Summary of the speech by Admiral Samuel Paparo
- Strategic Competition in the Indo-Pacific and the Role of Naval Power
- The speech by Admiral Samuel Paparo, Commander of the United States Pacific Fleet, focused on the increasing disorder and shifts in state behaviors in various regions, with a particular emphasis on the Indo-Pacific. He highlighted the strategic competition taking place in this crucial region, home to 60% of the world's population and economy, and shared the US National Security Strategy's approach to addressing the challenge posed by the People's Republic of China.
- Admiral Paparo emphasized the importance of alliances and partnerships in the region, with the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard playing an essential role in the international effort. He also discussed the impact of the information revolution on naval warfare, introducing new principles such as decision superiority, using machines for dangerous tasks, and ensuring human judgment in critical decisions. The admiral stressed that the nature of war remains inherently human, despite the augmenting role of technology.
- Navigating Changes in Warfare and Building a Resilient Combat Logistics Force
- Admiral Paparo emphasizes the importance of addressing changes in the information security environment and the enduring nature of warfare as a contest of wills. They highlight the Navy's efforts in delivering innovative solutions through initiatives like the Disruptive Capability Office's Replicator Initiative and DIU. A significant challenge lies in developing a more robust, modernized combat Logistics force, which faces narrow margins in sustainment across eight classes of supply, six Rs, medical, and personnel needs.
- Admiral Paparo advocates for partnerships with MSC and Marad to tackle the challenges in the maritime industrial base and supply chain, while acknowledging the need for a larger, more capable combat Logistics force that can be optimized with Information Age capability. Mass, in this context, remains essential, and console tankers must be certified and contracted to pass fuel in a bucket brigade mentality. The discussion also touches upon the PRC's aggressive tactics in the South China Sea and the importance of maintaining safety, adhering to rules, and defending US Navy ships when necessary. Lastly, Admiral Paparo briefly addresses recent recruitment challenges, observing that reports of diminished respect for the US military may be overexaggerated.
- Emphasis on Personal Growth, Adventure, and Outreach in Military Service
- In this segment, Admiral Paparo discusses the motivations of individuals who join the military, highlighting their desire for personal growth and adventure. The speaker uses their own experience of limited travel before joining the service and the exciting opportunities they encountered afterwards as an example. He stresses the importance of reaching out to every influencer in a young person's life, including parents, teachers, and mentors, to promote the value of military service.
- Admiral Paparo
also addresses the current challenges in recruiting
and retention, emphasizing the need for hard work, creativity in
retention incentives, and understanding the current environment. He
encourages each person in uniform to work harder in outreach within their
own communities to talk about their story and demonstrate the benefits
of service.
AFCEA West SANDIEGO, California—There’s a reason that the U.S. Navy has been much more open about its experiments with unmanned systems in the Middle East and South America than about the ones it’s conducting in the Pacific.
“And it ain’t because we ain’t doing anything,” Adm. Sam Paparo, the head of U.S. Pacific Fleet, said at the AFCEA West conference here. “We don't want to expose it to an adversary that would emplace a counter to that capability.”
Those experiments are happening, with more taking place soon.
“In the beginning of March, we'll execute Integrated Battle Problem 24.1 that will further demonstrate and test and experiment” with a concept advanced in last year’s edition of the wargame, Paparo said.
He added that the fleet will soon stand up a second USV, or ghost ship, squadron here.
Some of the Defense Innovation Unit’s most recent work on underwater drones is also tied to the INDOPACOM area, said Capt. Alex Campbell, who leads DIU's naval portfolio. DIU recently hired Oceaneering International, Kongsberg Discovery, and Anduril Industries to develop prototypes for sub drones that might one day be produced in the hundreds of thousands.
“So we recently partnered with PEO Attack Submarines, awarded three prototype bodies for a large-diameter UAV. It is meant to be lower cost and is meant to be potentially attributable, and is meant to get after problems that INDOPACOM has,” Campbell said.
DIU is also pursuing a “small uncrewed surface vessel that is functionally meant to be an interceptor—again, relatively low cost, ideally "attritable getting after INDOPACOM problem sets,” he said.
Among the most important of those problems is deterring China from attacking Taiwan, whose Overall Defense Concept sees very large numbers of submarine and surface drones as key to deterring a beach assault. INDOPACOM will seek ways to do that while limiting the numbers of manned vessels and sailors that may have to put themselves between the Chinese Navy and the Taiwanese coast.
Said Paparo: “When the unforgiving hour comes…there are battle spaces where it may not be necessary to contest air and maritime superiority one for one, but simply to deny its use to an enemy that wants to use that battlespace for its own purposes. A principled highly effective concept of operations of sea denial, with unmanned undersea vessels with smart undersea capabilities, with surface capabilities and aerial capabilities is the ability to meet some of the [new] principles, which is: don't send a human being to do something dangerous than a machine can do better, faster, and more cheaply.”
Drones may also be key to INDOPACOM’s Joint Fires Network, a nascent battle-management system designed to find and deliver target data to forces much faster. The system will use AI and likely drones, “utilizing investment automation, and the best technology where it is, in fact, useful. And then of course, leveraging people operating in the loop where it is legally required,” said Justin Norman, DIU’s acting portfolio director/technical director for artificial intelligence and machine learning.
But the Pacific Fleet has some big challenges to work through before it can integrate drones en masse into operations, in large part because putting tens or hundreds of thousands of sea, sub, and air drones into operation presents a logistical challenge that the limited experiments in CENTCOM and SOUTHCOM don’t, said Chris Murphy, the Office of Naval Research’s global science advisor to Pacific Fleet. The sheer number of robots that the fleet is looking at requires that they consider upfront a lot of the problems that usually come later in acquisition.
“Things like concepts of deployment and sustainment. How am I thinking about taking thousands of these things? Am I going to have them sitting on a waterfront, floating in the water, corroding? Or am I going to shrink-wrap them? Do I treat it like a missile that I shrink-wrap and put in a [vertical launch system] tube?” Murphy said. “Or like a RIB on a destroyer that requires an engineer to go out there every day? Those are going to drive design decisions that we don't have time to go back and re-engineer later on.”
While Paparo offered few specifics, he said that the United States and China are already locked in a competition to use new digital tools far faster but also at far greater scale than just a few years ago.
“We are in the middle of another epochal change and that is the dawn–and I do mean the dawn–of the information revolution. Who competes best in this, who adapts better, who is better able to combine data, computing power, AI and who can win the first battle—likely in space, cyber, and the information domain—shall prevail,” he said.
The Navy Adopts Drones, Slowly
Adm. Paparo hinted that the most valuable capabilities may remain classified but stressed the difficult balance between keeping innovation secret and deterring China’s aggression by publicizing capabilities.
“We'll be executing many experiments quietly, for the simple reason is that we don't want to expose it to an adversary that would emplace a counter to that capability,” he told the audience.
Adm. Paparo sees the People’s Republic of China (PRC) committed to destabilizing the rules-based order and U.S. interests around the world and, at the current level of deterrence, it will continue to pursue its interests aggressively.
“The PRC is undaunted, and their ambitions presently manifest themselves in their excessive maritime claims,” Adm. Paparo said. He placed Taiwan at the center of its interests as its ambitions over the democratic island grow.
The Asian power will continue to enlarge its navy, as the U.S. seeks present asymmetric threats to that buildup.
Beijing’s response includes its maritime militia, an irregular force that assists its naval operations. These sometimes attack foreign vessels at sea to harass traffic on sea lanes or waters of interest.
“They're looking to scare and intimidate their neighbors in order to claim these excessive claims by the logic of power,” Adm. Paparo said.
Despite those malicious intentions, the U.S. Navy will seek ways to diminish or eliminate the PRC’s intimidation.
“The United States stands ready to support our allies in accordance with their sovereign will: sometimes that's with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and sometimes that offer is there to execute joint patrols.” Adm. Paparo said.
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