The US military pilots training China's Navy

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SOMETIME AROUND 2008, the U.S. State Department sent an email to Daniel Duggan, a former Marine Harrier pilot, informing him that he was legally required to seek authorization before training a foreign air force. A couple of years later—according to a recently unsealed federal indictment—Duggan, who moved to Australia after leaving the Corps as a major in 2002, allegedly exchanged emails with a fellow ex-Navy fighter pilot about instructing “Chinese pilots in Field Carrier Landing Practice” in South Africa. By 2012, Duggan and others from the United Kingdom, South Africa, and China were allegedly involved in a scheme to train Chinese military pilots to master one of naval aviation’s most critical skills: landing on an aircraft carrier.

The fine art and science of landing on a carrier deck is best accomplished with three main components: advanced flight control systems, a well-trained naval aviator using their aircraft and instruments to land and catch an arresting wire safely, and a fellow pilot working below as a landing signal officer to talk them through a maneuver “similar to a controlled crash” onto a ship potentially sailing through a storm under blackout conditions with its runway pitching from side to side. It’s incredibly difficult and dangerous.

The Pentagon’s latest report on the Chinese military notes that its “growing force of aircraft carriers extend air defense coverage of deployed task groups beyond the range of land-based defenses and will enable operations at increasingly longer ranges.”

The key to that extended air defense is a skill that most militaries don’t have, but China—with its three aircraft carriers of the People’s Liberation Army Navy—now has indigenous pilots who were apparently trained by at least two of America’s best.

Duggan maintains his innocence, and his wife, Saffrine, says her husband has “been caught in a geopolitical storm for working in China, doing work that has been done there for decades by western, African and European pilots for decades with the full knowledge of these governments.”

But the U.S. government disagrees. “Neither Duggan nor any of the coconspirators sought or obtained an export license or other authorization” to export defense services, articles, “and/or military training to the [People’s Republic of China] or Chinese foreign nationals, as required,” the indictment says.

The former Marine could