London: One of the United States’ most senior intelligence chiefs says that the war on terror distracted them for more than a decade from the growing threat of China and delivering on the long-promised tilt towards the Indo-Pacific.

Lieutenant General Scott Berrier heads the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) which analyses foreign military capabilities and assesses their threat potential, as well as conducting operations in the field to collect intelligence.

Berrier says the US was distracted from the growing threat of China by the war in Afghanistan.Credit:AP

Berrier has the power to declassify information and reports directly to the US Secretary of Defence. He is overseeing a major restructuring of his organisation, diverting hundreds of analysts and agents from their Middle-Eastern focussed counter terror operations to a new China Mission Group.

He said the DIA’s current footprint reflected the Cold War and told the International Institute for Strategic Studies that the long-promised tilt was finally happening describing Russia as an “existential threat” but China as the “pacing threat.”

“With the pacing threat we’ve stood up another regional intelligence centre … called the China Mission Group and that is a group of analysts, mission managers, operators and collectors that all focus on the problems,” he said.

“We have a very, very strong presence here in Europe and on this side of the globe and not as strong a presence in the Indo-Pacific and we need to change that by developing greater partnerships, stronger partnerships and putting more DIA presence and collection capability into the Indo-Pacific over coming years.”

DIA director Lieutenant General Scott BerrierCredit:AP

He said those partnerships would not just be with governments and fellow intelligence agencies but also with the private sector and think tanks and that the shift from the war on terror to countering Chinese expansion had begun around five to six years ago but was now accelerating.

“It’s a big problem, [China] has greatly expanded in the Indo-Pacific region and let’s face it they come with cash and they come with projects and we’ve got to be able to counter that,” he said.

He said he took China’s President Xi Jinping at his word when he said that he wanted to reunify Taiwan with the mainland, potentially as early as 2027 and by force if necessary.

“I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that they will do it by force but they certainly appear to be building the military capability to do that,” he said.

Asked by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age if the DIA had waited too long to pour its resources into the region, Berrier agreed they should have been refocusing a decade ago.

“If you recall that President Obama told us about the pivot to the Pacific in 2013, well in 2023 we’re actually doing it,” he said.

“This whole notion about pivoting and when to pivot, I think everybody had the intention of doing it, but distractions happen right and our operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and other places, really, really put a drain on our intelligence resources,” he said.

Obama was critical of his predecessor George W. Bush for not focusing enough on Asia and in a speech to the Australian parliament in 2011, announced that the United States national security team was prioritising the region.

“The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay,” Obama said at the time, remarking that the “tide of war” was “receding” with the American troops leaving Iraq and the transition underway to Afghan authorities.

But it was Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, who would oversee the end of the United States’ role in Afghanistan more than a decade later.

While he was honouring an agreement struck by his predecessor Donald Trump, the shambolic exit enabled the Taliban to regain control of the country in a matter of days, undoing two decades worth of democratic progress introduced to the country.

Berrier said the departure from Afghanistan, as well as miscalculating Russia’s ability to carry out a successful invasion of Ukraine were areas where the intelligence community needed to do work.

He declined to predict an end to the war in Ukraine anytime soon, despite Russia being pushed back out of Kherson, saying that the war would now descend into a stalemate and a “winter of woe” for Ukrainians facing heating and food shortages.

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