Geopolitical Insight That Reads the Terrain Before It Shifts
We decode adversary systems and cognitive terrain shaping China’s strategic rise.
About Cypher Strategies
Cypher Strategies exists to decode adversary systems before they shape yours. We work with select leaders and organizations confronting growing pressure from China’s influence systems, narrative operations, and political-economic coercion.
Founded by Erika Lafrennie, a strategist with deep experience in intelligence and irregular warfare, our work fuses cognitive mapping, doctrine analysis, and narrative threat detection to clarify strategic risk.
We do not offer analysis as a service. We engage selectively when understanding power is mission-critical.
Every strategy starts in the mind. These are the maps we build.
Narrative as Battlespace
We map how ideology, perception, and information control reshape the terrain, before policy or force is ever applied.
Adversary
Psychology
We reverse-engineer how governing systems define threat, legitimacy, and opportunity so intent can be modeled before action occurs.
Cognitive
Foresight
We map what your adversaries can imagine, and what your team might overlook.
About the Founder
Erika Lafrennie is the founder of Cypher Strategies and author of Xinanigans, a field-grade intelligence brief on governance as power, trusted by national security professionals and private-sector leaders tracking China’s strategic behavior.
With two decades of experience inside US intelligence and private-sector strategic advisory work, she has supported special operations, shaped irregular warfare doctrine, and guided executive leaders through geopolitical risk.
Her work focuses on how governance systems—legal, bureaucratic, economic, demographic, and narrative—function as upstream battlespace in strategic competition.
She works exclusively with select clients operating in high-stakes terrain where perception, power, and doctrine collide.
