Britain needs a grown-up China strategy, not a defence cut from Cummings

On Tuesday, US defence secretary Mark Esper confirmed that China was now the most significant military threat facing the United States and that the military would make China “the pacing threat in all our schools, programmes and training”. Where does this leave Britain, currently engaged in her own confrontations with Beijing, not to mention trying to form a defence strategy which continues to tie our defence to our “indispensable ally” over the Atlantic? The picture is rather bleak. Britain’s long anticipated and now long delayed defence review is being plunged into political and intellectual turmoil at precisely the moment we need maximum clarity about how the UK deals with the most pressing threat — an increasingly assertive and potentially belligerent China.

The Integrated defence review has finally restarted but it is not clear who is really leading it. The leak earlier in the week that Dominic Cummings was engaged in a series of visits to defence and security sites across the UK is not desperately surprising to even the most casual observer of British politics. Cummings has always expressed an interest in reforming the vastly inefficient defence procurement process and few independent observers can really fault that ambition.

The more important and yet unknown question remains the extent to which Cummings will try to direct the more fundamental strategic questions and the shape and size of the armed forces. Nominally Professor John Bew, the respected academic is meant to be leading the integrated review and providing some meat to bare bones strategy of “global Britain”, providing us, hopefully with a detailed strategy for the UK. Yet an evidence session with the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter, also this week, revealed a lack of coherent leadership of the review. The astute Labour MP and former shadow defence secretary, Kevan Jones pressed Carter to tell him who was politically leading the review. Carter was unable to give an unambiguous response.

He responded that the First Secretary was leading until David Frost takes over as national security advisor. Frost will not start in this role until the end of August and will presumably still have most of his energy directed at the huge task of negotiating Brexit. With the Integrated Review due to report in the Autumn and a lack of a “heavy hitter” leading it in the interim, there is a fear that it might simply be reduced to a political exercise. Tobias Ellwood chair of the defence select committee was prompted to tweet that “If correct and Dominic Cummings is formally involved in reviewing the UK’s defence and security architecture then he should be subject to the same parliamentary scrutiny as ministers, military personnel and the civil service.”

It is more important than ever that we have a serious defence review, run by professional strategists rather than political advisers. The review must involve robust strategic thinking and must fund the military to the extent required by geopolitical demands. It should not be a source of easy budget cuts in a time of economic pressure.

The geopolitical context of all of this matters a great deal. Speaking last week in the wake of the China’s imposition of draconian new security laws in Hong Kong, Boris Johnson hardened Britain’s stance towards China, for the first time referring to it (in the context of Huawei) as a “hostile state”. The response from China’s ambassador in London, Liu Xiaoming was in keeping with the bellicose new brand of Wolf-Warrior diplomacy practised by China. The not so thinly veiled threat was that it was “not in the UK’s interest” to make an enemy of Beijing. What exactly does this mean for Britain? We can see quite clearly how China operates, having punished Australian beef and wool exports earlier in the year after Canberra called for an inquiry into China’s handling of Covid-19. No doubt Britain will go to the back of the queue if China becomes first to develop a Covid vaccine, but Beijing’s threats of future action actually conceal the extent to which China is currently involved in political operations in the UK.

General Carter’s evidence to the select committee is worth revisiting. There is a disconnect emerging between the UK government and the military. Carter told the defence select committee that China represented a “challenge rather than a threat”. The divide in language and thought between the Prime Minister and the Chief of the Defence Staff shows the extent to which Britain still lacks a coherent strategy for dealing with China. Policy flip-flopping on areas such as Chinese involvement in critical national infrastructure is no substitute for clear thinking. Any defence review, as Carter acknowledged, should not be concerned with the present but should look five or ten years into the future. We can see the preparations our allies are making. Australia has just committed to a defence modernisation programme which sensibly, given the economic impact of Covid-19, decouples it from a GDP target. The UK government, in contrast, is expected to use the decline in economic activity as a stealthy way to trim defence spending. Australia and the US are both retooling their strategies and military capabilities for a possible military engagement with China.

The UK does not have the same geographic exposure to Asia as the US or Australia. A benevolent reading of Carter’s view of China as a “challenge” rather than a “threat” might acknowledge that. A more robust analysis would engage with China’s “Three Warfares” strategy which introduced the concepts of public opinion warfare, psychological warfare and legal warfare and retooled the Peoples’ Liberation Army around fighting such wars in the early 2000s. In other words China does not consider war to just involve tanks and guns. In this context Carter’s assurances seem like a significant downplaying of events.

Even if we dismiss the issue of Hong Kong as a moral issue rather than a threat to a vital interest, there were more worrying revelations about the infiltration of China into UK politics this week. A leaked report called China’s Elite Capture revealed the extent to which China has made links with leading politicians, academics and businesspeople in order to advance her interests in critical infrastructure. Even if, In strictly military terms, General Carter is correct in his assessment, China is rapidly becoming a security threat. Carter is perhaps guilty of separating Chinese political warfare from their hard power. The UK requires a truly integrated approach to China that recognises the sophistication of Chinese strategy, both military and non-military in undermining her adversaries, of which the UK is one.

Carter also expressed what is well known in defence circles but might surprise the general public, that the UK concedes that it will never (indeed could not) go to war without an ally and that ally will almost certainly be the US. So while the former foreign secretary Philip Hammond is concerned about an “outbreak of anti-Chinese sentiment within the Conservative Party”, the reality is that Britain is drifting further apart from her primary ally’s stance on China.

A strategic dilemma is emerging. For Nato’s most powerful member, Europe’s Russian threat is being demoted in favour of an area of operations in the Indo-Pacific. This is of no direct geographic interest to most of Europe and China currently presents little direct military threat to the European continent. Yet as the British experience suggests, China certainly does not limit its conception of warfare to kinetic, military tactics. We are already at war with China at the political and economic level. The exercise of physical, coercive power these days is highly targeted and limited, as the people of Hong Kong have regrettably just found out. It is high time that we came up with a modern defence strategy that recognises all of the instruments of national power and how best to mobilise them in the national interest, rather than focusing on military strength as if it existed in a vacuum. Otherwise we may lose any future conflict, before we even realise it has begun.