It's INDOPACOVER

One Must Imagine INDOPACOM Happy

USN and JMSDF, Haydn N. Smith, 2022

If there’s one thing that’s been missed in the past week of the GOP unveiling the Sicario-esque fantasies they’ve been cooking up for the last four years—it’s the complete absence of a priority for the Pacific theatre.

While I don’t take much of the rhetoric surrounding invading Panama or doing a Special Military Operation in Mexico all that seriously as actual policy proposals, rhetoric is often useful for understanding priorities. Before even taking office, the incoming Trump administration clearly sees their most pressing priorities lying to the south of the United States.

Setting aside the wisdom of any of those policies in particular¹, taken as a whole they reveal a certain political will to go ahead with resource and time-intensive projects that preclude other national priorities. Every minute spent using finite resources on SOUTHCOM means someone has to lose.

While Trump was fairly confident on the campaign trail that he could end the war in Ukraine—Russia and Ukraine both get a vote on whether they plan to continue the fight. EUCOM will need higher resourcing as long as that war goes on and will need continued support after the cessation of the conflict to reassure our allies in NATO. Despite his claims otherwise, there’s simply too much weight of history and bureaucratic inertia to renounce our most successful alliance in a single term.

The Middle East is also in the middle of a generational tumult, and CENTCOM continues to be relevant and in need of resources and attention. In fact, CENTCOM will never go away. CENTCOM is a metaphysical construct that will outlast the heat-death of the Universe, and all money that goes to them should just be counted as non-discretionary spending at this point.²

To demonstrate how our resourcing is constrained by these competing priorities—CENTCOM can be thought of like the utility monster in the thought experiment dealing with utilitarianism. In this scenario, however, CENTCOM doesn’t suck up all of the pleasure in the world rendering utilitarianism a faulty concept via reductio ad absurdum³.

Instead, CENTCOM is a Tomahawk monster that can only experience joy when it is stealing Tomahawks from INDOPACOM and launching them at patches of desert. Since you cannot deprioritize CENTCOM, they will continue to launch Tomahawks even when Boltzmann brains begin to emerge from the ether. Resources will have to be found elsewhere from regions we deprioritize.

This brings me to my central point here—INDOPACOM will never experience happiness.

Now, if you’re sitting in Hawaii, you might think that I’m just singling you out. You might say, at least we aren’t AFRICOM! I mean good for you, but even they have a conflict in Somalia they’re still engaged. INDOPACOM’s biggest fight in 20 years was against a guy bribing them to make port calls.

The biggest issue that INDOPACOM has to contend with here is that their problems are fundamentally all just hypothetical. Currently, there’s no Chinese invasion fleet crossing the Strait to hit the beaches of Taiwan. There are no wars at all in the region save civil wars that the United States has shown little interest in intervening. Any money that INDOPACOM would request is solely for the sake of a future contingency, which will almost always lose out to actual priorities happening now.

A central focus by the incoming administration on South America means that diplomatic energy will be focused on Colombia instead of the Philippines. Envoys will be dedicated to the Panama Canal instead of Taiwan. Creating sustained diplomatic progress in our core areas of interest takes time and commitment—you can’t just get Japan and South Korea to get along for the sake of collective security because you asked nicely. The Philippines and Japan aren’t going to just have bilateral exercises because it sounded nice in your think tank white paper.

They have their own domestic interests, and we have to persuade other countries to act alongside us.

If we go through with some of the more insane tariff ideas, we would almost assuredly push Pacific partners to strengthen their economic ties to China. Why do business with us in that sort of climate?

We risk losing countries like the Philippines or Vietnam to the economic inertia of having China as a trading partner of convenience. They get a vote on where they find the most value for their commercial interests, and if we slam the door on them, why wouldn’t they turn to their neighbors?

Rhetorically too, we’d be focused on our grievance of the week with Mexico or some other country. It’s immaterial, but it matters. When we publically advocate for courses of action or certain regions, it signals to our partners where our commitments lie. It tells people where our core interests are, and where they aren’t.

The United States has been providing fairly significant humanitarian assistance to Sudan for instance—but you’d hardly know that since we never bring it up. You can read the level to which a country is committed to something by how much it highlights it.

Moreover, if we plan on military operations—the men and equipment have to come from somewhere. There isn’t just some dusty closet we can open and pull all of that out of.

This means less training being done with our partners in the Pacific. It means a lesser force posture than we would have otherwise. Less bilateral and multi-lateral training means less interoperability with our partners and less credibility that we could fight together as a coalition in wartime. It also means they trust us less when the time comes to decide if they’ll intervene in a conflict.

Munitions production would be prioritized for the conflict we’re in now rather than the conflict we might be in in 5 years. I mean the LRASM sure is a cool doohickey, but it’s hardly applicable to a rainforest. You’re gonna need M-ATVs and civil affairs teams, not Multi-domain Task Forces. It’ll be tough to push for new destroyers, and airbase infrastructure in the first island chain when we’re going to be dealing with how to take down quadcopter drones.

It also means doctrine (I hope you guys missed COIN) would again be reflective of the sorts of conflicts we were engaged in. It also means that our troops would be experienced in (and therefore accustomed to) a form of conflict that is entirely alien to what would occur in a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

You’re gonna be back out at NTC practicing conducting how to do a patrol in a town full of actors again instead of getting a hang of closing the sensor-shooter loop in a contested littoral.

Now I do think that military operations are a stretch, and largely just rhetoric, but I do think INDOPACOM is looking increasingly like the odd kid out when you start looking at the potential attention span of the incoming administration. It is also worth saying that all of this could change in a month since it’s still Trump we’re talking about here, and there is only so much mileage you can get out of late-night social media posts from him. So don’t hold me to this.

As for my friends out in Hawaii who might have been planning how to deter a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan? I’d probably suggest getting a copy of Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus—you should have enough time to read it over the next four years.

1. It’s stupid. The ideas are all stupid. Why are you even reading this right now if you think invading Panama is a good idea? You should be retaking 8th-grade English class or something.

2. You might mention that NORTHCOM also exists, but much like NORTHCOM, I’ve also forgotten that NORTHCOM exists, so we can probably just move on from that.

3. Yes, I know this isn’t exactly how the thought experiment works, but I can’t land the joke right if I start reciting Nozick. Nozick is a hack anyway.