs. The average cost of a data breach in 2025 was $4.44 million, which represents a 9% decrease from 2024.

According to BSI, digital exposure is another area in which attention to employees and training can play a crucial role in mitigating risk.

“While the up-front investment of time and resources can be significant, the rising cost of cyberattacks makes it critical to properly vet suppliers for cybersecurity, assess where cyber risks create vulnerabilities in the supply chain, and work directly with at-risk suppliers to strengthen their defenses,” said the report.

Complex Threats Create Serious Consequences

Each risk presented here shows the evolution from isolated incidents to complex threats that can disrupt entire supply chains across the world, and while some of them, like criminal networks, have defined adversaries against whom organizations can fortify their defenses, others, such as environmental threats, have no single agent. Instead, they are complex threats that can take down entire supply chains by hitting multiple critical points simultaneously, making more traditional, incident-based resiliency techniques obsolete.

Part Two of this series will explore how terrorism, labor unrest, and environmental threats are undermining the traditional way of protecting supply chains from disruption.