If COM Were King for a Day
Part 1: The Inside Blunting Force
Sankar’s 8th Thesis
, the CTO of Palantir and creator of First Breakfast, released The Defense Reformation in October 2024. In the piece, Sankar lays out his “Theses of Defense Reformation,” 18 ideas to reform the Department of Defense acquisition process.While we agree with many of Sankar’s points, and disagree with a few, we want to explore his 8th Thesis, that Combatant Commands (CCMDs) need budget to introduce strategic competition:
“Enabling CCMDs as the buyers approximates market forces. Programs will have to respond to the needs and feedback not of a captive service alone but also the folks that must employ these capabilities in anger. Even a budgetary reallocation of 5% would enable this market mechanism. With a modicum of economic power, CCMDs can harness the defiant and creative American spirit by creating situations for Service [Program Executive Offices] PEOs to respond to. This is how free markets work.”
King COM
If Admiral Paparo, Commander, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (COM INDOPACOM) became King COM for a day, what should he convene, fund, prioritize, and field?
Capability Bins & Operational Concept
As Sankar notes, the traditional acquisition structure is primarily based around the military services (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Space Force). The services bin their acquisition programs into service-logical chunks. For example, the Army has the infantry portfolio (Program Executive Office [PEO] Soldier), armored vehicle portfolio (PEO Ground Combat Systems), helicopter portfolio (PEO aviation), etc.
This approach is appropriate for the services, but not for a combatant commander. COM should instead bin his capabilities across the operational concepts appropriate for his theater.
INDOPACOM has three logical bins of capability. These bins correspond to operational concepts which would be employed under most any military strategy.
The first bin is for the fight on Taiwan or inside the first island chain (FIC). This is the inside blunting force that lives within red’s weapons engagement zone and will be the first to respond to PRC aggression. Under the 2018 defense strategy, these are known as contact and blunting forces. In order for the inside force to be effective in denying the PLA from achieving its objectives, it must be adequately resourced.
As with the Marine Defense Battalion at Wake in 1941 and the defense of the Philippines, insufficiently resourced inside forces can only hold on for so long before being overwhelmed.
The second bin of capability supports the outside surge force based across the Pacific theater primarily responsible for seizing the initiative once the PRC has committed the PLA to a military attack. Under the 2018 defense strategy, these are surge forces. The surge force must have the capability to break through the PLA’s anti-access/area denial bubble and strike high value/payoff targets.
The WWII analogue to the outside surge force includes the failures of American British Dutch Australian Command (ABDACOM) and the victory at Midway.
The third and final bin are those forces responsible for a protracted war in which Washington must impose costs against Beijing until the PLA is no longer able to seriously resist the coalition. Under the 2018 defense strategy, these are mostly homeland forces, whose potential must be converted into a decisive force capable of power projection and victory in Asia.
The analogy here is the island hopping campaign against Imperial Japan.
Inside Blunting Force - Check the PLA Assault
While this force may be at the highest level of risk, it also has the most defined mission and a strong deterrent value since it is highly visible and proximate to the PLA. Once conflict begins, the inside force must blunt the PLA assault and buy time for the outside force. COM cannot wait for indications and warnings to spool up the inside force, it must be ready today.
The character of the inside force is ground and ground-enabler heavy. This force will fight a conventional war in a non-traditional way: without the typical air and sea superiority or support that American formations are accustomed to. Much of the inside force’s air and sea support will come from new attritable drone systems as well as the Taiwan military.
A generation of Marine officers, Army special forces officers, Naval special warfare officers, light infantry Army officers, Army advisors, fires officers, engineers and critical enablers must be developed to make the concept work. They must have habitual relationships in training and receive extensive mentoring from USN and USAF leaders to understand the theater concept.
Counter-mobility engineers, anti-ship cruise missile (ASCM) batteries, and integrated air defense assets will be critical to supporting the success of the inside force, not to mention the entirety of the Taiwan military.
The output of this group would be an INDOPACOM led and HQ USMC approved annex to Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO), which is a USMC service-led operational concept. While we are proponents of EABO, it is still in maturation and not totally suited to COM’s priorities. It is primarily a Navy Marine Corps-centric document whose foundational logic is that the USMC is able to set conditions for Navy operations.
The problem is that the bulk of the inside force’s combat capability resides in the Marine Corps and the inside force will not fight alongside naval forces until much later in any Taiwan campaign. The PLA’s military capability (particularly in the rocket force [PLARF] and navy [PLAN]) and the desire to avoid losses to blue platforms make any significant naval support to the inside force infeasible until such a time that the PLA is unable to heavily attrit American platforms. EABO seeks to be a naval enabler for a fleet that will never make it to the fight.
Therefore, EABO requires an annex for what the USMC does when it's locked into a fight in and around Taiwan without the US Navy for an extended time. This requires far more USMC coordination with the Taiwan military and the US Army than it does with the US Navy. Perhaps an annex named Expeditionary Blunting Operations (EBO) would be a good start.
EBO would involve all services but with the USMC and Army in the drivers’ seats to 1) support the Taiwan military and 2) wage a blunting campaign against the PLA assault. This would involve forces fighting on the island (what the USMC calls Stand-in Forces [SIF]) composed of the bulk of both Marines and SOF stuck in the fight. It would also involve light formations able to rapidly reinforce during crisis, including I Marine Expeditionary Force, I Corps, XVIII Airborne Corps, 25th Infantry Division, and 11th Airborne Division.
COM Priorities for the Inside Blunting Force
Sea Mine Fleet
Rapid Beach Reconfiguration
Enable Green Heavy Mechanized Beach Counterattack
Drone-Delivered WAAM (DD-WAAM)
FPV Drone Capability
Blue Counter-SOF
Terp Soak
Green F-35T
Information Operations (IO) Support
Sea Mine Fleet
The importance of mines in a war over Taiwan is well studied and discussed here, here, and here. The problem is that mines are not sexy. The mine warfare community does not have the bureaucratic pull within the Naval organization equal to its battlefield importance.
Augment the Navy’s Program Executive Office Unmanned and Small Combatants (PEO USC) and orient Planned Maintenance System (PMS) 495 Mine Warfare to the inside force as a major customer. It is not unusual for program managers to have multi-service customers. For example, the Army’s HIMARS program serves both the Army and Marine Corps.
COM should task PMS 495 Mine Warfare to create capabilities to counter PLA counter-mine platforms. Only by employing the best mines and disrupting the PLA’s capability to remove them can the coalition get maximum mileage out of this critical capability.
For example, Marine Littoral Regiments (MLRs) should be capable of deploying sea minefields and killing PLA counter-mine forces, but the USMC does not have this institutional experience. Naval Special Warfare could also use this help. Rear Admiral Kevin Smith and Melissa Kirkendall could help bring this expertise where it is most needed.
Outcome: Large areas of the Taiwan Strait shutdown for surface movement, protecting landing beaches and causing the red fleet to canalize, concentrate, and slow down.
Cost: COM receives direct liaison authority (DIRLAUTH) and limited tasking authority for PEO USC.
Rapid Beach Reconfiguration
There are only so many landing beaches on Taiwan. Every beach requires a rapid reconfiguration capability. A combination of rock slides, collapsing highways, sea-walling, dredging, rapid river diversion, intentional flooding, building demolitions, rapid concrete tetrapod deployment, jetty construction, and bridging modification could potentially stall a PLA landing for critical hours or days and create a lethal linear danger zone across landing beaches.
Outcome: The PLA’s limited engineering units are overwhelmed and destroyed on the landing beaches, causing the PLA’s beachhead seizure phase of operations to significantly lengthen. This makes red forces more vulnerable to all of COM’s and Taiwan’s existing capabilities, compounding their lethal effects.
Cost: Setting up a new combined office between COM, Taiwan Ministry of National Defense (MND), and Taiwan civil authorities to enable construction activity on Taiwan.
Enable Green Heavy Mechanized Beach Counterattack
As Taiwan observers have consistently pointed out, the best defense against an amphibious assault is to launch an armoured counterattack against the beachhead. It is not the time at this late hour to bet against history. The coalition must pursue all the tools available to itself. The Taiwan Army will do the heavy lifting in this respect, but COM has an opportunity to enable and greatly increase the chance of success.
In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the US Army committed to the “Big 5,” which laid the foundation for American ground dominance up to today.
Today, the US Army is focused on a new “Big 6” while leaving Taiwan behind. The Taiwan Army needs COM’s and USD(A&S) Bill LaPlante’s help advocating for a “Taiwan Big 6”: the AH-64E Apache helicopter, the M1A2T Abrams tank, the Clouded Leopard infantry fighting vehicle, HIMARS rocket artillery, M109A7 Paladin self-propelled artillery (SPARTY), and PATRIOT air defense. These are the critical systems that will enable Taiwan soldiers to throw the PLA back into the sea for minimal American lives lost.
Without the credible capability to defeat PLA forces at the beach, CCP and PLA decision makers can always believe (as their Russian counterparts do) that flowing more bodies into Taiwan can lead to victory.
Why are the “Taiwan Big 6” important?
AH-64E Apache, M1A2T Abrams, & Clouded Leopard: These fighting platforms make up the heart of the heavy mechanized counterattack force. While initiatives are currently underway to provide Taiwan with Apaches and Abrams, more should be done to sunset and replace Taiwan’s SuperCobra, M60A3, CM-11, and CM-12 fleets with the modern preferred platforms.
The US should also provide assistance in modernizing and maximizing Taiwan’s indigenous production of Clouded Leopard fighting vehicles.
M109A7 Paladin SPARTY & HIMARS: Between the Napoleonic battlefield and WWI, artillery became the single most important capability employed to produce enemy casualties. Despite multiple revolutions in military affairs, artillery is still the undisputed King of Battle. This is because technological advances across the military often end up making artillery more, not less, lethal:
“Statistics shared by Ukrainian physicians demonstrate that more than 70% of all Ukrainian combat casualties are due to artillery and rocket barrages from Russian forces, which has resulted in significant polytrauma to multiple organ systems.”
Artillery serves as the foundation and pivot point for combined arms operations. Without heavy and local supporting fires, no amount of drones, tanks, planes, or ships are going to make a difference for the inside force fighting on Taiwan. COM must expedite Paladin and HIMARS fielding to Taiwan.
PATRIOT: As the US Army begins moving to a next generation air defense system, Patriot remains a battle-tested and known quantity. Timelines to field this system to Taiwan need to be cut down.
The Taiwan forces which receive the above equipment will require American advisors to speed up Taiwan’s training cycles, increase their proficiency, and provide US capabilities during wartime. COM should advocate for advisors in key capability areas, such as air defense (PATRIOT) and army aviation.
Outcome: PLA commanders’ ability to seize and hold a beachhead on the main island of Taiwan thrown into doubt.
Cost: The USMC alongside COM must advocate for more conventional US Army involvement in the Taiwan problem set.
Drone Delivered Wide Area Anti-Armor Munition: DD-WAAM
To counter the USSR’s conventional ground force advantage during the Cold War (similar to the modern PLA’s ground force capacity advantage), the US Air Force devised a program called WAAM (Wide Area Anti-armor Munition). WAAM was meant to be a family of area munitions developed to provide tactical air forces a multiple-kill capability against tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery, and support vehicles.
The Army pursued similar projects such as Brilliant Anti-Tank (BAT), a munition designed to be incorporated into ATACMS.
The time has come to check the records and bring these programs back to life. With Ukrainian forces employing drone motherships to launch FPV drones as a kind of submunition, there could be potential to make a drone-launched anti-armor submunition weapon that the inside force can employ independent of conventional air support.
Outcome: DD-WAAM causes armored vehicle traffic jams along avenues of approach leaving red landing beaches. This not only creates more obstacles, but reduces the amount of space available within the targeted beachheads for the PLA to conduct breakouts, reducing the chances that red will be able to assault inland.
Cost: COM needs funding and authorities to initiate a new start DD-WAAM program.
First Person View (FPV) Drone Capability
In September 2024, a private sector delegation from the US met with Taiwanese defense officials and industry reps to explore collaboration opportunities on combined drone and counter-drone projects. This is an essential first step, but we still have a long way to go.
Lessons learned from Ukraine show that individual First Person View (FPV) attack drones should be viewed as a combination of expendable ammunition and reconfigurable software.
In Ukraine, drone software requirements change every couple weeks as a result of new Russian counter-drone TTPs.
Outcome: Taiwan and the US have a more robust and resilient drone generation, sustainment, and employment capability.
Cost: COM needs funding and authorities to initiate a new start program where companies like Anduril, Shield AI, and AeroVironment have opportunities to collaborate with Taiwan’s National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology to develop a dynamic software and drone system employable by both US and Taiwan forces.
Blue Counter-SOF
As shown in Ukraine, a major SOF task is to kill enemy SOF. PLA ground forces rely on their organic SOF to conduct deep battlefield reconnaissance. These PLA SOF formations are one of the few organic ISR capabilities that PLA ground commanders can rely on.
By fixing and finishing PLA SOF, the coalition will be able to quickly blind and demoralize PLA landing forces. This plays to an enduring US strength, since blue SOF are far higher quality than red SOF.
These don’t need to be highly tasked Delta Force or Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU) teams. Basic operators graduating as SEALs, Raiders, or Green Berets need to have counter-SOF as a major core competency. Some of these teams should then be merged together to form a standing joint task force on Taiwan in high readiness with operational control (OPCON) to the inside force commander and administrative control (ADCON) to their respective services.
Outcome: Red forces unable to deploy survivable manned SOF formations during wartime.
Cost: COM, SOCOM, EUCOM, CENTCOM, and the services that generate SOF must convene to write new counter-SOF doctrine for the era of great power war. This new doctrine will then drive training modernization to create US SOF teams focused on the counter-SOF mission.
Terp Soak
The inside force will spend the vast majority of its time training and fighting alongside Taiwan, Japanese, Filipino, and Korean forces. Strong interpersonal relationships between coalition officers and NCOs are a force multiplier for nearly all the capabilities COM wields. The current level of translator/interpreter support is insufficient to construct the strong bonds required to form coalition cohesion.
Therefore, COM should establish an INDOPACOM translator interpreter program with branch offices in Washington DC, Honolulu, Monterey, Tokyo, Taipei, Manila, and Seoul.
This organization should work not only to provide US forces with translation and interpretation capabilities, but provide coalition partners with English-speaking linguists.
The organization also requires a strong CI and security section to establish the trustworthiness of terps and vet them across Category I, II, and III classifications. An education and training section should also support the CAT I workforce in upgrading to CAT II, and the same with CAT II upgrading to CAT III.
Outcome: Abundant translation and interpretation resources available across echelons from the team level up to corps level command. This resource facilitates communication and understanding on the inside force’s critical training and combat tasks. The office can be scaled up to meet the demands of the outside surge force and decisive force as required.
Cost: This program focuses on cultivating a high-demand low-density workforce. This requires significant cash resources and a small but dedicated crew to manage the program and branch offices.
Green F-35T
The inside force will receive the majority of its air support from Taiwan military forces. By foregoing the potential of arming the Taiwan Air Force (TAF) with a version of the F-35, COM leaves many efficiencies on the table.
First, upgrading the TAF to a 5th gen baseline has the obvious advantage of shifting the platform exchange ratio in Taiwan’s favor.
More importantly, a TAF F-35’s advanced sensor suite would provide intelligence and targeting data to American forces both on Taiwan and throughout the theater.
Finally, a more capable TAF is able to contest air superiority and provide close air support (CAS) to American combat forces engaged IVO Taiwan.
Cost: Taiwan maintains around 300+ fighter aircraft. Total cost for procuring 150 F-35A models would approach 13.5 billion, not something totally out of the question considering 1) Taiwan may want to make a large purchase soon and 2) the 150 aircraft could be spread across different manufacturing lots.
Note that these costs are to Taiwan, not the US (depending on the financing vehicle). Most of the program would be covered by Taiwan dollars, but COM may want to pony up air advisors for a new F-35T fleet.
Information Operations (IO) Support
Deterrence is the practice of discouraging or restraining a nation-state from taking unwanted actions, such as an armed attack. It involves an effort to stop or prevent an action. By publicly advertising the inside blunting force, Washington is able to credibly communicate that it has the capability to deny Beijing’s military objectives in regard to Taiwan.
Cost: Convincing American political leaders to be more open about discussing the capabilities of a potential inside blunting force and challenging Beijing’s currently unenforceable “redline” claims surrounding the stationing of foreign military forces on Taiwan.
IO elements already assigned to USINDOPACOM are able to refocus on this effort.
Conclusion
Our next article in the series will explore COM’s priorities for the outside surge force.