The Pacific Commander's Fleet Is All in the Middle East: Winning Without Fighting Because He Has Nothing to Fight With
Paparo made the cover of Time, with the line that his forces cover half the globe and must win without fighting; that same week 40% of the underway Navy was tied up in the Middle East, Indo-Pacific Command had just been renamed Pacific Command, and its ships were all in the Indian Ocean.
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The Pacific commander's forces are all sitting in the Indian Ocean
Time's cover line for Paparo was that his forces cover half the globe and must win without fighting. The show's reading is different: it isn't that he doesn't want to fight, it's that there is nothing to fight with. That week two carriers, roughly 16 destroyers and several thousand troops ashore were tied down in the Middle East; about 40% of the underway Navy was in the Persian Gulf or the broader Middle East region, 30% of the missile inventory is already gone, and even the carrier he is supposed to command is in the Middle East. This year Indo-Pacific Command was renamed back to Pacific Command, billed as a return to tradition — but going by where the fleet actually is, if you genuinely wanted to command this force you would want to call it Indo-Pacific Command. As for the forward headquarters west of the International Date Line that people have argued over for years: historically it has often amounted to two people with backpacks, who then have to turn around and borrow forces from the rear.
— BrianAmerica's forward resupply in the Pacific is held hostage by FedEx
The only way to move forces into the Indo-Pacific and get parts out to the fleet is to sign a contract with DHL or FedEx. During one funding freeze the government was four months behind on shipping charges for joint exercises, and FedEx simply stopped service — in the words of the person who lived it, they are a real company, and when they provide a service they expect to get paid. The problem is not just the unpaid bills: as they see it, every shipping company is now penetrated to the point where it cannot be discussed. And the reason they cannot do without this just-in-time chain is that the parts are short to begin with: you cannot afford to stockpile them forward, and putting them on a supply ship is the same as locking them away — three parts all riding on one cargo ship means nobody can use any of them. In peacetime this fragility never gets counted in the readiness ledger.
— JustinThe Pentagon designs its processes around money that only goes up
It is 39 days to the midterms. The expectation on the table is Democrats netting 20 to 40 House seats and 4 in the Senate, with the Iran war pushing further in that direction. At a closed-door Hudson session, staff from the congressional minority side offered this judgment: if the Senate flips, the defense budget goes flat or declines again. Normally, even when one chamber flips, you can still count on a wash or a point or two of growth — but this is not the usual game: the sitting defense secretary is deeply unpopular, the policy shop has not been talking to Congress, and the other side's posture is not to play hardball but to make it hurt. The trouble is that the department's internal decision processes are organized around money that only grows, so it can be spread across an ever more varied set of startups and experimental programs. When the topline shrinks, nobody has rehearsed the turn.
— BrianA fleet you can afford to buy but not to sustain is paid for in readiness
This year's $1.1 trillion budget will probably pass, because every side wants it banked before Congress turns over. But its composition is overwhelmingly capital: $82 billion for shipbuilding alone, stacked on top of roughly $60 billion the year before, plus a pile of fighter aircraft. Ships and planes are expensive not to buy but to keep — people, maintenance and operating cycles are bills you pay every single year. So three or four years out, when that force structure delivers, the budget will already be flat or falling, and there are two roads: retire the older equipment and hold force size steady, or refuse to shrink and let readiness hollow out. Nobody wants to be the one who shrinks the military, so the judgment is that at the end of this administration they will choose to protect size, and pay for it in readiness.
— BrianStanding up AI as its own service would make it useless to the force
So far all that has been announced about the AI Force is that there will be one — not what it is, or where it sits. Justin's objection is that it bets on two mutually contradictory premises at once: that AI is so special it takes extraordinary skill and knowledge to use well, and that it is so powerful it can think for us. Both cannot be true. More telling are the analogies they reach for: the document names SOCOM, NRO, NSA, CIA — that is, they want a special establishment where their own people call the shots. The cautionary precedent is electronic warfare and signals intelligence: once you carve it out, it becomes something you cannot talk about, that needs special permission and dedicated funding to touch, that mid-level commanders never think to use day to day, until all that is left is squabbling over who has authority over whom. Tony's addition is that the autonomy industry is already actually fielding is being conflated with general-purpose chatbots in a lab.
— JustinHuman-machine teaming on one platform is a design that holds you back
The Naval Institute's journal ran a piece arguing that autonomous technology is not mature enough and the answer is optionally manned ships — people aboard minding them in normal times, jumping ship once a mission gets dangerous enough. The show considers that a step backwards. In the Air Force, on collaborative combat aircraft, pilots have already said it in their own words: I'm flying a stealth aircraft, and a robot plane flying next to me only draws attention to me — why can't it go somewhere else and pull fire. Ships are the same: a robot ship cannot be both cheap and as fast and as long-legged as a crewed one, or there would be no point building it; the result is that it refuels more often, slows the formation down, and has to be protected with detached forces when the shooting starts. The conclusion is to use humans and robots separately, each doing what it does best. Tony calls this combined minds — complementary teaming the way infantry and tanks work, rather than walking side by side down the same road at the same target.
— BrianThe munitions saved for China are being picked up in Iran
An Anduril Dive-LD washed up on the Iranian coast. It had been hunting mines in the strait and had been working for about four months; the deepest part of the Persian Gulf is only around five hundred feet, and large vehicles of this kind have real trouble holding depth control in shallow water. Once it surfaced it was spotted and salvaged — Iran brought in booms and cranes, and an army supposedly beaten to a pulp pulled off a complete recovery. The Pentagon says there was nothing classified aboard, but the reasonable assumption is that once American hardware is in Iranian hands, the information flows quickly to Russia and China. The costlier line item is munitions: PrSM and JASSM stocked for a China conflict have been fired, and the duds and wreckage stay on the ground — which means both spending the China inventory and delivering the technology to the door. The historical precedent is the Sidewinder lodged in a MiG that the Soviets later reverse-engineered.
— BrianThe compute advantage stops at the edge of the physical world
America's compute advantage is seen as the more durable source of power — a model is a string of numbers on a hard drive, and you can stop neither distillation nor theft, but chips and semiconductor equipment you can stop. As for what share of China's progress comes from distillation, Jordan's line is that nobody really knows; what is plain is that someone is willing to spend this much effort on it, which tells you it saves time and money. The question is how that advantage converts into hard power. Inference genuinely eats compute: from an answer in five seconds, to thinking, to an agent working for days on end, to a thousand agents working for weeks. But beyond the software side — cyber, targeting solutions, electronic warfare — something still has to fly out, float, or sit underwater. What has actually shown up instead is human dependence: in that school strike in Iran, the operators assumed Palantir Maven would recognize that the data was out of date — the database only had old data, and no amount of compute makes old data anything but old.
— JordanIn their own words · checked verbatim
So he owns half the world from an operational perspective, but no forces to actually do anything with. So, yeah, you're going to be winning without fighting.
Brian5:12
And we got so behind on payment at one point because we went through a government freeze and FedEx is like a real company and expects to be paid for the services they render that they cut them off.
Justin7:12
Their decision making processes are organized around the idea of more and more money coming in so they can devote it to a more and more diverse array of startup companies and experimental activities.
Brian11:15
Nobody wants to be part of a shrinking military. Right. So the Trump administration at the end of its term will be trying to keep the military big and probably at the cost of readiness.
Brian15:23
And talking about an AI force is really just saying, I want a group of strategic thinkers to just think about AI all day. And it's like implementation. The more you segregate this from the rest of the force, the worse it's going to be, whether we are talking about the federal government side or the military side.
Tony36:25
So for all those reasons, man on man teaming just doesn't work. We got to keep the people and the robots actually separate from one another and use them for what they each do best.
Brian50:55
we basically have just dumped a bunch of new technology on the Iranians that we were hoping to hold on to for China.
Brian58:24
Like you're still stuck with, OK, your command and control is only so good as like the things that you are commanding and controlling, which are physical and in the real world and have to like fly around and get wet.
Jordan1:06:53
Figures
| Share of the underway Navy deployed to the Persian Gulf / Middle East | about 40% | 4:11 |
| Missile inventory already expended, as cited in the episode | 30% | 4:11 |
| Carriers and destroyers oriented on the Middle East | 2 carriers, about 16 destroyers | 4:11 |
| Ships underway in that region | about 24-25 | 6:12 |
| Days to the midterm elections | 39 | 10:12 |
| Expected Democratic net House gain | 20 to 40 seats | 10:12 |
| Expected Democratic net Senate gain | 4 seats | 10:12 |
| This year's defense budget | about $1.1 trillion | 15:23 |
| This year's shipbuilding budget | $82 billion (about $60 billion the year before) | 15:23 |
| How long the Dive-LD had been operating before Iran recovered it | about 4 months | 57:20 |
Glossary
- work at risk
- A contractor fronts development with its own or VC money, betting the government will pay for it later under a contract.
- FME (foreign material exploitation)
- Taking an adversary's physical hardware apart once you have it, to reverse-engineer it and extract technology and intelligence.
- CCA (collaborative combat aircraft)
- An uncrewed wingman program, aircraft designed to fly in formation with crewed fighters.
- combined minds
- Tony's coinage: apply combined-arms logic so humans and machines complement each other, rather than doing the same thing side by side.
- hellscape
- The concept of turning the Taiwan Strait into terrain an adversary cannot cross by flooding it with large numbers of uncrewed systems.
How to listen
Investors who care about what actually backs deterrence against China, defense-tech founders, and anyone who has to call which way the US defense budget breaks next year.
The state-dinner riffing from 0:00-4:00, and the ukulele folk song after 1:07.