From INDOPACOM to PACOM: Is There a Strategic Backstory?

**Mike Green** (0:00)
Welcome to The Asia Chessboard, the podcast that examines geopolitical dynamics in Asia and takes an inside look at the making of grand strategy. I'm Mike Green of the United States Studies Centre in Sydney and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
Welcome back to The Asia Chessboard. I'm Mike Green, joining you as always or almost always from Sydney, Australia, US. Study Centre, sometimes from Washington, Georgetown, and CSIS.
The Asia Chessboard tries to look at big strategic questions in Asia or the Indo-Pacific if you prefer and not jump at the news of the day. But recently developments in Washington have suggested that some big pieces of American Asia strategy may be in flux. The role of NATO or Europe in the East Asian and Indo-Pacific security equation is in flux right now, because of the transatlantic friction. And now the role of India and the Indian Ocean with the name change of the Indo-Pacific Command back to its original title of Pacific Command. Would a rose by any other names smell as sweet? We'll see. There could be something deeper afoot or it could just be window dressing, but it is a good time to reflect on why those parts of the chessboard that are not in the first island chain, that are not Japan, Taiwan, matter. To help us unpack the Indian Ocean and Indopacom name change, we're joined by one of the top thinkers on Indian Ocean Strategy and Indian Military Affairs, Arzan Tarapore. Arzan, welcome. Great to have you.

**Arzan Tarapore** (1:36)
Thank you very much, Mike. A real honor to be on. Thank you.

**Mike Green** (1:40)
You're joining us from Northern California, from the Hoover Institute at Stanford where you're a visiting fellow. I know you have affiliations with European University Institute in Florence and that you've been a lecturer and a professor at the Armory War College, ASPE in Australia, Georgetown Rand, East West Center, ORF, the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi, but your career started in the Australian Department of Defense.
How does a kid from Sydney, I think you grew up in Sydney, end up other than I guess some geographic proximity, end up being one of the leading career officials in Australia, now scholars in the US and the region on Indian Ocean Strategy? Were you a kid staring out at the sea from Sydney thinking there's an ocean out there? How did you get into this?

**Arzan Tarapore** (2:23)
I was a kid, Mike, and this is good advice, I think, for any parent. I was a kid whose first desk in his bedroom was one of those laminated desks with a world map on it. And so by default, compulsorily, every time I sat at my desk, I was literally looking at a map. So that's why I really enjoy playing games about quizzing capital cities of countries and stuff. So that was, I mean, look, I grew up studying and loving history in high school. And when I got to uni, I studied international relations, which was as close as you got to guns and bombs and international security. But that was all pre-911, right? And so pre-911, if you were studying IR in uni, you had to be really interested in it. You had to be really dedicated to it because not a lot of people were, or if they were, they weren't studying international security. And so really, it was when I did my junior year abroad at Georgetown, no less, at the School of Foreign Service, where I was really inculcated into what they colloquially called guns and bombs, so international security studies, and also a real, I think, feature of Georgetown, which is prizing the notion of public service. And so when I finished, I joined the public service and I joined the Department of Defense, actually, as a China analyst way before it was cool. And when I joined, this is how old I am, I joined in 2001, very soon thereafter, a Chinese fighter jet bumped into an American ISR plane, the EP3 incident. And so there was a real sense that this was going to be the defining feature of our careers.
But of course, a few months later, there was another incident, 9-11, which really did make that the defining feature of my government career. So as soon as 9-11 happened, as happened certainly in the US and certainly in Australia, everyone in my business, all my peers, all my colleagues, we all sort of, our gaze turned immediately to Southwest Asia broadly.
I deployed a couple of times to Iraq and Afghanistan, and I finished my job there as a liaison officer in Washington, DC.

**Mike Green** (4:41)
It's interesting. I started in the White House on the NSC staff right before the AP3 incident in April 2001, and everyone thought China was going to be the big strategic focus.