Chatham House, the premier policymaking institute for British imperial interests, also known as the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), hosted the country’s leading cyber-security, military and intelligence experts at a Dec. 14 seminar, whose primary purpose was to attack China as the greatest strategic threat facing the British. The webinar, for members only, entitled “Digital Competition: The U.K.’s Cyber Response to Online and Real World Threats,” featured Jeremy Fleming, the head of General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency; Gen. Sir Patrick Sanders, head of the U.K. Strategic Command; Dr. Patricia Lewis, the director of Chatham House’s International Security Program, and Dr. Robin Niblett, Chatham House Director and Chief Executive.
China is “the greatest strategic threat facing this country,” bellowed Sanders, claiming that while Britain was engaged in “nation-building and counterinsurgency in the Middle East, the Chinese got ahead of us with technology. They have exploited things like 5G, military capabilities in space, hypersonics and autonomy. It represents a paradigm shift in their approach to warfare,” Sputnik reported him as saying. Discussion also focused on the challenges facing the U.K.’s National Cyber Force, a joint MI6-military effort to combat the growing threat of “hostile states, terrorists and criminals online,” the Daily Mail reported Dec. 14.
