Clinton West

Clinton West is the president of the supply chain security practice at Aardwolf Global Solutions, where he leads intelligence-driven work to secure critical supply chains for national-security, defense, and commercial operations. He spent more than two decades at the Central Intelligence Agency, with earlier service in the US Navy and the National Reconnaissance Office. At the CIA he led the Office of Supply Chain Risk Management and held senior supply-chain and risk roles across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

West appeared on Open Door Salon alongside Mike Walker, a health-and-life-sciences digital-strategy leader, for a conversation on cybersecurity and the security of the pharmaceutical supply chain. Drawing on his intelligence career, West argued that the conflict in the Middle East exposed a strategic shift: Iran moving to close the Strait of Hormuz is something the CIA long anticipated but had never seen attempted.

His central warning was about dependency. Pharmaceutical companies, he said, built their supply chains for resilience, but only at the level of visible, surface-level products, not the downstream dependencies that actually carry the risk: the roughly 70 percent of active pharmaceutical ingredients sourced from India and China, and the energy and semiconductor supply chains that everything else rests on.

This disruption, West argued, is different from the 2008 financial crisis or the COVID shock, because adversaries are now studying supply chains with precision, looking specifically for the break points. It is a game, he said, that brittle, linear supply chains were never architected to withstand, and his work with companies is now a race to map their true dependencies and build optionality before the next disruption.