The unspoken but crystal clear message delivered by the leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) at the Annual Threat Assessment hearings conducted on Wednesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee is that the post-9/11 era is over.
It is not entirely coincidental that the hearings took place on the same day that President Biden announced that the pullout of U.S. forces from Afghanistan would be concluded by Sept. 11 of this year, exactly 20 years after the al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. During those two decades, the focus of America’s national security community has largely been on the threats posed by foreign violent extremists, on our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and on efforts by rival powers to take advantage of our being distracted and depleted by those costly conflicts. While there was an effort during the past several years by the Intelligence Community to shift the focus to threats posed by emerging rival state actors, this year’s hearing, in conjunction with Biden’s announcement, marked a substantive watershed.
We are entering a new chapter in the history of American foreign and national security policy. Its focus is above all on the threat posed by China and by the onset of an era of technology-enabled and often technology-focused competition and conflict that the US and its allies are scrambling to understand and prepare for.
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Listening to the hearings, it was clear that there was broad bipartisan consensus around these new priorities among the senators on the committee and among those testifying, a group that included Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, CIA Director William Burns, National Security Agency Director General Paul Nakasone, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Scott Berrier, and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Russia, Iran, North Korea, and violent extremists from both overseas and within our own borders were mentioned. So too were the lingering effects of the COVID pandemic and the consequences of the climate crisis. Sen. Marco Rubio, the committee vice chairman, summarized the overall assessment by observing that 90 percent of the threats discussed came from these areas.
But there is no doubt that looming above all these was the perceived threat posed by China. Calling China “an unparalleled priority for the Intelligence Community”, Haines described the country as “a near-peer competitor challenging the United States in multiple arenas, while pushing to revise global norms in ways that favor the authoritarian system.” Haines, making an auspicious debut before the committee following her confirmation in January, was quietly authoritative and in clear command of the facts.
She continued in her opening statement to cite China’s “comprehensive approach” to demonstrating “its growing strength… including claims over disputed territory and assertions of sovereignty over Taiwan.” Specifically, she raised and the committee frequently returned to its technological capabilities while also noting “its economic, environmental and demographic vulnerabilities.”
On this last point, speaking also to the capacities of other rivals and adversaries such as Russia, Iran and North Korea, she went on to say: “Emerging and disruptive technologies, as well as the proliferation and permeation of technology in all aspects of our lives, pose unique challenges.” She cited cyber-threats and then underscored the importance of focusing on “the competition in critical technology areas such as high performance computing, microelectronics, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, fiber optics and metamaterials.”
The committee in its questioning, and Haines’ colleagues from the IC in their answers, returned more frequently to these two themes than any others. There were of course, questions about the Afghanistan decision, the rise of domestic violent extremism in the U.S., shifting alliances in the Middle East, and other issues of particular importance to individual senators, but listening to the hearing it was impossible not to conclude that China and the way technology was transforming both societies and conflict were of the greatest importance.
Wray, the FBI director, commented that he saw no country posing “a more severe threat to our innovation, economic security and our democratic ideas” than China. He noted that the FBI was opening a new investigation into illegal Chinese activities in the U.S. every 10 hours and that more than 2,000 such investigations were currently being conducted. He stated that there had been a 1300 percent increase in China-related investigations in the past few years.
The hearings followed the release by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence of its 2021 Annual Threat Assessment (PDF) earlier this week. The report outlined similar themes to the hearing, emphasizing among other things the growing threat posed by cyber attacks. It stated that as such attacks grew more aggressive they would be increasingly likely to impact civilian populations.
Senators probed the panel on ways that critical infrastructure and sensitive data could be better protected. They were particularly interested in ways that new legislation might help ensure that companies reported security breaches to the government in time to keep them from spreading and causing greater damage. In the same vein, they asked whether the IC would support the creation of a new mechanism to review foreign investments proposed by Sens. Bob Casey (D-PA) and John Cornyn (R-TX) to help reduce U.S. financial or technological assistance to rivals like China.
Another theme touched upon several times by Haines, Burns, and Berrier was how America’s allies and friends, notably the other so-called Five Eyes countries with whom we have the closest cooperation on intelligence matters (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom), saw similar challenges and were working together to develop new capacities and to collaborate to enhance collective security.
Underlying the questions about the need for new laws and for greater public-private partnership were points made by both questioners and the IC about the need to protect privacy and to work within the constraints we face as a society that values openness and seeks to resist government over-reach into the affairs of citizens or businesses.
In these exchanges an essential tension was revealed. Our principal rival and our greatest threats in this new era come from authoritarian states where privacy rights do not exist and openness is not a concern. They can demand their citizens and companies comply with government directives. Our greatest strength in competing such states is the fact that we and our allies are democracies and value individual rights.
During the Cold War, our Soviet adversaries were defeated in part because closed societies could not compete in global markets that depended on the free flow of information. Now, in this new era, it seems to be the case that our rivals may seek to turn the tables against us. In an era of “grey zone conflicts” of the type that the Annual Threat Assessment warned would increase—like the non-shooting, low-risk, hard to trace exchanges of cyberattacks—we might be at a disadvantage unless we can find effective ways to defend ourselves without violating our values.
That will entail new forms of international cooperation and new initiatives in public private cooperation. It will require a new understanding of threats and a remaking of our capabilities. (Burns noted that one-third of CIA employees are now working the cyber realm.). If new laws are required, writing them will require walking a fine line between security needs and respect for individual liberties. The threats will evolve rapidly as do new technologies—both here on earth and in space. In all these things, we will be forced to contend with a powerful rival with ever growing diverse capabilities.
In short, reading the Annual Threat Assessment and listening to these hearings, it is clear we are entering a new chapter in our foreign policy and national security history. It will require, as at the end of World War II, a top-to-bottom rethinking of how we remain secure and lead in a new era. What was striking listening to the Senate Intelligence Committee hearings was that in a period of such profound political strife in America, there was such clear bipartisan agreement that we are at a pivotal and demanding moment.
