The United States strives to maintain regional stability and safeguard the sovereign rights of all nations in the Indo-Pacific—the most consequential theater of operations for the 21st century. China, Russia, and North Korea are threatening that stability and security.1 These states create instability to try to change the current rules-based international system to their advantage, but the U.S. joint force, working with increasingly capable allies and partners, is constantly preparing to deter them from upending the regional order.
U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is the theater joint force commander, employing Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force capabilities bolstered by service initiatives such as Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Lisa Franchetti’s new Navigation Plan 2024 (NavPlan) and its implementation plan, Project 33. Those service capabilities—knitted together as a joint force—strengthen assurance and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific by expanding the battlespace to deter conflict, respond to crises, and, if necessary, fight and win.
Core to the capabilities of the joint force and its interoperability with allies and partners are the readiness and modernization of each U.S. military service. Project 33 provides a clear path to improve the Navy as an individual service and enhance its contributions to the joint warfighting ecosystem.2
Through Project 33, the Navy will increase readiness by: reducing maintenance backlogs to improve combat surge capability; operationalizing robotic and autonomous systems (UxSs); redoubling efforts to recruit and retain the right talent; improving flexible training to build sailors’ tactical proficiency; and restoring critical infrastructure to generate and sustain the ready forces required.
Building capital ships takes years. Therefore, to increase warfighting capability in the near term, the CNO is focusing on rapidly developing, fielding, and integrating UxSs. These systems will augment the multimission conventional force to increase lethality, sensing, and survivability.
Project 33 also emphasizes the fleet maritime operations centers (MOCs) as the Navy’s central warfighting systems to increase information and decision advantage.
Robotic and Autonomous Systems
Building on the Replicator Initiative announced by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks in May 2023 and now employed in the Indo-Pacific, Project 33 will allow the Navy to operate in more areas with greater capability.3 Unmanned systems provide the ability to project fires and effects dynamically, at any time, from multiple axes, and with mass. Some capabilities are difficult for adversaries to detect or counterattack. Project 33’s vision to provide more munitions on more platforms in more places, and its focus on counter-C5ISR is key to making the Navy—and the joint force—more lethal and survivable. For example, as Vice Admiral Rob Goucher, Commander, Submarine Forces, recently wrote in these pages, “UUVs [unmanned undersea vehicles] will allow the submarine to conduct multiple operations at the same time, such as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), acoustic collection, and bottom surveys. A UUV can get into areas too shallow, too deep, or too risky for a submarine—shifting risk from the submarine and crew to a robot.”4
As another example, Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific’s Offensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics program is testing and fielding capabilities that focus on autonomous swarming tactics using small but massed attritable UxSs in key geographic areas.5 In addition, continued attention to autonomous systems under the Army’s Project Convergence, incorporated into exercises such as Balikatan with the Philippines, allows the joint force to rehearse and refine capabilities dynamically and continually.
Sea Denial/Control
Sea denial and sea control are both core Project 33 goals. In the Indo-Pacific theater, the joint force is exploring ways to use geography to canalize and restrict adversary movement. Traditional and new capabilities being developed will make key areas a wasteland for adversaries with malign intentions. Artificial intelligence (AI)—as yet a largely unfulfilled promise in emerging technology—will be key to enable UxSs. There are roles for AI to play in every aspect of sea denial and sea control, from ISR to fires, command-and-control, and sustainment. The military must continue to provide clear requirements, use cases, and concepts of operation to push industry. To do that, military leaders must be technology-literate, with expertise from computer sciences to engineering. For these reasons and more, the CNO’s NavPlan rightly calls for a campaign of learning and investing in warfighter competency.
At the same time, the joint force must not “overlearn” the lessons coming out of the current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. While the use of UxSs is significant in both conflicts, those platforms are not the long-duration, autonomous systems that can be recovered if unused, with capable, large, discrete payloads required for the vast distances of the Indo-Pacific.
In addition to the employment of UxSs, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is expanding its ability to manage and operate across the vast battlespace of the theater by rehearsing, exercising, refining, and improving command and control. This includes training and exercises that certify and improve joint task force–level commands that could be established quickly to address crises or conflict in the region, all the way down to service operations centers, such as the MOCs that Project 33 is enhancing. Annual joint exercises, including Pacific Sentry and Northern Edge, and service exercises—such as the Air Force’s Return of Forces to the Pacific and the Army’s Operation Pathways—provide large-scale testing of headquarters from the combatant-command level down to individual fighting units to continually test and improve command and control.
Sustainment
The all-domain, dynamic combat power provided by conventional forces, supplemented by UxS, must also be sustained throughout the theater. A key Project 33 element is restoring the critical infrastructure that generates, maneuvers, and sustains the force for the fight.6 An example of this is pushing increased naval maintenance infrastructure forward to Guam, Japan, and other areas in the western Pacific to facilitate increased naval operations in the region in the ongoing competition phase, as well as supporting combat repair in the event of conflict.
The entire joint force is creating tools to improve knowledge and awareness of sustainment stocks and forces—treating sustainment as a part of the fires and effects processes. This will improve decision-making superiority by allowing commanders to understand and task sustainment across the theater based on where supplies are being consumed and which sustainment forces can provide resupply. In addition to sustainment-decision tools, the joint force is improving force posture in theater to support distributed military operations, while also recognizing that all activities to sustain U.S. fighting forces will be contested. The Navy’s continued focus in Project 33 to improve and expand global networks of facilities and other infrastructure is critical to strengthening a combat-credible force.7
Joint . . .
Thanks to almost 40 years of dedicated actions following the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, multiple military operations worldwide, and modernization efforts such as Project 33, the U.S. military is now more joint than ever—a far greater whole than the sum of its service- and domain-specific components alone. The services are integrated into a warfighting ecosystem at the tactical and operational levels, and they continue to pursue ways to increase integration.8 U.S. command-and-control, exercises, operations, security cooperation activities, and crisis-and-conflict planning are consistently employed, tested, and improved to ensure combat power in the Indo-Pacific can deter adversaries, assure allies, respond to crises, and prevail across the range of warfare.
. . . and Combined
NavPlan 2024 makes the salient point that there is no scenario in which the United States fights a major conflict alone. So, in addition to command and control of U.S. forces, U.S. IndoPaCom is continuing to refine and improve support to, and work with, other militaries and their headquarters. These efforts include the reconstitution of U.S. Forces Japan as a joint force headquarters reporting to U.S. IndoPaCom and as a key counterpart to the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) Joint Operations Command. This new command-and-control relationship and bilateral capability supports the agreements made by the U.S. and Japanese governments to upgrade their respective frameworks to integrate bilateral operations and capabilities and allow greater interoperability and planning between U.S. and allied forces in peacetime and during contingencies.
Recent examples are numerous. Take, for instance, the enhanced trilateral defense exercises, improved information sharing, and increased cooperation on ballistic-missile defense among the United States, Japan, and South Korea to address North Korean provocations.9 Throughout 2024, the three allies conducted two trilateral maritime exercises, a trilateral aerial exercise—escorting U.S. bombers operating in the region—and the inaugural Freedom Edge, a trilateral multidomain exercise. Each event improved interoperability, signaled to multiple adversary nations commitment and solidarity, and provided helpful lessons for better operational cooperation in the future.
Farther south, U.S.-Philippines-Australia-Japan joint patrols are supporting the Philippines in its attempts to push back against illegal Chinese claims in the South China Sea. These activities signal to Beijing that the United States has a strong coalition against coercive actions. They also assure allies and partners that the United States can not only support them unilaterally, but also convene other nations in the region and work through interoperability issues together in peacetime.
All these joint and combined exercises and activities strengthen U.S. alliances and communicate to adversaries the futility of aggression.
No Time to Bluff
The CNO’s NavPlan and Project 33 set aggressive and necessary goals to improve readiness and prepare for crisis or conflict by 2027—just two years in the future. There can be no bluffing when it comes to deterring adversaries and assuring allies. The U.S. joint force must have unilateral combat capability and the combined power with its allies and partners to fight and win. Project 33 is enhancing those efforts and capabilities in the Indo-Pacific, and I am confident it will give us the capability and capacity to prevail.
* Special thanks to Colonel Nathan K. Finney, U.S. Army, for his help with this article.
1. Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Richard Fontaine, “The Axis of Upheaval: How America’s Adversaries Are Uniting to Overturn the Global Order,” Foreign Affairs 103 no. 3 (May/June 2024), 50–63.
2. ADM Lisa M. Franchetti, USN, Chief of Naval Operations Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy 2024; and James Holmes, “The Navy’s New NavPlan Sets Its Sights on China, from a Sea Denial Stance,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 150, no. 9 (September 2024).
3. Joseph Clark, “Hicks Underscores U.S. Innovation in Unveiling Strategy to Counter China’s Military Buildup,” Department of Defense News, 28 August 2023.
4. VADM Robert M. Gaucher, “Maintaining Undersea Superiority: Status Report,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 150, no. 10 (October 2024).
5. Maison Piedfort, “NIWC Pacific’s Swarming Experimentation Aims to Advance Autonomous Warfare,” DVIDs, 26 July 2021.
6. Franchetti, Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy 2024
7. Salvatore R. Mercogliano, “Logistics Wins (and Loses) Wars,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 150, no. 2 (February 2024); and CDR Graham Scarbro, USN, “Strike Warfare’s Inventory Problem,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 149, no. 12 (December 2023).
8. See, for instance, the work of non-naval forces in support of seapower in the Indo-Pacific: GEN Charles Flynn and LTC Tim Devine, USA, “To Upgun Seapower in the Indo-Pacific, You Need an Army,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 150, no. 2 (February 2024); and VADM Brian Brown, USN (Ret.), “The Challenge of Joint Space Operations,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 150, no. 1 (January 2024).
9. The White House, “Fact Sheet: The Trilateral Leaders’ Summit at Camp David,” August 2023.
