The Pacific Ocean covers more than half (53%) of the earth’s surface. The region is home to the world’s largest democracy in India, the largest Islamic nation in Indonesia, and half of the world’s population - more than 4 billion people- residing in countries with some of the fastest growing populations on the planet. Every day it’s estimated that IT infrastructure supports $15 to 22 trillion in transactions; the massive undersea cables spanning the Pacific are estimated to carry 95-99% of those transactions. Commerce transacted across these cables and across shipping routes traversing Pacific, has a major impact on the global economy. It’s no wonder that seven of the world’s 20 largest economies are in the Indo-Pacific region.
Ensuring peace and stability in the region is essential for modern life and humanity today. It’s a priority within the current national defense strategy and will be for generations to come. While we cannot alter the scale of the challenge, we must counter our adversaries’ numerical advantage and geographic proximity to be successful. The way we do that is by intentionally and strategically building a decision advantage that enables us to leverage information and make choices faster than our adversaries.
So as we consider what the future of stabilization in the region looks like, it requires a different way of thinking about how we operate there. It requires different approaches that deserve our collective attention and prioritization. Among them:
1. Resilience as the Foundation
Resilience is the precursor to deploying technology that is both operational and effective, and that we cannot strategically afford to lose. Investing in equipment or capabilities that outstrip our adversaries’ abilities means little if it is not reliably and securely able to operate or communicate.
2. Effective and Efficient Movement of Data
With resilience as its underpinning, moving data is a huge challenge in the region. The Pacific is a contested space and within it, there are considerations to make around the battle space itself, and the effective target ranges of both our systems and our adversaries. Threats like electromagnetic spectrum jamming, cyber interference, and attacks on relay stations affect how we maneuver forces as well as data. This requires intense and intentional logistics and supply chain considerations across a massive, massive area.
3. Expendable Equipment and Masking
Proximity, logistics, manufacturing capacity, and sheer numbers are all challenges our nation must overcome in the Indo-Pacific. Moreover, the balance is tipped in favor of our adversaries on all four of those fronts. Low-cost, expendable equipment, produced in mass, can help ensure we gather the information we need at the speed we need it. It helps to create an advantage in places where, on first glance, their isn’t one and furthers our efforts to enable warfighters and mission partners to act quickly and decisively when needed.
4. Leveraging AI for Technology and Operational Capability
When most people think about artificial intelligence they think about autonomous drones or reconnaissance capabilities. We need those but we also need to more thoroughly leverage AI-driven automation for everything from decision enhancement to command and control workflows with humans in the loop. To do it, we will need a network architecture aligned with the distributed nature of the mission and the need.
The modern battlespace is unlike one we’ve ever known. The way to stay ahead of adversaries is to create a decision advantage that enables us to securely collect, reliably assess and readily act on information. Key to this is to consistently harness enabling and emerging technology, allowing for new and sophisticated ways to gather and access critical data – sharing it when necessary, even in remote, austere locations.
The stability of the region is essential to American interests, to our security and to our prosperity. It is therefore incumbent upon all mission partners to meet the moment with the mindset it requires and the executional capabilities it demands. On this page, we will continue to chronicle both the challenges and opportunities in the region, including how GDIT teams are collaborating with agency and mission partners to bring continued stability and security to the Pacific.
