Donald Trump’s nominee for director of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, will, if confirmed, sharpen the storied intelligence agency’s focus on winning the deepening geopolitical struggle with China, a message that he’s expected to bring to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence this morning.
He will tell members of the panel today that the CIA must “continue — and increase in intensity — its focus on the threats posed by China and its ruling Chinese Communist Party,” according to a copy of his opening remarks obtained in advance by National Review.
“President Trump has been an incredible leader on this issue, and it is encouraging that a bipartisan consensus has emerged in recent years,” he is expected to say, praising the creation of a CIA China Mission Center under Biden-appointed director William Burns.
“This is our once-in-a generation challenge. The intelligence is clear. Our response must be as well.”
His remarks also will address several areas in which he intends to shake up the agency, including on reorienting it toward merit principles and away from its embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion concepts.
Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence in the first Trump administration, is credited in national-security circles with having trained the intelligence community’s focus on threats posed by Beijing in the first place.
That effort encountered pushback when he assessed in 2020 that China was undertaking efforts to influence the outcome of that year’s presidential election. He took his message public, publishing an op-ed with the Wall Street Journal on the topic, a rare move for a sitting director of national intelligence.
An intelligence community ombudsman’s report later supported Ratcliffe’s conclusions, finding evidence that intelligence analysts were “hesitant” to make assessments regarding Chinese interference in U.S. politics due to fears that those findings would support Trump administration policies with which they disagreed.
“It’s an interesting thing because the national security strategy, national defense strategy, national military strategy all reflected that China was the pacing threat and the national security priority around which we organize the whole government, but the intelligence community was always a laggard in executing on that and, from a capability standpoint, providing policymakers the level of collection that would be commensurate with those documents,” Alexander Gray, the chief of staff at the White House National Security Council during Trump’s first term, told National Review on Tuesday.
“John laid down a marker very clearly last time that he wanted to change that,” Gray said.
Ratcliffe will emphasize the need to surge resources to cyber operations of both defensive and offensive natures, a source familiar with his thinking told National Review.
The Wall Street Journal first reported that Ratcliffe, if confirmed, would make the employment of offensive cyber operations a priority of the CIA.
The source told NR that offensive cyber operations are just one part of a broader agenda focused on bringing new technologies to bear on intelligence collection.
The Ratcliffe team wants “to utilize tech in a way that it hasn’t been used yet,” the source said, adding that this might include advances in the use of artificial intelligence models for analyzing intelligence collected across different languages.
“We need an intelligence community that’s organized to be at the tip of the spear for great-power competition, and part of that is offensive. Part of that is aggressive collection in all sorts of ways, whether it’s cyber, whether it’s humint, and whether it’s sigint,” said Gray, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, using shorthand for “human intelligence” and “signals intelligence.”
Before his confirmation as director of national intelligence in 2020, Ratcliffe represented a Texas congressional district and served as a federal prosecutor.