UK Strategic Institute Labels Russia-China 5G Collaboration a Serious Military Threat

A report issued on March 1 by the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security (RUSI) of the United Kingdom is sending military alarm bells ringing throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States.

According to the experts at RUSI, after roughly four years ago after Moscow signed contracts with Beijing to share information and work together on advanced 5G telecommunications advances, Russia already put that information to surprisingly sophisticated use for business and for the military. According to the Institute, the two countries are already deeply integrated in plans which go far beyond these early stages of cooperation, with increasing emphasis on weapons and armed forces logistics activities.

The initial coordination program was inked early on with Russia’s MTS (Mobile Telesystems), that country’s biggest mobile network operator, and Beeline, known as Билайн domestically, is a major Russian telecom which has been around since 1993 and services many of Russia’s nation partners outside of the country, including Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, and Armenia. Both companies are based in Moscow.

On China’s end the partner was Huawei, one of the early 5G innovators. It was sufficiently ahead in its work that it was at one time seen as the leading 5G telecommunications company in the world, with installation bases growing in most major countries across the globe. Its growth was slowed only after the U.S. and the European Union identified Huawei’s tech as a major surveillance risk, with mostly classified investigations within the Five Eyes international bloc claiming Huawei had installed clandestine software which could spread throughout western nations’ data networks for monitoring and capturing confidential information, and with the potential to destabilize networks via cyberattacks, just as the U.S. has done with telecom gear for many decades.

According to the new report, the initial collaboration between MTS and Beeline on Moscow’s side, Huawei from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the military technology developers from both countries, is making a difference in several areas.

On the conventional telecom end, by 2021, one of the most intense early years of this cooperative venture, Huawei and MTS enabled Moscow’s 5G networks to set new data communications records locally. It also was used by medical teams in Russia to perform remote surgery via Russia’s Global Medical System Hospital. A further application that showed promise within Russia came when a new form of joint 5G command-and-control tech was used to help control unmanned dump trucks within a Russian mine.

On the military end, engineers from China and Russia have also already collaborated to link together the primary satellite navigation technologies of the two countries for military use. On China’s end the network is BeiDou, its alternative to the western world’s GPS (global positioning system) solution. Russia’s equivalent in GLONASS. Both are satellite linked, with different strengths and weaknesses for both, though in a collaborative form their guidance data is being transmitted faster and is more accurate.

According to the RUSI report, this interoperability is already helping make Russia’s military more effective in Ukraine. 

“[Within that country],” the authors wrote, “GLONASS has already enabled Russian missile and drone strikes via satellite correction and supported communications between Russian troops.”

Russia has also signed off on a plan to let China build a BeiDou monitoring system located in Obninsk, a Russian village near the Ukraine border.

Once that system is in place and others are built as well, the report continued, “Russia could exploit BeiDou’s ability to facilitate the navigation and tracking of autonomous vehicles for strategic attacks with missiles and drones.”

Though all that Russia and China might do together is unclear, the report speculates that more accurate satellite data of this kind could soon be deployed by Moscow to gather far more accurate imagery in the most important battlegrounds of the Ukraine war, predict weather more accurately, and generally provide more precise terrain mapping. Other shared systems could provide major improvements in Russia’s ability to determine the best targets to go after and providing better precision for Russian missiles and drones.

Though such cooperation might seem very much one-way in nature, the RUSI authors suggest that China is also gaining much from the partnership in technology supplied directly by Russian engineering personnel. The PRC military teams also are learning much from the real world battlefield experience Russia is gathering, just by deploying the advanced 5G tech and BeiDou/GLONASS integration in an actual combat environment.

According to Jack Crawford, a co-author of the report who serves as a RUSI research analyst, China’s satellite tech and tracking systems are probably improving at a faster pace than they would otherwise, thanks to Russian rapid deployment of the existing tech from both countries in the field. What that means for China is that it is now expected to be far more ready than it might have been to carry out a full-scale invasion of Taiwan, when it deems the time to be right.

While Russia and China have had an increasingly close military alliance for some time, the differences in military tech made it difficult for them to function as a unified force. That is changing rapidly. As the two nations grow closer to counter what they consider the NATO menace, they may bring other nations into their military alliance via BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Iran and North Korea are already working more closely with Russia and supplying it was arms and ammunition. 

The longer NATO wages war against Russia through Ukraine, the stronger Russia will become and the more alliances it will form. The longer NATO and the EU support fascist Israel's genocide of Palestinians, the more determined the rest of the world will be in countering that fascist bloc.