“China’s unprecedented aggression and military modernization poses a serious threat to the homeland, our allies and our partners,” Paparo told both the House and Senate Armed Services committees, citing China’s 300% increase in military drills designed to pressure and intimidate the government in Taipei to capitulate to Beijing’s demands for reunification with the mainland. “China’s increasingly aggressive actions near Taiwan are not just exercises, they are rehearsals,” Paparo has warned repeatedly. Chinese President Xi Jinping has made no secret that he has a goal of reclaiming Taiwan, which China views as a renegade province, as part of the Chinese mainland before the decade is out. Pressed about whether he has the forces and capabilities in the Indo-Pacific needed to dissuade Xi from acting on his objective, or to defend Taiwan should deterrence fail, Paparo’s qualified answer was, for now, “yes,” but soon, “no.” “I remain confident in our deterrence posture, but the trajectory must change,” Paparo testified. “To maintain credible deterrence, INDOPACOM requires additional, sustained investment in long-range survivable fires, in integrated air and missile defense, in force sustainment with an emphasis on autonomy and AI-driven systems.” It is an established military maxim that wars are won or lost on logistics, and Paparo identifies that as an area where there are serious shortfalls. “There are gaps in defense fueling support points,” Paparo said. “Those are the locations where aircraft and/or ships would load fuel and distribute fuel. There are shortfalls in our tanker fleet and keeping enough fuel in the case of a contingency. And there are gaps in the combat logistics force in order to sustain the force.” At another point in his testimony, he noted that “World War II was won every bit as much on our ability to supply, to sustain the force as any.” A key pillar in the U.S. contingency plan for war with China dictates maintaining control of what’s known as the first island chain, a strategic archipelago that includes Japan, Taiwan, and the northern Philippines, among other territories. The U.S. has always assumed that with its sophisticated high-tech airpower, including F-35 stealth fighters, it would enjoy air dominance, if not air superiority, in any future war. But when questioned by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) about whether the U.S. would control the skies in a war with China, Paparo hedged. “China has an order of battle of 2,100 fighters, an order of battle of over 200 H-6 bombers, and they are producing fighters at a rate of 1.2 to 1 over the United States,” Paparo said. “Furthermore, their advanced air-to-air missile, long-range air-to-air missiles, also present a tremendous threat.” “Is it a fact that China is now capable of denying us air superiority in the first island chain?” Wicker asked. “I give them high marks in their ability to do that,” Paparo responded. “I have some game too. Air supremacy is the complete mastery of the air — neither side will enjoy that. But it’ll be my job to contest air superiority, to protect those forces that are on the first island chain.” Another Defense Department maxim is that military planners often make the mistake of thinking the next war will be like the last one. Ukraine is offering a real-time tutorial to both the U.S. and China about how the nature of warfare is evolving. “There is no doubt that the lessons that we are learning in Ukraine show us that low-cost innovation is starting to dominate the battlefield,” Rep. Pat Harrigan (R-NC) said during the House hearing. “Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet has been in part scuttled by a force that has no navy of its own. … Eighty percent of the Russian casualties that are being caused in the Ukrainian theater are being caused by [first-person view] drones.” China is estimated to have invested nearly $30 billion in drone production last year, four times what the U.S. spends, and that’s just one area where China’s military is surging ahead of America’s. “China’s outproducing the United States in air, missile, maritime, and space capability,” Paparo testified. “China dominates the drone industry just by dint of its capacity to build them. Many of the long-lead critical items that go into any drone are made in the People’s Republic of China. So diversifying our supply chains in order to ensure that we’re not dependent on China to acquire the drones that we need to deter China is absolutely critical.” “We should equip our forces in the field with the right kind of capabilities … so that we’re not expending capabilities that cost millions against something that costs thousands,” Paparo argued. And then there’s the budding alliance among China, Russia, and North Korea, which Paparo describes as “a transactional symbiosis where each state fulfills the other state’s weakness to mutual benefit of each state.” “China has provided 70% of the machine tools and 90% of the legacy chips,” Paparo said. “That’s enabled Russia to rebuild its war machine, and then coming back to China is potentially submarine-quieting help.” Last summer, the Chinese and Russian navies conducted a joint patrol in the Bering Sea,” Paparo noted. “They’re deepening their ability to operate together, and they’re demonstrating that by going further afield, and in bigger formations.” The dire warnings come as Congress is poised to pass Republican-drafted legislation that would add $150 billion to this year’s Pentagon budget, pushing U.S. defense spending to over $1 trillion, although only $11 billion is specifically earmarked for countering China. Wicker, who has been a leader in calling for a “generational investment in our national security,” argued that this year’s plus-up, while “historic,” has to be just the beginning. “We need more survivable, long-range munitions, more assured U.S. command and control systems, and an improved ability to counter China’s increasingly capable cyber and space systems,” Wicker said. “Our adversaries, led by Beijing, are playing a global game. We must be smarter and more agile than they are across the board.” While China boasts the world’s largest navy and is outpacing the U.S. in shipbuilding, producing three times as many surface ships and twice as many submarines each year, when pressed, Paparo said his greatest need is for what he called the capability to “dazzle, deceive, destroy the adversary’s ability to see and sense” what’s happening on the battlefield. It’s a reflection of Paparo’s “Hellscape” concept, which envisions future war not so much as large force-on-force clashes between big, expensive weapons platforms, but as a thousand smaller skirmishes employing long-range, unmanned AI systems capable of “air denial and sea denial in enclosed places such as the Taiwan Strait.” “There are spaces where the force need not gain air superiority or maritime superiority but just deny it to the other, at low human cost,” Paparo said. “And this is the essence of ‘Hellscape’ — undersea unmanned, undersea vehicles, unmanned surface vehicles, unmanned air systems, and loitering munitions.” Asked what year he needed these new capabilities, Paparo responded, “20-now, sir.” “I’m dissatisfied with the scale,” he said. “I’m dissatisfied with the speed. We have to go faster, work harder, and get better.”