Admiral William McRaven headed up the Joint Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2014, including the raid which saw a US operative assassinate the Al-Qaeda mastermind. Mr McRaven said the sheer pace of Chinese military evolution – which has included fortifications on numerous islands in the disputed South China Sea – needed to serve as a wake-up call for Washington – or as he put it, a “holy s***” moment.
Referring to what he called the US’s “Sputnik moment” – by which he meant the tiny satellite launched by the Soviet Union in 1957 which showed Washington was lagging behind Moscow in the space race – he urged action now.
He added: “If not now, when? And oh, by the way, it’s just going to get harder as we get further into the future.”
Speaking at an event yesterday to mark the publication of a new report published by the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations think tank, Mr McRaven, who co-authored the document, said: “We need to pay attention to the rise of China.”
The gap between between President Donald Trump’s US and Chinese technology and innovation “is narrowing”, Mr McRaven warned.
Beijing had invested enormous sums overhauling its military in recent decades to make it capable of operating in East Asia and beyond.
Between 1996 and 2015, Chinese military spending increased by 620 percent, with China’s budget now second only to that of the US.
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The report offered commercialisation of 5G technology as evidence of China’s superiority over the US, with Washington attempting with limited success to persuade allies to block Huawei, fearing the Chinese Government could use the tech company for the purposes of espionage.
The report also clams Chinese hackers are continuing to steal technology from US firms in order to make cheaper versions of the same products.
The Council on Foreign Relations report warns: “This time there is no Sputnik satellite circling the earth to catalyse a response, but the United States faces a convergence of forces that equally threaten its economic and national security.
“First, the pace of innovation globally has accelerated, and it is more disruptive and transformative to industries, economies, and societies.
“Second, many advanced technologies necessary for national security are developed in the private sector by firms that design and build them via complex supply chains that span the globe; these technologies are then deployed in global markets.”
It concludes: “During the early years of the Cold War, confronted by serious technological and military competition from the Soviet Union, the United States invested heavily in its scientific base.
“Those investments ensured US technological leadership for 50 years.
“Faced with the rise of China and a new wave of disruptive technological innovation, the country needs a similar vision and an agenda for realising it.
“The United States must once again make technological preeminence a national goal.”