Just before Thanksgiving, Admiral Samuel Paparo unveiled a massive turkey: America’s defense posture in Asia. Paparo became the head of America’s Indo-Pacific Command in May after commanding the Pacific Fleet for three years, and he came to Washington to deliver some bad news. The United States is not keeping pace with the threats facing his forces.
In the nearly three years since Russia attacked Ukraine, Washington has failed to arm U.S. forces or their allies sufficiently. The Replicator Initiative is scrambling to make up for lost time, and peace in Asia will depend on the Pentagon using that time wisely.
From nearly the moment Vladimir Putin launched his invasion, a coterie of Washington intellectuals have claimed that the United States cannot help Ukraine and also deter China from starting a war in Asia. Most of them have been quieter about Israel since Oct. 7, but their argument applies to the Jewish state as well. When asked if aid to Ukraine or Israel cut into his own requirements, Paparo recently told a Washington audience, “Up to this year, I had said, ‘not at all.’” The artillery shells and short-range weapons Kiev and Jerusalem needed were of limited use in a Pacific war.
That changed in 2024. “With some of the Patriots that have been employed, some of the air-to-air missiles that have been employed, it is now eating into stocks” his forces would need in a conflict with China. “To say otherwise would be dishonest.” The threat is growing. Since this summer, the Chinese military has conducted the most extensive exercises “that I’d seen over an entire career of being an observer,” Paparo said.
China has spent decades preparing “assassin’s mace” weapons to drive U.S. forces out of the Pacific, and the Replicator Initiative is trying to break that mace. It is now halfway through its first mission to build thousands of cheap drones by next year that can rain down on America’s enemies from above, skim along the water line, or surge up from the ocean’s depths. They are part of Paparo’s plan to “turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape” if China attacks. According to the admiral, “I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything.”
Peace in Asia largely depends on how quickly the Trump defense team can get “the rest of everything” in order. When she announced Replicator, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said, “We’ll also aim to replicate and inculcate how we will achieve this goal” so that the Pentagon will learn again how to quickly acquire needed weapons.
This is sorely needed since the defense industry is generally very slow to arm American warfighters. Much of the blame lies with Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense who saddled the Pentagon with an elaborate process for developing new weapons and then lost the Vietnam war. As with most of Kennedy’s “whiz kids,” McNamara’s ideas had only mixed results at the time and have aged poorly.
The country is now facing a defense crisis that was entirely foreseeable. The Pentagon started sending Patriot air defense missiles to Ukraine two years ago, and Lockheed Martin and Raytheon intend to double their prewar production rate for Patriot air defense missiles by 2027, the year Xi Jinping has ordered China’s military to be prepared to conquer Taiwan.
This is lightning speed for America’s legacy defense industry, but still not nearly fast enough. The Pentagon estimates that China’s arsenal of some classes of ballistic missiles has nearly doubled in the past two years.
Demand far outpaces supply for other American weapons, too. As Israel recently showed by effortlessly snuffing out Iran’s Russian-supplied air defenses, the United States is still the world leader in building expensive, high-quality weapons. But those weapons tend to arrive behind schedule and over budget, just like the submarines, frigates, and aircraft carriers under construction that will reach the Navy years late.
As Paparo pointed out, drones are insufficient to halt Chinese aggression, but they buy time. In a war, they give his forces a few weeks to respond, but in peacetime, they could buy the Trump team the time to fix the Pentagon’s construction delays or find workarounds.
Every time Paparo arrived at his old headquarters, he saw a reminder of the cost of defeat in the Pacific—and what it takes to win. Shortly after Dec. 7, 1941, the Navy hastily built a heavily fortified building near Pearl Harbor for Admiral Chester Nimitz to oversee the war with Japan. By the time the Pacific Fleet moved to Guam in early 1945, its focus had shifted from defending American territory to turning Japan into ash.
Nimitz had to fend off the Japanese for two years before new American ships and planes turned the tide. If China attacks, Paparo will not have that luxury.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
