“…if some [EU] countries believe that they can do clever business
with the Chinese, then they will be surprised when they wake up and find
themselves dependent”.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, March 2019
Alphen,
Netherlands. 26 March. Source code is the software ‘brain’ at the heart of a
computer, its directing command. Control source code and one controls the
machine. And, as man and the machine become ever more intertwined via the
internet of things, control the machine and one controls mankind. It is that
threat which is behind going Western concerns about China’s digital Silk Road, its
funding of global 5G networks, and the role being played by its surrogate
company Huawei.
5G
Dreadnought?
The other day
at Munich Airport I enjoyed a coffee with General James L. Jones, NATO’s
one-time Supreme Allied Commander Europe. General Jones talked eloquently about
the threat posed by China and its efforts to control Europe’s 5G future. As he spoke my mind cast back to an earlier
age when technology again changed the strategic balance at an instant. In 1906
the Royal Navy launched HMS Dreadnought
– the world’s first all-big gun, big armour, turbine- driven battleship which
made every other warship afloat obsolete. 5G threatens to do the same thing but
on a much grander digital scale than any single ship could ever do.
In a sobering
paper for the Strategic Insights Program
of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security General
Jones is clear, “5G is a fifth generation “disruptive” technology which, when
used in its secure mode, will transform our societies in ways that we are only
starting to understand”. At its heart,
5G is a way to fast super-network stand-alone computers undertaking a myriad of
functions critical to our daily lives. At best, such a network offers life-transforming
super-efficiency thus reducing the cost of actions for greatly increased
output. At worst, control of such a network offers critical command over those
same actions and, by extension, the lives of our states, institutions and ourselves.
5G will also
have a host of military applications, not least as the beating heart of
artificially-intelligent drone swarms – the digital ‘queen’, if one will, of an
attack hive. During any major attack future war would see such swarms probe,
fail, learn and finally overcome defences and then intelligently exploit such
weakness to devastating effect. Digital decapitation?
Why China? At
the centre of Jones’s paper is a profound warning about China’s role in
developing digital coercion as part of wider complex strategic coercion. As Jones states, “Huawei is a tool of state power and a
critical asset in China’s global economic and geopolitical competitions and
ambitions”. Even the most cursory glance at Chinese national strategy confirms
Beijing’s strategic intent to use whatever means at its disposal –financial,
economic and, if needs be, military - to gain strategic advantage.
Beware
Chinese bearing gifts
The specific
danger from Huawei is that because it is an agent of the Chinese state it is significantly
cheaper than its Western commercial competitors. What Huawei offers is not
simply a 5G ‘product’ but an entire digital infrastructure. Imagine a digital version of all the roads,
railways and airport in your Western state that is what Huawei, and by
extension China, is offering. Now,
imagine that as part of the ‘package’ your state effectively hands over access
to your digital roads, railways and airports to China. The Huawei ‘deal’ is thus
lucrative, seductive and utterly dangerous.
It is a
threat reinforced by work the British have been doing to identify the
controlling source codes of the Huawei capability. In 2010 British Intelligence
set up the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Cell near Banbury as part of its
National Cyber Security Centre with a specific remit to quantify the nature and
scope of the threat. In late 2018 HCSEC stripped back networking gear and
millions of lines of code to assess the extent to which Huawei afforded Beijing
‘Trojan horse’ industrial and military espionage and other ‘command’
capabilities. Its findings were deeply
concerning to London not least because Huawei tried to mask the real source
codes from the British. Consequently, the head of MI6 warned against any 4G and
5G nework reliance on Huawei. The EU and
Britain’s other Five Eyes allies, such as Australia, and New Zealand are beginning
to join the Americans to warn of the threat posed by Huawei, although the
British Government has yet to divest itself of much of the investment it has
already made in Huawei technology.
5D warfare
and China’s 5G digital Silk Road
So why does
this all matter? Now, it would be easy to suggest that this is some form of
American ‘dog in a manger’ warning not dissimilar to the ‘reds under the bed’
hysteria that swept the US during the 1960s. The evidence suggests otherwise. Much
of my work of late has been focused on pioneering the concept of 5D warfare –
the planned and systematic application of disinformation, deception,
destabilisation, disruption and implied destruction against open societies by
the strategic autocracies, most notably China and Russia. Much of Europe is making such warfare
plausible by its refusal to consider the worst-case and the dangerous
interaction that a fusion of strategy, capability and technology affords
adversaries. In other words, too many Western European states simply refused to
believe the post-Cold War peace is over and that, like it or not, Europeans
must again face strategic competition red in tooth and claw.
Worse, the
determined European focus on the cheap and the short-term is creating the
conditions for an externally-driven digital diktat. And, it may be that the Silk Road policy has
already achieved its strategic goal by fracturing European political solidarity
and defence cohesion as countries desperate for Chinese investment effectively sell their strategic soul in some form of
latter day Faustian pact. President Macron this week implicitly warned the Italians
about being naive in their dealings with China, even as President Xi was about
to visit France.
Jones’s 5G
defence
If the West,
in general, or more specifically Europe, is to avoid waking up one day to find
itself facing a digital Dreadnought against which it has no defence far more
digital realism is needed. General
Jones recommends a series of actions to prevent Chinese 5G digital dominance
built on awareness-raising and systems-hardening. Crucially, Jones calls on the
US and its allies to halt work with Huawei and use “alternate companies” whilst
“technical standards be designed to withstand cyber attacks. He also calls on
the US to establish a “…long-term national spectrum strategy” that confirms
federal control over all aspects of 5G and its application, as well as the
streamlining of US federal procurement practices that build cost into bids for
5G development work that Huawei simply does not have to consider.
General Jones
also highlights a fundamental flaw in the West’s privatisation of structural
security technology and China’s one-way exploitation of it. There are some emerging technologies that are
of such profound capability that they must be prescribed for fear they will be
instrumentalised against the West and its peoples.
China’s Silk
Road policy is an unashamed attempt to compete with the West and extend its
influence. On the face of it there is nothing wrong in that. A peaceful China trading assertively but fairly is to be welcomed. However,
Beijing is also in the business of strategic dominance. The invisible silk strings that run alongside the Silk Road combine
debt dependency with aggressive cyber and espionage that is far more dangerous
than some mutually-beneficial trade agreement.
There is, of course, one easy test to which China could subject itself
if it wished to demonstrate at a stroke that the fears of General Jones and
others are ill-founded. It could open up its market to Huawei’s competitors, show
a willingness to purchase significant parts of its own burgeoning 5G network
from American and other contractors, and cede control of Huawei’s source codes
to its customers thus making it impossible for Beijing to manipulate to
advantage. Unlikely.
Julian
Lindley-French
