Did the Few Let the Many Down? The ex-RAF in China...

 

Should your prior service be used as a guarantee of your future citizenship? This seems a hyperbolic question to ask, but one that has been raised this week following the revelation that several dozen British military pilots have reportedly been training the Chinese military. Reportedly contracted to provide technical advice in specific areas for around £250k per year (which buys a lot of watches), these pilots and aircrew have been accused of treason, demands to lose their UK nationality and resulted in swift action preventing similar occurrences in future.  

On the one hand it is easy to feel strong moral indignation at the actions of these individuals, who having served their nation, have now taken the mercenary route of providing their knowledge and experience to help increase the capability of one of the worlds most dangerous states. Under President Xi, China has become an exceptionally hostile and aggressive dystopian totalitarian dictatorship, posing a clear and present danger to democracies around the world. Their aggressive and bellicose threats to Taiwan’s freedom, and their intolerance of debate or democracy (as seen in Hong Kong), or their murderous genocide in Xinjiang province of the Uighur peoples are a stain on the worlds conscience. To take their money and help train their armed forces is little short of a disgrace.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright 2023.

But on the other hand you could make a case that these pilots have done nothing legally wrong. There is (or was) no law preventing them from working abroad after they have left the armed forces, and they are merely earning an honest living. There is nothing that legally prevented them from doing this, and many former air force personnel from around the world have earned lucrative second careers training, advising or serving in foreign airforces – just look at the Middle East which has become a second home for huge numbers of Western military veterans who continue to serve in their ‘retirement’. Also until recently China was seen as a potential long term partner for the UK, with talk of a ‘golden age’ of Sino-British relations, and real efforts made to develop mutually beneficial links between the two nations in a range of areas. Is working to deliver training to a nation that is not (currently) formally considered a hostile nation to the UK a major problem given all of this?

This is a more complex case than it perhaps appears at first sight. There is a strong and compelling moral case that what these people have done is clearly very wrong, and they deserve the opprobrium heaped upon them for their actions. But legally they have not committed any crime, nor have they committed treason as some may suggest. Practically the value of their training may well be limited as time will dull memory, and even if they are working abroad, it is unlikely that former service personnel would willingly divulge classified material to a new paymaster. The actual value of their contribution may be relatively limited, and as the ever brilliant twitter account ‘ex-Owls’ notes in their scathing video, their main contribution may be to provide so much insight that the Chinese training model follows the UK and lengthens the fastjet training pipeline from two to seven years…

Even so this story does raise real concerns about the lengths China will go to in order to build their understanding of how to develop their armed forces. This is not the first time that difficult links with China have been exposed – there has been previous incidents involving British academics lecturing in China being arrested, in part due to their involvement with classified aerospace programmes. Similarly the Chinese Government is known to practise ‘Linkedin espionage’ by creating fake consulting firms to gain the insight and experience of people from across the world, paying them to provide ever more sensitive data in a form of overt intelligence collection. There is no doubt that the Chinese state poses a clear and substantial threat to UK interests, and has a willingness to use all sorts of methods to collect intelligence as it sees fit.

Countering this is difficult because of the challenges of living in an open-source democracy. It is remarkably hard to prevent people from taking employment in third party nations without extremely strong and legally binding employment contracts, and extensive aftercare to ensure people do not take this work up – this level of scrutiny would require a lot of resourcing and intrusive policing of peoples lives after they have left the military or government employment. Trying to enforce it would be challenging and highly likely open to legal challenge as an over extension of the states rights – after all, why should the MOD have a say in what employment you take on years after you’ve left the military unless it proposes to compensate you for loss of earnings?

At the same time the sheer range of information available online makes the West an intelligence collection dream as it is so easy to find out open source information on sensitive military subjects and collate it for official use. The sheer range of discussions, debates and engagement on some sites can quickly blur the line from ‘fanboy’ to people sharing classified material (as has happened on the World of Tanks website with Challenger 2 documents), or LinkedIn can be used to build effective intelligence collection operations against people with relevant credible access to material. When brought together there is a boon of good material available online openly that the Chinese state has the resources to collect and analyse, and that is even before you consider what hostile espionage methods may be open to them.

What this incident demonstrates then is arguably two things. Firstly it is a timely reminder that China is a growing threat, willing to make use of soft approaches like this work to build its military capability, and that is has deep pockets and a willingness to spend time and effort on long term collection and collation of information. Countering this requires a much more effective understanding in the West about how to prevent seepage of information, enforce plans to prevent people from sharing after they have left, and put in place robust legal frameworks to stop this happening again. All of this takes time and requires up to date legislation to deliver – which is why reform of the Official Secrets Act is one of the top priorities for the Home Office. The current OSA dates back to WW1 and reflects a world that has long vanished, but is not necessarily entirely relevant to the 21^st Century – therefore reforms to make it usable and credible are vital.

More widely this incident demonstrates a growing public aversion to China in a way that has not been felt with other nations. There is a long history of pilots working for Middle Eastern and African nations in ways that could be seen as very unsavoury today, yet there was never the same level of disquiet. That such a move has been seen as treasonous is a useful insight into where China sits in both public affection and long term concerns about the threat it poses.

The current optics suggesting that it is purely British personnel involved is unhelpful as doubtless aircrew of a variety of nationalities are involved in this work – it is highly unlikely to be just the British taking part. It is important to understand the scale of the challenge and how many people have been involved in it before reaching conclusions about the reliability or otherwise of the UK as an ally (as some have rather hyperbolically done). Coming though at a time when the USA has just cited China as the number one threat of concern in its national security strategy document, it is a helpful reminder that the actions of a few can damage the reputation of the UK with our core allies. There will need to be some damage control done with Washington and elsewhere to reassure them that the UK has not ‘gone rogue’.

While calls to strip those participating of their citizenship and pension seem over the top, it is undoubtedly an extremely naïve at best and morally dubious at worst course of action to have taken. But equally it raises questions about what should ex military aircrew do for a living when they leave the services? If they still wish to fly, and are being offered good money to do a legal job, why shouldn’t they take it? They have mortgages and rolex bills to pay, and pensions, while generous are not enough to raise a family on. Following a period of layoffs in the aviation industry, there is not always an ideal job for them to go to, so can you blame a pilot for taking the opportunity for more time in the air? We may not like what they did, and strongly disapprove of it, but short of the State subsidising ex aircrew to ensure they don’t need the money, what can reasonably be done to prevent it happening in future?  Sadly though, for all the debate, the sheer damage done to the reputation of the UK and unfairly to others who have served but not flown ‘for China’ perhaps means a new saying is appropriate “never was so much reputational damage done for so many, by so few”…