Australia’s pilots are being lured abroad with eye-watering paychecks to train Chinese pilots in manoeuvres that would give them an advantage over Australia’s own military. The Australian government created the conditions to help them do it. 

In a news story in October 2022, it was claimed that Chinese agents were recruiting recently retired British military pilots in order to determine the best way to defeat Western combat planes and helicopters. Allegedly, these pilots were lured to China with a hefty £240,000 salary (AU$431,000). Not a bad salary by anyone’s calculation. Former Royal Australian Air Force pilots were also being recruited, according to a recent article in The Australian, to the tune of AU$300,000.

But what would make patriotic former British and Australian military personnel want to take up this offer? Aren’t these countries in a strategic confrontation with the People’s Republic of China (PRC)? Doesn’t that make it an “enemy”? These are pertinent questions. And for the patriotic ex-service personnel who are financially well off, or for those who simply cannot see themselves accepting such offers, even if on struggle street, there’d be no question of them accepting this Chinese inducement. But many ex-service personnel are not adequately taken care of after they have completed their military service. This is a fact of some concern among many veteran communities in the UK and elsewhere in the West. Soldiers, sailors, and pilots can be traumatised by their military experiences – combat or non-combat related. Veterans can be deeply in debt owing to financial mismanagement, addictions, health, and other personal maladies.

In the UK, there are the financial problems associated with the rapidly rising cost of living, declining veteran pensions, and government services for this community. Brexit has been no help to anyone trying to make ends meet. Indeed, while Britain’s standard of living has been in steady decline since Brexit became a reality in 2020, COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine War have accelerated this decline, which the former government of Liz Truss found impossible to stop. This situation is also presenting a serious challenge to new British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

In Australia, things aren’t as dire as in the British case economically speaking – for now. China is after all still Australia’s number one trading partner despite the escalation of war-like rhetoric between Beijing and Canberra, tit-for-tat sanctions on non-essential commodities, services, and products, and shrill media headlines condemning each other for slights, real or perceived. A strangely ambiguous semi-belligerent Sino-Australian relationship just adds to the complex nature of things and to ongoing uncertainty in this relationship.

There’s also another very deeply held issue that needs to be addressed. In the neoliberal economic order that we have been told is the highest form of capitalism, things like loyalty to country are not held up as national values as they used to be. Yes, the military and most other uniformed civilian agencies and the intelligence services cling on to these traditions, and yes, on national holidays commemorating previous generations and their sacrifices, people do come out to remember the past and support current service personnel. But let us be under no illusion. These are but quaint shadows of the importance once placed on sacrifice for one’s country and its system of governance. This generation and the two that preceded it have gradually turned from national citizens to global consumers. Their loyalties are often to the corporate brands they wear and use, not necessarily to the countries they inhabit or the governments that manage the affairs of state on their behalf.

Furthermore, everything in this world has been commodified, including people. If your economic value is no longer considered advantageous to a country’s gross national product, you can no longer be viewed as useful. While in capitalist economies of the past, this has often been a reality that many, especially veterans, had to struggle with. Today, the deification of money and wealth has largely turned people into economic units – objects to be traded. Governments once believed in higher order things like moderation, sound regulation, community, values, and ethics, but now these are all considered barriers to profit. If money is so important to how we are seen by our society, then we cannot condemn those, who, for whatever reason, have accepted Chinese money for their knowledge.

So, what makes these Chinese entreaties to British and Australian ex-service personnel so potentially damaging? For many Western countries, veterans are normally conceived of as a financial burden on governments. Lingering physical, emotional, and mental health issues, post-service are expensive to deal with. Government services for veterans are also unnecessarily bureaucratic. Over time veterans are often forgotten, languishing at the end of social security systems in various states of decay and dysfunction.

What the Chinese have understood, and what the West seems to have forgotten, is that veterans are still useful as a source of recent operational and tactical information. By giving the most desperate what they need – money for a proper standard of living – China is buying information. Considering the dire state of the British economy and the price squeeze and inflationary pressures on the Australian economy, finding financial security in a brown paper bag of Chinese money cannot be seen as “treason.” No war against China has been declared, and therefore relying on World War II-style calls for loyalty by former service personnel are irrelevant. The British and Australian governments still allow their businesses to trade with the PRC, sanctions on selected non-essential goods and services notwithstanding, post-COVID-19. If loyalty were a thing, all governments would impose total bans on all economic activity with an enemy state. After all, keeping members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) financially flush enables it to carry out the mass internment and cultural genocide of the Uyghurs and Tibetans, run the PRC as a surveillance state, carry out political repression in Hong Kong, and militarily threaten Taiwan – all the things the West is meant to abhor about the current Chinese system.

So far it seems that only dozens of people in the UK and Australia have been approached by the Chinese. The UK has openly stated that this is deemed a security breach and are now warning currently serving and retired service personnel from accepting any Chinese offers. In Australia, the Albanese government has launched an official investigation into allegations of the Chinese “buying local former military talent.” Perhaps this may stem the breach for now. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and if governments fail to recognise that veterans are repositories of operational and tactical knowledge, one government’s wilful ignorance will become another’s force multiplier.

One method of completely cutting off China’s access to Western military veterans would be to guarantee them a universal basic income. If a citizen is prepared to potentially sacrifice both life and limb for the defence of their country, then this sort of measure is entirely appropriate. However, under financial stringencies, and current government thinking, it would be a brave national leadership to propose this as a solution. But ultimately this all comes down to how much nations value military service and expertise.

We are all mercenaries now following the edicts of “the market.” For many, this becomes a matter of survival, not ideological choice, since everybody, democratically inclined or not, are capitalists, and currency is holy to us all.

Dr John Bruni is founder & CEO of South Australian geopolitical think tank SAGE International. He is also a regular commentator on international relations for FIVEaa’s Evenings with Matthew Pantelis, and host of STRATEGIKON & The Focus podcasts. SAGE International is an Adelaide-based, independent, privately operated NFP geopolitical think-tank and consultancy estd. in 2008. Areas of expertise include Indo-Pacific strategy, the Middle East, and North Africa (MENA) region, defence procurement, Australian defence & security and global maritime security and technological trends.