Multinational navy ships and a submarine steam in formation during a group sail off the coast of Hawaii during RIMPAC 2020

WASHINGTON: Over the weekend, the White House announced the promotion of two Navy admirals to lead military operations in the Pacific, a swap of commanders that comes as the Biden administration looks for ways to put its own imprint on the intensifying competition with China in the Pacific region.

The nominations of Adm. John Aquilino to lead the Indo-Pacific command, and Vice Adm. Samuel Paparo to run Pacific Fleet, had been expected for some time. But the two will assume command as the Pentagon looks to reframe and remake its mix of forces and deterrent initiatives, while potentially pumping billions into new weapons systems and training ranges spread across the region.

Aquilino, the current Pacific Fleet boss, would bring years of operational experience to the job and a deep-seated understanding of the needs and challenges of the office. Paparo is coming from the 5th Fleet, which runs naval operations in the Middle East, where he has been busy dealing with the ongoing threat from Iran.

In an indication of the scale of the challenge, just last week the current Indo-Pacom command Adm. Philip Davidson released an ambitious five-year, $27 billion plan for bolstering missile defenses and dispersing basing in the region, an idea for which Congress has largely signaled support. 

The Pacific Deterrence Initiative, however, will present a bureaucratic challenge for Aquilino as he’ll have to work to defend it at a time of flat budgets. While the Navy is largely expected to come out of the 2022 budget process in good shape, the other services will have to make some hard choices about what to spend money as their share of the budgetary pie shrinks slightly.

Given that there will be little extra cash for Davidson’s PDI, it remains unclear how much of the plan can be put into action.

Overall, the PDI as it was delivered to Congress includes $4.6 billion in 2022, and calls for “highly survivable, precision-strike networks along the First Island Chain, featuring increased quantities of ground-based weapons,” along with a new Aegis Ashore radar and missile defense system on Guam.

Davidson will again defend the initiative Tuesday morning during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he’ll appear in both public and closed sessions.

Aegis Ashore test launch

One aspect of the proposal which has been floated for years — the Aegis system on Guam — has received expressions of support from Congress, but nothing in terms of actual lines in a budget. During a virtual event last week, Davidson said the radar could free up three Aegis destroyers from performing the missile defense mission, a pitch the Navy would welcome as it has been frustrated by the missile defense mission for years.

“I think the hardest part of it will be sustaining a deployed presence to compete with China, given readiness challenges across each service, fiscal constraints, and force structure that is still too weighted toward the high-end,” said Bryan Clark, a former Navy officer now at the Hudson Institute.  

To effectively compete with China, however, “US forces will need to be able to confront Chinese aggression at various levels of escalation,” Clark added, areas where things like hypersonic weapons and land-based strike missiles are less useful than “deployed ships, troop formations, or aircraft. INDOPACOM will need to work with the services to rebalance forces toward those that are more proportional to gray-zone operations and are less expensive to sustain.”

The White House has signaled the centrality of the Indo-Pacific to its overall foreign policy vision by building out the Indo-Pacific team at the National Security Council with around 20 officials once it is fully staffed. It will be the largest office within the NSC. The State Department’s East Asia envoy under President Barack Obama and one of the architects of the “shift” to the Pacific, Kurt Campbell, is leading the team. 

At his own nomination hearing last week, Colin Kahl, the nominee to be undersecretary of defense for policy, threw his support behind the PDI, telling Senators “there’s a lot of bipartisan support for supporting our allies and partners in the region” and calling the Indo-Pacific the Biden administration’s top priority, saying its “No. 1 with a bullet.”

If confirmed, both Aquilino and Paparo will have to fall in right away on a variety of issues, including the continuing battle with COVID, and the importance Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has placed on identifying extremists in the ranks, and ensuring racial and gender equity. 

Brent Sadler, a retired Navy officer now at the Heritage Foundation, suggested a major item for the command in the near-term will be to “make sure the joint force and fleet are ready for a spring/summer of contestation with China in South China Sea and possibly East China Sea,” as the Chinese fleet kicks off seasonal exercises. The exercises usually pressure US posture in the region, and will be a perfect time for Beijing to challenge the Biden administration.

They also will need to begin stress-testing Navy and Marine Corps concepts to disperse their forces throughout the region and begin planning to “conduct fleet experiments on manned-unmanned teaming to better understand and demonstrate viability of unmanned naval systems to Congress.” The Marines have officially made China their top priority, over and above Russia.

Sadler said both the Obama and Trump administrations laid down the foundations for an overhaul in the US posture in the Pacific, but “the Navy and joint force has needed to rebalance its posture for a decade and has made little progress, this needs to be revitalized and the PDI is good, but only a part of the wider effort.”