China-Russia military exercises near Taiwan force US to revise plans, intelligence chiefs say
- Admission comes before the Senate Armed Services Committee while discussing Beijing’s evolving military support for Moscow
- Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines says joint exercises show ‘China definitely wants Russia to be working with them and we see no reason why [Russia] wouldn’t’
China’s joint military exercises with Russian forces near Taiwan have prompted new US defence planning, two top US intelligence officials told Congress on Thursday.
The admission came during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in which they also discussed Beijing’s evolving support for Moscow and what they called the two nations’ “pre-positioning” of vulnerabilities in US military and infrastructure assets.
US Air Force Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency, told the committee that the Chinese-Russian operations, “seen over the last two years, have caused the department to relook at its analysis and become even more concerned about what are our joint-force requirements” in the region.
“Even if Russia and China in a military force are not interoperable, they would certainly be cooperative, and we would need to take that into account in force structure and planning,” Kruse said. “We are in the middle of that revision today.”
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Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, who testified alongside Kruse, said that the joint exercises show that “China definitely wants Russia to be working with them and we see no reason why [Russia] wouldn’t”.