Anniversaries invite us to put contemporary events into perspective. The 30th anniversary of the crushing of the popular movement in and around Tiananmen Square on 3–4 June 1989 drives home a simple and obvious fact: the Chinese Communist Party is still here and maintains a total silence on 4 June. The strict, Leninist, ideological, intolerant and dictatorial rule of the CCP in China has become resurgent and stronger, backed up by economic might and technical ability. Not only is the CCP not going away, it appears to be getting stronger.

In fact, the party isn’t necessarily stronger. It faces severe challenges at home and brewing conflicts abroad. Much of the domestic repression and international bravado we see in China reflects an anxious effort to ensure the survival of the party-state.

But, for us in the West, the anniversary of the violent repression of peaceful protests in Beijing and other Chinese cities in June 1989 is a reminder and invitation to review the 30 years of our relations with China. We have to deal with the government of the People’s Republic of China as it is, not as we wish it to be.

Scholars have pointed out since the 1990s that economic liberalisation and the opening of China’s markets to world trade would not inevitably lead to democratisation as an automatic effect of a rising middle class. Political and popular opinion was more hopeful, and US President Bill Clinton famously expressed the confidence that China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in December 2001 would lead to liberalisation, an implied promise that China would become ‘more like us’.

It’s only in the past few years that public sentiment has turned and the realisation has sunk in that, somehow, we’ve been cheated. We let China into the WTO on a preferential basis, it made a lot of money, and it didn’t uphold its end of the bargain.

There was no bargain. The CCP knew what Clinton wanted and just assumed it was part of the US’s assault on the party’s rule. So, China’s leaders methodically set about taking the benefits of globalisation without the institutions of political liberalisation or democratisation. The CCP’s steely determination was evident on 5 June 1989.

Thirty years later, it’s clear that the Chinese party-state hasn’t crumbled, as many predicted it would in the early 1990s (and a doughty few announce annually), but has survived, and in many ways is more powerful.

Yet, at the same time, we know the current government in China faces severe challenges from economic stress, social unrest among workers and the left-behind, mounting ethnic tensions, and profound environmental problems of pollution and access to water. This has provoked anxious responses from the party that include brutal repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, imprisonment of Chinese lawyers for trying to apply Chinese law, and harassment of Marxist youth groups in Beijing’s universities for supporting workers, as well as a harsh but so far ineffective crackdown on endemic party corruption. Given these domestic challenges and the repressive responses of the current government in China, its increasing global power makes it dangerous. Dangerous to its own people, and dangerous to the world.

So, what should we do? We can’t change China fundamentally, but we can influence and modify the actions of the Chinese government in the world. Domestically, we are going to have to respect China’s sovereignty even as we regret and criticise the CCP’s policies. The mass detention camps in Xinjiang deserve concerted and continuous public criticism.

Nonetheless, our job now is not to change China or bring about regime change but to create and enforce the structures and incentives that we feel promote a good global order. Most fundamentally, this means we have got to work together—Australia, Canada, the EU, even the United States—when we can. Liberal countries, liberal democracies have to work together more effectively to promote a peaceful and fair global order. We need to spend less time trying to fix China and more time shoring up our ability to take care of ourselves, our societies and all of our citizens.

In short, we need to play better football. This simple metaphor suggests three ways to respond to the realities of China 30 years after Tiananmen: study the other side, bring our team together, and build a better league—that is, strengthen our China capacity.

We need many, many more citizens in government, business and public life who can read, speak and write Chinese and who have the professional training and career opportunities to build a strong and deep knowledge base about China and Chinese history, culture, politics, economics and military affairs.

We need to welcome, engage and work with our citizens of Chinese descent. They are not the problem; they are an indispensable part of the solution with their cultural knowledge and personal contacts in China’s civil society.

Finally, we need to form a united front of liberal societies to build and defend the rules of fair play. We won’t have the organisational discipline of the CCP’s United Front Work Department, but we will have the more enduring strength of transparency and free societies working in concert.

During a recent visit to Tajikistan, Russian Federal Security Service Director Alexander Bortnikov claimed that around 5,000 militants based in Afghanistan from a group known as Islamic State Khorasan, or IS-K, had been redeployed to the north of the country, near its border with the former Soviet states of Central Asia.

Bortnikov’s statement has been treated with some scepticism, with Moscow accused of exaggerating the threat posed by IS-K to advance its own objectives in the region. But his comments make it timely to revisit the question of whether IS may emerge as a genuine threat not just to Afghanistan but also to the broader Central Asian region.

To date, the states of Central Asia—Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan—have been relatively free of terrorist incidents involving Islamist groups. Between 2008 and mid-2018, 19 attacks categorised as terrorism occurred across the region, resulting in around 140 fatalities. Most of these attacks targeted law enforcement agencies, and regional governments have claimed that they disrupted another 61 attacks during 2016 alone.

IS was involved in several of these events. In July 2018, a group claiming allegiance to IS killed four foreign tourists outside of the Tajik capital of Dushanbe, and in November, Tajik authorities claimed that they had detained 12 suspects with alleged ties to IS who were planning an attack against a Russian military base and school.

However, Central Asians have been disproportionately represented among the foreign-fighter cadre of IS in Syria and Iraq. Estimates of the number of IS’s Central Asian foreign fighters range between 3,000 and 5,000. With the collapse of the IS ‘caliphate’, many of these militants may seek to return home. If a broad fatality rate of one-third is applied to this overall figure, that leaves several thousand IS-aligned Central Asian foreign fighters who might try to return home.

The number of Central Asian foreign fighters tells only part of the story of potential support for IS across the region. The Soufan Group’s 2017 report indicated that while around 500 Kazakh nationals successfully travelled to Syria or Iraq, nearly 2,000 were stopped in Turkey. Similarly, around 1,500 Tajiks successfully travelled to IS territory, but around 3,000 were stopped or turned back in Turkey. Figures for interdictions of other Central Asian nationalities aren’t available, but it appears that the 3,000–5,000 Central Asians who made it to IS territory may have been just a small proportion of those who tried to do so. While there’s evidence that some of them may have been radicalised while working in Russia, high-profile cases such as the former head of Tajikistan’s police special operations who became IS’s ‘war minister’ suggest that IS may have broader appeal in Central Asia.

But it’s unclear how many Central Asian foreign fighters will ultimately seek to return to their countries of origin, and, if they do, whether any of them will remain committed to IS. Estimates from 2018 put the total number of returnees at around 300, and a mass return to Central Asia is seen as unlikely due to the repressive nature of the region’s regimes. However, the figure is likely to have increased significantly following the complete collapse of the IS caliphate.

Many of those who have returned have been jailed, creating additional risks of jail-based radicalisation of other inmates. This problem has proven particularly severe in Tajikistan, where prison riots involving IS members in November 2018 resulted in 50 deaths and in late May 2019 around 32 deaths.

More worrying are indications that IS-K is consolidating and expanding its foothold in Afghanistan, and that it may be doing so by drawing on a reservoir of Central Asian militants, including those returning from the Middle East.

Over the past year, IS-K has reportedly made significant ‘tactical gains’ in Afghanistan and has expanded to between 3,000 and 5,000 fighters, up from 600 in 2017. IS-K has specifically targeted Central Asian foreign fighters in the Middle East for recruitment. Afghanistan is a logical destination for those fighters and also for new recruits from Central Asia given its geographic proximity and ethno-linguistic links.

Also, given that IS-K seeks to establish a new caliphate covering South and Central Asia, it’s also logical that it would recruit Central Asians for its Afghan operations, because they can be used to advance the group’s ambitions across the broader region. IS-K has already called for terrorist attacks against public gatherings in Central Asia and has forged allegiances with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and other key Central Asian terrorist groups, building on its connections with the region.

Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan all share a long mountainous border with Afghanistan. If IS-K were to conduct cross-border forays, those countries’ defence and security services would probably struggle to deal with even a small group of battle-hardened, motivated fighters. Tajikistan—which alone shares with Afghanistan a nearly 1,400-kilometre border—would be particularly susceptible to such incursions.

Fortunately, much of this is still in the realm of conjecture. Despite having enjoyed success in Afghanistan over the past year, IS-K will likely take time to consolidate its gains and may not be ready to widen its theatre of operations. Also, despite IS’s rebranding as a global insurgency, it is yet to be seen whether the IS brand has retained its cachet following its defeat in the Middle East. It’s possible that Central Asia’s IS alumni may turn their backs on the organisation and either throw their support behind rival groups such as al-Qaeda, or abandon jihad altogether.

The combination of a hardening of IS-K’s position in Afghanistan and the unresolved question of the intentions of displaced Central Asian foreign fighters creates a wicked security problem for the region. Given the recent spate of IS-inspired attacks in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, it may be just a matter of time before Central Asia experiences a mass-casualty terrorist attack. The challenges for local policymakers and for external stakeholders such as Russia, the US and China will be to formulate a strategy that manages these risks without encouraging a clampdown from the region’s security services that ultimately proves self-defeating by driving even more people into the arms of fundamentalists.

I recently sailed onboard the landing helicopter dock and Royal Australian Navy flagship HMAS Canberra from Vietnam to Singapore, as one of several academic sea-riders invited to observe Indo-Pacific Endeavour 2019 (IPE 19), which has now concluded after three months at sea.

A key question about this operation was what did the People’s Liberation Army Navy make of so much Australian activity in waters that China claims? Sailors tend to have a healthy professional regard for each other. The good news is that interactions between the RAN and PLAN remain cordial.

But we were followed at a discreet distance by a Chinese warship for most of the transit, both on the way up and back, despite the fact that our route didn’t take us near any feature occupied by Chinese forces, or any obviously sensitive areas. Bridge-to-bridge radio communications, I was told, while courteous, included requests for Australian warships to notify the Chinese in advance of any corrections to their course—something the RAN was not about to concede while exercising its high-seas freedoms.

The presence of our ‘trailing escort’—HMAS Parramatta apparently received similar attention from the PLAN—had no obvious effect on HMAS Canberra’s activities, including maintaining a brisk pace of flight operations. The army’s Tiger attack helicopters practised night flying and deck landings, as they start to develop a maritime role.

Some helicopter pilots had lasers pointed at them from passing fishing vessels, temporarily grounding them for precautionary medical reasons. Was this startled fishermen reacting to the unexpected? Or was it the sort of coordinated harassment more suggestive of China’s maritime militia? It’s hard to say for sure, but similar incidents have occurred in the western Pacific.

Since its first outing in 2017, IPE has become established as Australia’s roving vehicle for regional defence engagement, though it more closely resembles a set of separate port-based engagements than a rolling exercise at sea. The aim is to shape Australia’s strategic environment, with a heavy emphasis on defence diplomacy, to strengthen relations. Although delivered by a naval task group, the joint aspect of IPE 19 was emphasised by the fact that it was led by an air commodore.

Although IPE 19 was primarily focused on South Asia, for me this was an opportunity to experience a naval transit of the South China Sea (SCS), in the hope of demystifying that most commented-upon body of water. I’m grateful to the RAN for making that possible. While the transparency and openness I experienced onboard was impressive, the SCS remains something of an enigma.

The fact that IPE 19 incorporated a spur into the SCS is itself significant. Australia was literally going out of its way to include Vietnam in the activity.

The ADF’s military-to-military engagement with Vietnam was less evolved than with more familiar partners along the IPE route—but more interesting for being unfamiliar. One of Vietnam’s six Kilo-class submarines based at Cam Ranh Bay was conspicuously on hand to witness our departure. We then conducted a passage exercise with two Gepard-class frigates, the Vietnam People’s Navy’s largest warships. The Vietnamese went out of their way to engage in broader respects, including a rock-star welcome to ADF personnel on a school visit (many onboard ranked this as their personal highlight of IPE 19).

In addition, a small contingent of US Marines based in Darwin had embarked in Thailand. My first significant moment of IPE 19 came in Nha Trang (a popular recreation spot for US servicemen during the Vietnam War), where I witnessed probably the first US Marines, out of uniform but on active duty, to walk along that beachfront in nearly 50 years. Historical value aside, this was surely a significant defence diplomacy ‘effect’, sharpened by the fact that it was delivered, benignly, from an Australian amphibious assault ship.

It also says something that the US Marines were welcomed in Vietnam but didn’t go ashore in either Malaysia or Indonesia. Sensitivities—not only on the hosts’ part—can hopefully be salved so that the marines can in future interact with more regional partners, under an IPE aegis. It will take time for all concerned to become accustomed to US forces ‘plugging in’ to an Australian operational and diplomatic lead. But this kind of role reversal is in the long-term interests of the alliance, as Canberra steps up strategic engagement in the region.

My short time embedded with the RAN also made me reflect on how an inordinate academic and media focus on freedom-of-navigation operations, something I’ve contributed to, has distracted from more fundamental questions about Australia’s naval presence and willingness to operate in the SCS.

For a modest-sized navy, the RAN has been remarkably active across the SCS. HMAS Canberra transited from Cam Ranh to Singapore, accompanied by HMAS Newcastle (its final voyage before decommissioning). Meanwhile, HMAS Success (also about to be paid off) was participating in multinational ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting (ADMM)-Plus exercises to the south. On our way to Singapore, we crossed paths with the Anzac-class frigate HMAS Parramatta, which was headed on a northeasterly track. HMAS Melbourne had passed through the SCS and Taiwan Strait only a few weeks earlier, on its way up to Qingdao and points east.

The ubiquity of PLAN vessels shadowing other warships in the SCS suggests that China’s surface force has grown big enough to be able to ‘close mark’ at will. Our transit coincided with multinational naval activity elsewhere in the South China Sea, including a US FONOP close to Scarborough Shoal. The PLAN was simultaneously participating in ADMM-Plus exercises to the south, alongside HMAS Success.

The fact that Chinese warships are shadowing their marks for longer distances suggests that the PLA’s over-the-horizon surveillance capability is also maturing. The large facility at Fiery Cross Reef sits at a prime gatekeeper location in the Spratly Islands, from which PLAN ships on ‘picket’ stations can be sent to intercept other vessels.

Although IPE embodies non-warlike missions, including humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, our transit through the most hotly contested body of water in the Indo-Pacific brought home the contrast between a naval task group operating under peacetime conditions, scattering and then reforming, and the more challenging scenario of sailing a naval task force into harm’s way, in a decreasingly permissive environment like the SCS.

Australia’s navy has gamely demonstrated its willingness to remain present in the SCS, operating in several locations at once. China has equally underlined that it can detect foreign warships and has the capacity to deploy screening forces across the SCS. That’s a sobering development.

If Australia continues to operate in the SCS in the long term, as I hope it will, its ability to do so will depend increasingly on the support of its allies and partners. This is not a job to do alone. IPE represents a head start on developing the defence and security partnerships that Australia needs to invest in for a less benign future.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to think about 5G networks in a nation-state. Right now, according to Bloomberg, 40% of the world seems to be thinking the wrong way.

The debate on 5G and Huawei has descended into a simple binary choice: ‘Do you want to “follow the US” and ban Huawei?’ or ‘Do you want cheap 5G from Huawei, while sending comforting messages about trade and investment to Beijing?’

The second of these ideas has been stoked at telco-world events such as Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress, where corporate CEOs like Vodafone’s said banning Huawei will bring higher costs (and disturb commercial relationships).

This sets up an attractive rationale for national leaders who want to show their independence from Donald Trump’s America, and get plaudits from companies that have commercial relationships with Huawei—all while signalling a desire for more Chinese investment. Nationalism and cash: what a delightful result.

If only it were that simple and that attractive. It’s not, as the 30 nations’ representatives at the recent security discussions in Prague are no doubt thinking.

The national security issues involved in 5G are fundamental, and the commercial implications from the combination of national decisions on it will shape global communications technology development and markets.

None of this has anything to do with liking or not liking Trump. And, as is often the case with economics, what looks like a low-cost option on its face may well turn out to be the opposite.

On national security, there’s a larger story around the broad and rapid expansion of Chinese tech companies across the globe, but 5G is central to that effort.

A country’s 5G network will be the nervous system that connects its economy, carries its data and for the first time bridges the gap between internet-connected systems and ‘operational technology’ (in places like factories, power stations, utilities, railways and airports) that right now is mainly air-gapped from the internet. That’s what the long-promised ‘internet of things’ is about. It will also enable telemedicine, driverless cars and drone delivery systems to become realities, with all the economic and security implications this will bring.

So, who can control, distort, disrupt or harvest data from your 5G network becomes more important than for any prior telecom network—4G or fixed line.

As has been said many times, the Chinese state’s security agencies have the inside running to do this when it comes to their national 5G champion, Huawei. These agencies also have form when it comes to large-scale cyber intrusions and data theft.

So, on national security grounds, not having Huawei as a provider of your country’s future critical digital infrastructure makes sense, regardless of who the US president is and what he or she does.

What’s been less talked about, though, is that the commercial arguments are equally compelling.

Normally, purchasing decisions take price and quality into consideration. There’s been a lot of talk about price. But there’s been very little mention of the longstanding design and engineering quality problems that the UK’s Huawei evaluation centre continues to find in Huawei network products and software. A more critical eye is needed on the product itself.

Beyond this, it’s not just the US that understands that the Chinese state laws, policies and practices that protect and enable Chinese companies’ growth and pricing, along with forced technology transfers, are core problems for the global economy. The EU has a long, sorry history of negotiating with China over these issues, and it’s now in the midst of a WTO action as a result.

Huawei has been a beneficiary of market-distorting Chinese state policy and practice. It has grown because it has had the luxury of operating in a protected home market in China.

As Rick Umback noted in a recent ASPI report, the company’s executives have longstanding ties to China’s security apparatuses. And, since its formation in 1987, Huawei has benefited from Chinese government contracts, a protected domestic market, financial support from state-owned banks, and diplomatic support for its overseas expansion. In Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei’s words, ‘If there had been no government policy to protect [Chinese enterprise], Huawei would no longer exist.’

These protections are set to continue under President Xi Jinping’s signature ‘Made in China 2025’ plan, designed around his desire for strategic and economic dominance from future internet and communications technologies including 5G. The one area that’s least likely to be resolved in the US–China trade dispute is real access to China’s high-technology market, along with an end to Chinese global cyber espionage and talent cultivation to get hold of others’ high-tech intellectual property.

It’s laughable in this context to hear telecommunications companies that are Huawei’s commercial partners saying Huawei needs to be included in national systems to enable market competition. It’s an even more Through the Looking-Glass experience to hear Huawei claim that it is ‘encouraged by the emphasis on the importance of research and development, open markets and competition, but would urge policymakers to avoid measures that would increase bureaucracy and costs and limit the benefit that 5G can bring’.

The home-market protection provided by the Chinese state to Huawei is a major explanation for the ‘China price’ offered by Huawei for 5G. On simple competition policy grounds, this must be taken into account when national decision-makers outside China think about competitive bidding involving Huawei—or any other Chinese ‘national champion’ firm.

A further contributor, though, flows from classic economic theory: because Xi and Huawei see 5G as one of the keys to strategic and economic dominance, it’s worth pricing low now to buy global market shares.

Of course, economic theory and history tell us what happens next if companies succeed in cornering markets: they exploit their monopoly position to charge ‘rent’ on top of costs and profits, with supernormal profits a usual by-product. A study by the International Monetary Fund on market power validates this effect in both advanced and developing economies, finding ‘a positive relation between firm markups [over costs] and other indicators of market power’.

Many of Europe’s telcos are probably reluctant to make the big up-front investments 5G requires while they’re wringing profits out of existing fixed-line and low-margin 4G investments. So, there will be bulls and bears when it comes to 5G—slow and fast adopters.

Decision-makers in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America must think beyond any eagerness to get low ‘entry level’ prices from Huawei. To help here, the EU and NATO can both still do the work to get some important things like harmonised standards on 5G security—and competition policy—right and inform national decisions across Europe and elsewhere.

Rather than rushing into decisions based on Huawei’s cheap and ubiquitously marketed offers, nations need to think a few steps ahead and consider the wisdom of handing global market power to Xi’s national 5G champion, for the health of both their own telcos and their citizens. Getting the framework and decisions right on 5G will also help them deal with the other technology investment decisions they’ll face as China’s tech expansion continues.

On top of this, for those of you who remember the TV detective Columbo, played by Peter Falk, ‘there’s just one other thing that bothers me’. As Xi’s ‘Made in China 2025’ plan makes clear, the Chinese state sees strategic power as coming from dominating 5G and other communications and internet technologies. Having 5G from Huawei in your nation’s network is a key step here, bringing Xi’s ‘Digital Silk Road’ into being.

If a nation wants its future core digital infrastructure to be one of Xi’s tools of strategic power, then by all means let your telcos sign those cheap Huawei deals. But do it knowing that the ‘China price’ won’t last, and that Xi has already given ample demonstration that he’s happy to use all the global, strategic and economic power he can muster for his own ends.

Welcome to ‘The Strategist Six’, a feature that provides a glimpse into the thinking of prominent academics, government officials, military officers, reporters and interesting individuals from around the world.

1. It appears that the United Kingdom has decided to allow the Chinese company Huawei to build part of its 5G network. Does that present a security problem for Britain? And how seriously is that decision likely to be viewed by the other members of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network?

The official British position is that this is still a matter under deliberation. I’ve always said it’s up to each nation to determine the right answer for itself. What’s right for one may not be for another.

This is an issue that almost every nation, particularly industrialised nations, is coming to grips with. Australia has concluded that there’s a level of risk it isn’t comfortable with and Huawei will not be part of its 5G infrastructure. In the United States, we’re still working our way through this.

As a director of the US National Security Agency and the commander of US Cyber Command, I said this boils down to the level of risk we were comfortable with and I’d make it less about a specific nation or company and much more about how a nation ensures its economic competitiveness in the digital age. It is certainly a security issue, but with 5G you need to look through the prism of not just traditional national security, but national security in a much broader sense.

As 5G is going to be such a fundamental aspect of a nation’s economic competitiveness, I’d be worried about something that could call that into question. There are some areas where I think you could take some level of risk, but there are others where I would say the risk is very high. And I’d be very concerned about any entity if you didn’t have complete confidence that you knew what it had provided and some measure of control or oversight over it. That becomes very complex with 5G because so much of the capability is not centralised but is spread out across the network. It becomes much more difficult to mitigate the risk.

2. Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said recently that he’d raised with US President Donald Trump his concern that 5G technology was available from a limited number of providers, none of which were in the United States. Can the US catch up in that field and provide the sort of technology that countries like Australia need?

I think the challenge is to create an environment where there are commercial options that Australia, the US, the UK, Japan and others would feel comfortable with. Part of the economic challenge is that Huawei has positioned itself with a price that US firms and other nations can’t match. We need to ask ourselves how and why that happened and whether we’re comfortable with it.

I’d hope governments could come together to work out how to generate alternatives. It seems possible to have vendors that provide a good price without the high level of risk posed by vendors like Huawei and ZTE. Can you trust a particular vendor? What’s the relationship between that vendor, that company, and its nation-state? Is that company from an authoritarian state where the legal regime and nature of the state mean the government can access data purely upon request?

It’s not just the laws on China’s books, it’s the fact that the Chinese Communist Party decides what the law is as and when it likes. It doesn’t have to go through a court or any kind of independent verification or justification. It can just tell the company, ‘You’re a corporate entity from our nation. The law says I can have access to whatever data I want. This is what I want.’ We need to spend some time, the US, Australia and others, on what we need to do to develop a viable alternative, and how can we help industry. Alternative 5G technology providers like Nokia, Qualcomm and Ericsson exist, and telcos like Telstra here in Australia are bringing 5G solutions to market.

3. Turnbull also raised concerns that the threshold for response to cyberattacks on Western nations is very high. Before you left Cyber Command, you put in place a different approach to offensive cyber operations, including the concept of defending forward. How important is that, and how can it be done? And what impact can it have on criminals and other nations’ agencies?

One of the greatest challenges we face is to change the risk calculus of actors out there to get them thinking that perhaps stealing intellectual property on a massive scale, interfering with democratic elections, and penetrating infrastructure and other areas, such as power, water, petroleum and financial that are a huge concern to any nation, are not worth the risk.

How can we convince them to step back and think, ‘While I could do this, the risk is pretty high and maybe it’s not in my best interest to do so.’

If we continue to just respond passively, to wait for people to come after our networks and to steal our intellectual property, then we’re just responding, which is a reactive strategy, a losing strategy. My experience as a military leader taught me that you want to shape the behaviour of any potential adversary, to drive them to make choices that benefit you, not them.

We need to talk about cyber as one of a broad set of capabilities we have at our disposal. We’re prepared to use that range of capabilities in the right place and at the right time within an international legal framework, with a sense of proportionality—being very discrete and very specific. It was important that adversaries knew the US had cyber capabilities and that it was prepared to use them at the time and place of our choosing if they insisted on engaging in this risky behaviour.

I think you’ve seen a shift in the past 18 months to this idea that we just can’t sit outside the network waiting for somebody to penetrate before we respond.

4. How does an offensive cyber capability work in response to an attack, how important was the elevation of Cyber Command to a combat command, and what did that signify about the US defence establishment’s level of concern about cyber threats?

There’s a full range of possibilities. Just because someone comes at us in cyber, doesn’t mean we’re going to do always the same thing.

My argument was, let’s look at the full range of capabilities that we enjoy as a nation and which of the tools we have makes the most sense in this scenario, given the target they went after and the impact they had. It shouldn’t be one size fits all.

We need to fundamentally change the risk calculus of nation-state and criminal actors because this is costing the US, Australia and others billions of dollars in the theft of intellectual property. It’s potentially placing some of our critical infrastructure at risk as opponents penetrate that infrastructure, study it, and look at changing it, degrading it, denying it over time. It’s providing intelligence and insights that can be used to disrupt and undermine policy- and national decision-making over time, including through cyber intrusions into political parties’ information systems.

We don’t want that to happen. One of my biggest concerns was that this should be based on a structure and a system that everybody understands. In the US system, combatant commanders, as the senior operational commanders, are a key part of discussions about strategy, resources and prioritisation. That’s how important cyber is. Cyber Command needs to work at that level, needs to be part of those discussions. It’s also a real positive in terms of speed of decisions and reaction.

5. How serious will cyber threats become, and how will the world deal with them?

While states such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran attract considerable attention, the greatest activity out there doesn’t involve nation-states—it’s criminal. Criminals use cyber as a vehicle to generate money and a tool to penetrate systems, steal credit card information and identities, and run scams.

For most citizens outside authoritarian states like China and Russia, the greatest impact cyber will have in their lives is if someone steals their identity or their credit card number. Will we see cyber criminals link with terrorist groups or forming partnerships, sharing people and tools, going after common sets of targets? Will we see nation-states turning to criminal actors as a way, for example, to hide attribution?

Do you see criminal actors telling a nation, ‘If you give me protection so I’m not thrown in jail, I’m not extradited, I’ll apply my criminal activities, capabilities and cyber skills to support you’? We need to pay attention to that.

6. When the internet was established, it was generally seen as a very positive institution and a way to spread knowledge. It’s certainly done that. But it’s also been a vehicle for hate speech and promotion of terrible brutality. Is the system beyond control, or can it still be a force for good?

The average person with internet access can gather more information than anyone in the past and that can be a force for good in terms of personal growth, economic growth, sharing of information and the ability of widely dispersed individuals to coalesce around issues of concern.

The positives far outweigh the negatives. But there are some negative aspects to this unfettered connectivity (the model in large parts of the world) and the ability to move information and to coordinate around the world.

It goes back to when the internet was started in the late 1960s by the US Department of Defense to move information within the department over great distances without being stuck with using faxes and mail. Nobody was going to steal unclassified stuff, and we knew who the users were, so security wasn’t a big deal. So, we’ve built this global engine but we really didn’t think about how to defend it, how to work out if someone was real or not.

One of the questions we’re dealing with now is how do we create something totally new and build in defensibility, reliability, redundancy, and a means to ensure identity? Do you rebuild it with something new or do you keep it where it is?

But the sunk capital costs in the structure are so high, I can’t see us totally replacing it anytime soon.

That’s only possible in authoritarian states—not in truly open, market-driven economies. Again the Chinese precedent seems to show that you can shift the structures to enable high levels of social control over your population—and this system of authoritarian control through internet technologies is what they’ve been keen to export, with some success.

So how can you attempt to address some of these issues using this existing framework and how do we change it over time? You’re seeing how we do domain control, naming infrastructure, all those things continue to evolve. So it’s manmade, it’s global, but it’s going to be a changing dynamic.