"Securing the Connective Tissue of the Global Commons:" Topic

… The Indian Ocean Gap

"As the Pentagon approaches its September 18 force-posture review, the strategic logic underlying American military deployments demands rigorous re-examination. The measure of a global force posture is not simply how many forces the United States stations in its principal theaters, but whether it can see, move, communicate, sustain, and act across the global commons that connect them—the sea lines of communication, maritime chokepoints, undersea infrastructure, and logistical networks upon which both military mobility and global commerce depend.

The September 18 review is an early decision point in a broader reassessment of U.S. force posture for the coming decades. The Pentagon is developing multiple options addressing troop levels, basing, access, overflight, and the space, cyber, and intelligence infrastructure required for global power projection. The larger objective is to shift greater responsibility for conventional defense to European allies while positioning U.S. forces for broader global priorities. The critical question, therefore, is not simply what happens to American forces in Europe, but what strategic capacity the United States preserves—or relinquishes—as it reallocates forces, infrastructure, and attention across theaters.

Against this backdrop, the institutional shift back toward a narrower Pacific Command designation raises a consequential question: could the Indian Ocean once again be treated as a passive transit corridor rather than a maritime space requiring an integrated strategy?
This increased Pacific focus coincides with two concurrent posture adjustments that could magnify the problem. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is examining how to reduce its reliance on large, static installations in the Persian Gulf because of missile and drone threats, potentially dispersing its weight eastward toward the Arabian Sea. At the same time, Pacific planning is concentrating increasing attention on the First Island Chain and the Western Pacific…"

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Armand

"In December 1936, Mao Zedong wrote that war, "this monster of mutual slaughter among men," would eventually be eliminated by the progress of human society. It is a strange line for a man now remembered as one of the twentieth century's most gifted strategists: a promise of peace built entirely out of violence, offered by a leader who spent the next thirteen years proving he had no intention of putting the monster down.

By 1949, that leader had driven Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist government off the Chinese mainland and founded the People's Republic of China. That victory is often read as proof that Mao out-thought his enemy, a narrative clean enough to show up in staff colleges and doorstop biographies alike. It does not hold up, however. Mao did not out-think Chiang so much as outwait him. Mao stood still after the men who had armed his rivals lost patience, ran out of money, or switched sides. He had one habit his rivals mostly lacked: when something broke his way, he kept it.

The Chinese Civil War of 1945 to 1949 is usually told as a duel between two visions and two generals. This approach leaves out most of what actually happened. Washington kept prescribing cures that did not fit the disease. Japan's occupying army was brutal enough to recruit for the Communists without meaning to. Moscow quietly armed Mao's forces, routed mostly through rear-echelon bases in North Korea. Chiang, for his part, had years to make good decisions yet rarely did. None of that was Mao's doing. What was his — the only part that was really his — was noticing what he had been handed and never once handing it back…"

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Armand