In a war against China, the US could quickly exhaust its weapons. A new Indo-Pacific defense initiative might be the answer.
What would happen if China launched a barrage of ballistic missiles at US forces in the Indo-Pacific? China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has invested extensively in its standoff capabilities and in a high-intensity conflict would be capable of inflicting severe damage on US and allied forces. Even if the United States is successful in winning such a war, this scenario runs the risk of a Pyrrhic victory for US forces, in which they are victorious but at the cost of being unable to contest a future conflict.
The most significant reason for this risk is sustainment—specifically, the speed at which US capabilities are replaced after use. This vulnerability is apparent across all theaters of conflict, however the Pacific Ocean makes timely resupply exceptionally difficult. On October 1, the US Navy, in supporting Israel’s air and missile defense, launched a dozen counter-ballistic missiles, including SM3 interceptors. The US Department of Defense has proposed to cease production on the workhorse block of these missiles in fiscal year 2025, while output on the more advanced variant remains stagnant at a dozen missiles per year. It is possible that with this single engagement, the United States exhausted a significant portion of its global stockpile of advanced interceptors. This poses an alarming reality of how munition depletion impacts not only the prosecution of war but overall allied deterrence against opportunistic actors such as China, North Korea, or Russia in starting a conflict.
In the past, the United States has relied on its qualitative edge for its war-fighting systems. However, continued Chinese theft is eroding this advantage. As a result, near-peer Chinese capabilities now drastically outnumber US systems forcing a reckoning that requires strategic rebalancing to maintain credible deterrence. The United States can help mitigate these short- and medium-term challenges by taking advantage of its most significant strategic asset: the depth of its alliances and partnerships.
What is PIPIR?
Enter PIPIR—the Partnership for Indo-Pacific Industrial Resilience—a new multinational initiative launched in June to strengthen “defense industrial resilience to promote security, economic security, and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific.” If it reaches its potential, PIPIR can enable the United States and its partners to mitigate the risk of a Pyrrhic victory. Though still in its early stages, PIPIR has already drawn comparisons to the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, which coordinates the pooling of resources for the multinational delivery of critical weapon systems to Ukraine. If a parallel effort is based in Asia, it could enable faster provisioning of resources to Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, or even the United States if a war breaks out. This effort, by providing credible benefits to sustainment helps restore deterrence as China continues to modernize its military forces to reach world-class status by 2049.
For the United States, PIPIR also provides a unique benefit, as many Indo-Pacific partners are US military hardware and software customers and regularly train with US forces, ensuring familiarity with variants of US systems. The effort could also be a valuable forum to coordinate the various bilateral co-production efforts emerging across the region. These include possible co-production of artillery pieces with South Korea; missile and rocket systems, including Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, with Australia; hypersonic missile interceptors with Japan; and drones with Taiwan.
On October 7, PIPIR took its next step forward with an inaugural meeting based on the thirteen-country signed statement of principles for Indo-Pacific Defense Industrial Base Collaboration, which includes European partners. The meeting resulted in the creation of four institutionalized work streams: sustainment, production, supply chain resilience, and policy and optimization. Now that these nations have decided to pursue these important issues, PIPIR should work to integrate the appropriate existing bilateral and multilateral efforts with these work streams. If done effectively, such integration could dramatically boost the sustainment and production capabilities of the United States and its partners.
Avoiding the tyranny of distance
In addition to providing the United States and its partners with more options for sustainment, PIPIR, as a regional initiative, can support Washington’s strategic goals of mitigating war-time risk through its distributed logistics and basing model—a key objective of the United States Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM). In March, the then-INDOPACOM commander, Admiral John C. Aquilino, testified before the US Senate that “deterrence depends on the ability of the Joint Force to act quickly and decisively, which requires an increasingly flexible and distributed force posture and logistics network.” While pre-positioned stockpiles are a critical unilateral way of reducing the burden of resupply in a hot conflict, they are not a cure-all for INDOPACOM’s logistical challenges. Pre-positioned stockpiles are targetable by adversaries and cannot, in a truly distributed force posture, be of sufficient size for the duration of a hot conflict. Moreover, the larger the stockpiles and a force’s reliance on them, the more damage their destruction would cause to its readiness.
Here, co-production and the possible value of PIPIR to coordinate can genuinely shine by providing supplies that US forces could be capable of using beyond their existing regional stockpiles. Further, coproduction in the region could reduce the lag time from production to delivery from weeks to days. Such cooperation would significantly mitigate the United States’ tyranny of distance challenge in parts of the Indo-Pacific and offset China’s anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) advantages.
Three steps to success
To be effective, PIPIR should next focus on three important objectives: account for current capabilities and shortfalls, standardize critical weapon systems among participants, and receive assurances or private commitments for using such produced systems in a crisis.
Resource and capability awareness: To begin, PIPIR should have each participant look hard at its defense production capacity and, importantly, the projected exportable capacity not already committed. This caveat is essential as, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, producers in Asia have already begun committing their resources to the fight. For example, in a two-part deal between the United States, South Korea, and Ukraine, Seoul agreed to provide 300,000 155 mm artillery shells to the United States to backfill its stockpiles with an equivalent amount supplied to Ukraine. However, with a current annual capacity of 200,000 155 mm shells, South Korea can’t provide any additional 155 mm capacity for partners and allies in the Indo-Pacific while also supporting Ukraine, which requires a whopping 75,000 shells a month. Indeed, public reports have found that South Korea may not have enough shells for more than a week of hot conflict with North Korea.
One must accept that the arms market is truly global, and with hot conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, Asian defense producers have not been idle. What was once excess capacity has already been dedicated to clients in these other regions. After completing an honest capability assessment of free capacity, PIPIR participants should consider leveraging funding to enhance the production of allies and partners for specific weapon systems. While such investments, if by the United States, would be made outside the US job market, the impacts on the sustainment of such production are well worth the investment. However, there remain strong political barriers to allocating taxpayer funds to defense industrial base investments abroad. Such a mechanism would have to be used sparingly and in cases where the benefit for sustainment outweighs the political backlash against the investment.
Champion standardization: PIPIR should emulate the commitments of the NATO industrial capacity expansion pledge toward standardization among key participants and systems. While NATO has the benefit of being an alliance-based effort, the long-term presence of the United States and the extensive foreign military sales to the region provide an opportunity to establish and expand the use of NATO standardization agreements to the Indo-Pacific. We have already seen examples of STANAGS with key regional allies such as the South Korea And Japan. Moreover, standardization does not have to be a monolithic effort. Instead, partner countries should identify critical systems that are most likely to require sustainment, such as missile and artillery capabilities, and focus on these systems first.
Ensure commitment to supply: PIPIR’s value is maximized in times of crisis when sustainment challenges add survivability and expenditure rates to the logistics equation. To ensure the effectiveness of PIPIR, the United States should work to develop security of supply agreements exclusive to PIPIR across partners that are willing to work on co-production and standardization. These agreements must come with clarity on the sequencing and preferential status of these agreements concerning other regional allies such as NATO. They should provide sufficient incentives to ensure participation. The United States should work with partners to identify situations in which partners are willing to support the US military’s sustainment and situations in which they will not accept the risks during a crisis.
Today, it’s still too early to tell if PIPIR has the potential to parallel or even surpass the efforts of the Ukraine Defense Contract Group. Apt diplomacy and consistent US leadership will be paramount to success. News that the Department of Defense’s most senior acquisition official, William A. LaPlante, chaired PIPIR’s inaugural meeting is a meaningful symbol that the United States is committed to seeing the initiative succeed.
At the same time, the opaque nature of which countries are participating in PIPIR points to China’s long shadow in the region. Regional partners will have to carefully balance economic interests with national security when working to expand defense industrial base cooperation. If the United States can prioritize the aforementioned recommendations and successfully navigate the discretion that PIPIR requires, then it can enable this new initiative to provide a strategic impact to improve allied deterrence and sustainment—ultimately saving American lives and treasure.