China now our biggest military threat: Pentagon

China presents the biggest military threat to the United States, according to a new strategic assessment by the Pentagon. It has been formally promoted to the top of a list of most dangerous rivals.

Mark Esper, the US defence secretary, has told military chiefs to recalibrate training and operations to match Beijing’s capabilities.

The military must make China ‘‘the pacing threat in all our schools, programmes and training’’, Esper said in a message to Pentagon staff marking his first year in the role.

‘‘We are now in an era of great power competition and China, then Russia, constitute our top strategic competitors,’’ he added. In the 2018 national defence strategy delivered by James Mattis, his predecessor, China and Russia were on an equal footing as the ‘‘great power rivals’’ to the US.

Tension between the US and China has been rising, stoked by competing narratives over trade, intellectual property theft and hacking, as well as Chinese influence campaigns, counterintelligence and Beijing’s military activities in the Pacific.

Congress has passed sanctions on China over the repression of minority groups in Xinjiang and its crackdown in Hong Kong. The State Department has announced visa bans on Chinese officials involved in abuses in Tibet, prompting reciprocal bans by Beijing.

There are also tensions over China’s growing nuclear arsenal, with the Trump administration demanding that Beijing join its talks with Moscow to forge a multilateral arms treaty. Beijing said yesterday the demands were a ruse for Washington to abandon the bilateral treaty but suggested it could take part if the US shrank its arsenal to the size of China’s, an offer President Donald Trump would never accept.

In another sign of their growing co-operation, Russia and China announced yesterday that they had agreed to boost joint economic enterprises, including in energy and civilian aircraft manufacture after President Xi Jinping and President Vladimir Putin spoke by phone.

Christopher Wray, the FBI director, warned on Wednesday that China was ‘‘engaged in a whole-of-state effort to become the world’s only superpower by any means necessary’’ and presented ‘‘the greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality’’.

The economic damage wreaked by China’s intellectual property theft was ‘‘breathtaking’’, he said and half of all counterintelligence investigations in the US involved China. ‘‘The stakes could not be higher,’’ he added.

Esper said he had set up a special China strategy group to focus the Pentagon’s efforts on countering the growing threat.

In the past year all existing Pentagon war plans for countering China have been reviewed and updated after previous simulations judged China to have the upper hand in any naval confrontation in the Asiapacific region because of its huge inventory of anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles.

The build-up of these missiles by the People’s Liberation Army is part of an ‘‘anti-access, areadenial’’ strategy to deter the US navy from sailing into the region in the event of a crisis, such as a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or the seizure of more islands in the South China Sea.

Two aircraft carriers, USS Nimitz and USS Ronald Reagan, are operating in the South China Sea this week, flying fighter jet missions to underline America’s strike capabilities. A B-52H nuclear-capable bomber took part in exercises.

Esper said the US military was now investing in ‘‘game-changing technologies’’. These included hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence and directed energy systems. – The Times