When Americans think about fighting China, the first things that come to mind are recruitment, weapons development, and our military industrial base.
It’s important that we prioritize all three. Until recently, our Armed Forces were experiencing historic recruitment shortfalls. Our procurement system is badly broken, regularly delivering weapons platforms years late and billions over budget. And the American industrial might that once buried Japan and Germany beneath a mountain of tanks and battleships is a shadow of its former self. We can’t even make enough artillery shells to keep up with Russia, and China has over 200 times our shipbuilding capacity.
In a modern great power conflict, however, control of information, from who can send it, to who can intercept it, to who can shut it down, is just as decisive as control of the seas or skies. Every aspect of a nation’s society and economy, no matter how seemingly mundane, has geopolitical implications.
The recent acquisition of telecommunications company Juniper by its larger competitor HPE provides the perfect example, even if some members of Congress, who began criticizing the Justice Department’s approval of it this month, fail to realize it.
Both companies are part of the enterprise networking industry, which provides wireless network services to large facilities such as factories or university campuses.
What does this have to do with fighting China? The answer is that Huawei, a Shenzhen-based company with close links to the Chinese Communist Party, dominates the global telecom equipment market. Its closest American competitor, Cisco, has just one-sixth of Huawei’s market share.
Starting in 2017, the U.S. government gradually banned Huawei products, first for the Defense Department and other federal agencies, and finally in the entire domestic market, due to the risk of digital espionage and cyber warfare.
From my past experience at the NSA and as an acting U.S. Homeland Security Adviser in classified settings, I know that intelligence professionals have repeatedly warned that Chinese-manufactured networking hardware can be a tremendous national advantage for the People’s Republic of China. Chinese control of the software in devices we trust can allow remote access, disruption, and data theft at any time of Beijing’s choosing. The FBI even concluded that China could use Huawei equipment to disrupt American military communications, up to and including messages involving our nuclear arsenal.
The State Department launched the Clean Network Initiative to convince our allies to keep these dangerous devices out of their infrastructure. Unfortunately, many of them haven’t listened.
Huawei’s network equipment remains an integral part of telecom infrastructure in many of these countries. And that includes enterprise-level products used in large-scale facilities such as hospitals, government ministries, and even military bases.
For an intelligence officer, government and defense communications flowing through hardware ultimately controlled by an adversary is a nightmare scenario.
U.S. allies with such glaring vulnerabilities will find it almost impossible to stand up to China when the time comes. What country would be willing to impose sanctions over a Taiwan blockade if it meant spending the next six months communicating via smoke signals?
The HPE–Juniper acquisition creates a company that can use its newfound economies of scale to compete more effectively on the world stage. Scale isn’t just about selling more routers. It’s about having the R&D muscle, secure manufacturing pipeline, and global distribution network to beat Huawei on both price and trust. If our allies refuse to ban Huawei, the least we can do is offer a safe, American-made alternative. Every client HPE–Juniper manages to steal from Huawei advances our national security.
Of course, not everyone saw things this way. Antitrust officials at DOJ objected to the deal on the grounds of excessive consolidation, even though the resulting company would be much smaller than domestic market leader Cisco, which is itself dwarfed by Huawei on the global stage.
Thankfully, the U.S. intelligence community intervened in favor of the deal, Axios recently reported.
“In light of significant national security concerns, [the deal] … serves the interests of the United States … and is critical to countering Huawei and China,” one national security official told the outlet.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, who greenlit the acquisition, appears to have accepted this argument, even though it meant enduring ruthless attacks from Congress.
Winning World War II required a massive effort on the home front. American civilians grew victory gardens, bought groceries with ration cards, went without new cars, collected bottlecaps to be made into guns and tanks, and knitted blankets for the troops.
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Our conflict with China is still a cold one, but it will define the 21st century as surely as World War II defined the 20th.
As someone who spent a career watching adversaries exploit our digital vulnerabilities, I can tell that our front lines now run through server rooms, network cables, and semiconductor fabs. It’s time to recognize that, put our economy on a war footing, and stop handing China the advantage.
Rob Joyce is a cybersecurity leader with more than 34 years in the intelligence community. Previously, he served as acting homeland security adviser and special assistant to the president on the U.S. National Security Council.