The Economist ran a profile this month of Admiral Sam Paparo, the commander of United States Indo-Pacific Command, and the picture it paints is worth thinking about. Paparo is a career fighter pilot, a TOPGUN graduate with over 6,000 flight hours and roughly 1,100 carrier landings. He now runs the oldest and largest of America's combatant commands, headquartered at Camp Smith in Honolulu, responsible for military operations across half the Earth's surface and more than half its population. INDOPACOM covers 52 percent of the planet. If you have not heard of it, you are not alone.
The article is interesting for several reasons, but the one that stuck with me is the role Paparo is playing that has nothing to do with combat. The Economist describes his quiet diplomacy in the Thailand-Cambodia border conflict last year, where he flew repeatedly to Malaysia to meet with both countries' military chiefs and keep a fragile ceasefire from collapsing. The conflict had flared in July 2025, killing dozens of people and displacing over 300,000. Donald Trump claimed credit for ending it by threatening tariffs, and a deal was eventually signed in October. But the reporting suggests it was Paparo, working behind the scenes with relationships built over decades of Pacific assignments, who kept the guns quiet long enough for the political solution to land. In a normal administration, that kind of sustained diplomatic engagement would be handled by ambassadors, by the State Department, by the National Security Council. But the Trump administration has recalled most of the Biden-era ambassadors without replacing many of them, and the president's senior advisers tend to stay close to Washington. The Economist calls Paparo "a rare instance of consistency." That phrase should be reassuring. Instead, it is a little alarming, because it means America's network of alliances in Asia is being held together in significant part by the personal relationships of one four-star admiral.
Paparo's three challenges, as outlined by The Economist, define the scope of the problem. First, reassuring allies that America will not abandon them, even as the White House focuses on Venezuela and Greenland and treats NATO with open contempt. Second, fighting for resources within the Pentagon, where INDOPACOM's carriers and air-defense batteries keep getting dispatched to the Middle East and where the administration's defense strategy has formally prioritized the Western Hemisphere over Asia. Third, keeping American war plans current as China's military modernizes at speed. On that third point, Paparo has spoken publicly about turning the Taiwan Strait into what he calls an "unmanned hellscape" in the event of a Chinese invasion, deploying thousands of low-cost drones to delay and disrupt any amphibious assault while the full weight of the American military mobilizes. The Pentagon's REPLICATOR program, launched in 2023 with a billion dollars in initial funding, is designed to field these systems at scale. A fellow admiral told The Economist that Paparo "goes to sleep every night thinking about winning or losing the next great war."
I have written before about the Sullivan Doctrine and the trade and technology dimensions of the US-China relationship, and years before that about how Japan and other Asian nations view the United States through cultural lenses that Americans rarely consider. The Paparo story is the military and diplomatic face of the same broader question: will the United States continue to maintain the institutional architecture that has kept the Pacific stable since 1945? The trade controls, the military presence, the alliance commitments are not separate policies. They are facets of a single posture, and they depend on each other. A trade war with China that is not backed by credible military deterrence is just noise. A military posture that is not backed by diplomatic relationships and economic partnership is just hardware. Each of Paparo's three challenges is simultaneously a present-tense operational problem and a narrative problem: allies need to believe the commitment is real, the Pentagon needs to believe the Pacific is the priority, and the war plans need to reflect actual Chinese capabilities rather than comfortable assumptions.
The Economist's conference scene at the end of the article is telling. Several hundred officers, bureaucrats, defense analysts, tech executives, and allied representatives spent two days in windowless rooms near Waikiki Beach, discussing how to win a war against "the adversary," universally understood to mean China. The discussion was cerebral but pragmatic. These are the people doing the actual work of deterrence, and they are doing it with focus and professionalism. Whether they will have the political support they need is the question that hangs over everything Paparo does. That Paparo "goes to sleep every night thinking about winning or losing the next great war" is both comforting and sobering. Comforting because the person in charge of deterrence appears singularly focused. Sobering because it suggests how much of America's strategic position in Asia rests on the competence and judgment of individual commanders rather than on robust institutions. The Indo-Pacific Command has existed since 1947. The alliances it supports have endured for decades. But the political commitment to those alliances is always contingent, always dependent on the next election, the next crisis elsewhere, the next shift in presidential attention. With luck, Paparo's wargames will not be needed. But luck is not a strategy, and history suggests the Pacific has a way of punishing leaders who confuse narrative confidence with actual capability.