Admiral Sam Paparo
Commander, U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet
Samuel John Paparo, Jr. was born in 1964 in Morton, Pennsylvania. He earned an undergraduate degree and was part of the ROTC program at Villanova University. He earned an M.A. from Old Dominion University, an M.S. from the Naval Postgraduate School, and has graduated from other educational opportunities afforded him by the U.S. military.
He deployed to the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War. Throughout his Navy career, Paparo has held numerous commands, including for Carrier Air Wing Seven, Carrier Strike Group 10, the U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, the U.S. Fifth Fleet, and he presently commands the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
In the News…
Admiral Scott Paparo, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet recently said that, as China continues to send warplanes over the Taiwan Strait and Maritime Militia vessels through Philippine waters, the United States needs to be able to use artificial intelligence and develop analytic algorithms to determine the difference between micro-aggressions and the beginnings of a first strike attack.
“Just in the last three years, [we’ve seen] step-level changes in the force levels, the jointness of those force levels, the rehearsals,” Admiral Paparo said. “[It’s] raising the threshold of warning… Soon we’ll be at a point where a force sufficient to execute a profound military operation is in the field and operating under a fig-leaf of exercise. … This erosion of strategic, operational, and tactical warning is real,”
“When we are left in a spot where we can no longer derive enemy intentions — would-be enemy intentions —from their disposition in the field, we must go deeper and that requires data, compute, talent,” he said. “What are those indications and warnings?”
The admiral concluded, “The ability on short notice to see, understand, decide, and act against a rapid effort on the part of another great power … allows decision makers, the commander-in-chief and the Congress maximum decision time and space to act when there is no doubt that there is violence impending.”
