SOURCE: BRITISH ARMY VETERAN AND FORMER MP
Bob Seely MBE is a British Army veteran, a former Member of Parliament who served on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and the author of The New Total War. He is an investor in the Ukrainian mil-tech startup Trypillian.
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“People think [a big invasion is] not going to happen because the Russians can’t march into Poland World War Two style. That’s not the issue … If there is ever going to be a Pearl Harbor moment again, with either Russia or China or potentially some combination of them, it’s not going to be a military operation.
It’s going to be one where our enemies attack the resilience of our society … In the UK, and I’m sure the US is very similar, the average family keeps about three days’ supply of food. If you suddenly attack that just-in-time supply system—through software, through traffic lights, through chaos on ferries and in shipping—you’re really going to hit the ability of Western societies to actually look after their populations.”
THE NEWS: The Washington Post reported this week on Chinese and Iranian cyber operations against American water systems. Seely notes that Russia has spent years mapping the 65 undersea cables through which the UK receives almost all of its data.
“The US is doing very well stripping Chinese components out of their military supply chain. Europe and the United Kingdom have got to get with the program … If the Chinese have some kind of kill switch in it, you can’t actually use your weapon in the years to come if the Chinese don’t want you to.
The fundamental problem is that we’re only rearming at the moment because the Chinese are allowing us to do so. And if the Chinese stop supplying components, we’d be in a world of pain.”
THE NEWS: British naval drones were revealed this week to carry Chinese cameras. Ukrainian student-volunteers were stripping Chinese components out of donated drones in 2022.
Everyone understands that America can restrict how American weapons are used. China can do the same thing—quietly, without announcing it—and almost nobody is discussing it.
SOURCE: AMERICAN INVESTOR IN KYIV
Deborah Fairlamb is a founding partner at Green Flag Ventures in Kyiv and co-hosts our Coalition of the Doing podcast. Ninety seconds into recording, she stopped mid-sentence.
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