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The question no one dares ask: what if Britain has to defend itself from the US? (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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All the talk now is of how we might defend ourselves without the US. But almost everyone with a voice in public life appears to be avoiding a much bigger and more troubling question: how we might defend ourselves against the US.

As Keir Starmer visits the orange emperor’s court in Washington, let’s first consider the possibilities. I can’t comment on their likelihood, and I fervently hope that people with more knowledge and power than me are gaming them. One is that Donald Trump will not only clear the path for Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, but will actively assist him.

Now consider our vulnerabilities. Through the “Five Eyes” partnership, the UK automatically shares signals intelligence, human intelligence and defence intelligence with the US government. Edward Snowden’s revelations showed that the US, with the agreement of our government, conducts wholesale espionage on innocent UK citizens. The two governments, with other western nations, run a wide range of joint intelligence programmes, such as Prism, Echelon, Tempora and XKeyscore. The US National Security Agency (NSA) uses the UK agency GCHQ as a subcontractor.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I doubt we could defend ourselves if Belgium decided to invade.

This could be key if things did spread to the Baltic states:

Then we come to our weapon systems. Like everyone without security clearance, I can make no well-informed statement on the extent to which any of them, nuclear or conventional, are operationally independent of the US. But I know, to give just one example, that among the crucial components of our defence are F-35 stealth jets, designed and patented in the US. How stealthy they will turn out to be, when the US has the specs, the serial numbers and the software, is a question that needs an urgent answer.

Nor can I make any confident statement about the extent to which weapons designed here might be dependent on US central processing units and other digital technologies, or on US systems such as Starlink, owned by Musk, or GPS, owned by the US Space Force. Which of our weapons systems could achieve battle-readiness without US involvement and consent? Which could be remotely disabled by the US military?

During lockdown, a friend had special dispensation to travel, issued by the MOD so he could work on a supercomputer that the American-made planes needed to function properly. I bet the Americans could just switch that off if they didn't want us using their technology against Russia.

And this is all about physical warfare - they US could easily shut us down completely with cyber warfare. Or Musk might decide he wants all the data from HMRC as he has done in the US. I'd imagine working through GCHQ would make this possible.