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Suggest a Feature →Commander's Reading List
The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is the largest of the combatant commands — responsible for the most strategically consequential geographic area in the world, covering 36 nations and more than half the earth's surface. The INDOPACOM Commander's reading list reflects the intellectual demands of that responsibility: the history of the Pacific theater, the rise of Chinese military power, the theory and practice of deterrence and coalition management in the Indo-Pacific, and the strategic context of the competition that will define American security policy for the next generation. Required reading for anyone deploying to or advising on the Pacific.
Allison identified the Thucydides Trap — the historical pattern in which a rising power threatens a ruling power and the resulting structural stress makes war more likely — and applied it to the U.S.-China relationship. Twelve of the sixteen cases he examined ended in war. The book is not a prediction but a warning: that the forces driving the United States and China toward conflict are structural, not the result of bad decisions by either side, and that avoiding the trap requires deliberate strategy rather than optimism. Allison directs Harvard's Belfer Center and has advised multiple Secretaries of Defense. On both the INDOPACOM Commander's reading list and the Secretary of the Air Force's China list because understanding the trap is the first step to not walking into it.
Kaplan traveled the South China Sea littoral and wrote the most accessible analysis available of why the region is the central arena of the twenty-first century's great power competition: the overlapping territorial claims, the energy resources beneath the seabed, the trade routes that carry forty percent of global commerce, and the Chinese naval buildup designed to make the sea a Chinese lake. His analysis of the specific countries — Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei — and what each wants from the competition is the ground-level complement to the strategic frameworks that dominate Washington's discussion. On the INDOPACOM and SOCOM reading lists.
Singer is the Pentagon's most-cited defense researcher; Cole is a former Navy intelligence officer. Their novel about a near-future U.S.-China war over Hawaii — fought with autonomous weapons, satellite-blinded aircraft, microchip-compromised weapons systems, and cyber-enabled insurgency — is explicitly designed as a policy argument in narrative form. Every technology in the book either exists or is in development; the footnotes at the back cite the actual defense programs. The Indo-Pacific Command reads it as a planning document disguised as fiction: the scenarios Singer and Cole describe — a surprise attack on INDOPACOM, the U.S. forced to fight with degraded networks and compromised supply chains — are the scenarios INDOPACOM wargames. The most operationally useful work of military fiction published since Red Storm Rising.