The Indo-Pacific Arsenal Needs a Wartime Trade Pact

Imagine the opening weeks of a crisis in the Indo-Pacific. A damaged aircraft approaches a regional repair facility. The technicians are prepared, access to key technical data has been approved, and the facility continues to remain operational. Yet, the aircraft stays grounded. An authorized replacement component is stuck at customs. A shipment of industrial solvent has been caught by a last minute export restriction. Batteries ordered from another partner country have been redirected to satisfy domestic demand. None of these items are weapons. Together, however, they have disabled the repair hub almost as effectively as an enemy strike.

The Partnership for Indo-Pacific Industrial Resilience (PIPIR) is meant to prevent such a paralysis. Its 16 members are beginning to construct a distributed network for producing and sustaining military capabilities closer to where they would be required. PIPIR’s 2026 plan includes broadening an Australian sustainment hub for P-8 maritime patrol aircraft, exploring fighter-engine repair in Japan, advancing a Chinook engine hub in South Korea, establishing a U.S.-Japan solid rocket motor initiative, and assessing an ammunition production line in the Philippines. Members are also developing common approaches for unmanned systems, including work on small motors, batteries and modular platforms. 

These projects address a genuine operational shortcoming. During times of prolonged conflict, the United States and its allies cannot rely exclusively on equipment and spare parts journeying across the Pacific from a small number of distant industrial centers. Regional production, forward repair and greater specialization among partners can be useful to shorten maintenance cycles, distribute risk and make the collective industrial base harder to disable. But, PIPIR is building production nodes without securing the flows between them.

Managing industrial manufacturing operations in Southeast Asia has taught me that facilities do not necessarily stop because of an unavailability of headline assets. It stops because an approved chemical has not arrived, a commercial motor / gear cannot be replaced, a customs document does not match the cargo or a material has failed inspection. An item which appears to be interchangeable on a procurement spreadsheet is not always interchangeable on the factory floor. A substitute lubricant, coating or polymer may require compatibility checks, new safety documentation or customer approval before it can be used.

Repair hubs and production lines depend upon industrial lubricants, commercial pumps, packaging, tools and other unglamorous goods. Distributing production makes access to these inputs more important, not less. A commercial contract cannot prevent a government facing shortages from hoarding inventory, requisitioning transport or imposing a new export license. The existence of a purchase order proves that a buyer and seller reached an agreement. It does not prove that a government will allow the goods to leave.

Trade pacts cannot keep a ship afloat, reopen a bombed terminal or compel an ally to export during an existential emergency. Its strongest role is therefore narrower than the phrase “wartime trade pact” may suggest: it can reduce self-inflicted disruption during mobilization, gray-zone coercion and the early stages of a crisis, and keep available goods moving during conflict where physical routes remain open.Alternate ports, stockpiles, protected lift and hardened infrastructure must address the kinetic problem. A pact addresses the governmental one: whether partners add avoidable legal and administrative barriers to shortages the adversary has already created.

Similarly, an agreement cannot create supplies which didn’t exist within the network in the first place. This is important to note since many of these supposedly mundane inputs run through China. The International Energy Agency reported in 2025 that China was the leading refiner for 19 out of 20 strategic minerals, produced about 94 percent of sintered permanent magnets and held shares of 80 percent or more across many battery supply-chain segments. An agreement among partners not to restrict exports cannot release a battery precursor or rare-earth-dependent component that China has withheld.

Therefore, PIPIR should treat a Defense Essential Supplies Agreement as one layer of a broader resilience strategy. Members should be able to map out a product’s upstream origin before it enters a protected schedule. Goods critically dependent upon Chinese feedstock would need non-Chinese second sources, minimum inventories near the supported facility, or a funded substitution and recycling plan. The pact would protect supply that exists inside the club; diversification and stockpiling would create that supply in the first place.

Here, too, the industrial experience muddles with policy language. “Find an alternative supplier” sounds straightforward until a new vendor is asked to provide samples, material certificates and traceability records; pass technical and quality reviews; demonstrate compatibility with existing machinery; and satisfy the end customer’s approval process. A second source identified during a crisis is frequently not a usable second source. It must be qualified beforehand. Hence, PIPIR’s supply mapping should record not merely where a product can be purchased, but whether alternative suppliers have been technically approved and whether their materials have been tested at the facilities expected to use them. 

There is already a regional model to address the issue. Singapore and New Zealand signed an Agreement on Trade and Essential Supplies in May of 2026 and entered force on July 17. It grew from a non binding 2020 declaration of essential goods during the pandemic. The treaty requires pre-arrival processing, cooperation on alternative routes and port access, designated contact points and consultation during disruptions.

Its legal promise is precise, not absolute. For listed products traded bilaterally, the parties disapply the GATT exception that otherwise permits temporary export restrictions to prevent or relieve critical shortages. They also undertake to refrain from “unnecessary actions that exacerbate shortages.” Other GATT and national security exceptions remain available, as the agreement’s National Interest Analysis explains. This agreement does not guarantee procurement or supply; it changes the legal default for goods that the parties have chosen in advance.

The published product appendix shows how the model is useful for defense sustainment. New Zealand’s list includes industrial chemicals, petroleum products, anti-corrosive additives, polymers, steel products, batteries, gas turbines and measurement equipment. The public schedule is at the four-digit customs-heading level, while the negotiated list is at the more precise six-digit level. Singapore’s list is weighted towards food. That asymmetry is the point: reciprocity does not require both economies to need the same goods.

Likewise, a PIPIR version should exclude munitions, weapons, controlled technology and classified weapons. It should cover low-sensitivity goods whose military value comes from their use: fuels and lubricants, industrial chemicals, commercial pumps, maintenance consumables, protective packaging and selected electrical and construction materials. Each participating project would have its own annex, identifying products at the six-digit customs level, approved end users, minimum inventory obligations, qualified alternative suppliers and pre-negotiated routes.

These schedules should be developed with the facilities that will actually receive the goods. In industrial operations, the difference between a useful inventory list and a fictional one is often found in product specifications or a line on a safety data sheet. Governments can identify broad categories such as “industrial chemicals” or “maintenance equipment.” Operators must identify the exact grade, composition, certification and packaging configuration that a particular facility can accept. Otherwise, a protected shipment could arrive quickly and still be unusable.

The agreement’s membership would also require a degree of legal realism. Italy, Lithuania, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands are European Union members. Under articles 3 and 207 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), common commercial policy, including export policy, is an exclusive Union competence. Those five governments cannot simply make binding trade commitments through national opt-in annexes. Either the European Union would have to participate in, or authorize , the relevant commitments, or an initial pact would run among PIPIR’s Indo-Pacific and non-EU members while EU members join operational arrangements within their competence.

An automatic crisis mechanism is expected. Under the Singapore-New Zealand Agreement, a party has seven days merely to answer a consultation request, and consultations may take up to 30 days to begin. Those periods are useless when a repair hub is waiting for a component. PIPIR annexes should instead create standing export licences and customs waivers for listed goods and approved end users. A pre-agreed crisis trigger would activate them. Covered cargo would be released within 24 hours unless a designated minister issued a written objection invoking a specified exception. A permanent, 24-hour coordination cell would match the shipment to pre-cleared brokers, carriers and alternative routes. Consultation would follow an objection and not precede every release.

Pre-clearance must extend beyond political permission. Customs delays frequently originate in ordinary discrepancies: an inconsistent tariff code, an incomplete end-use declaration, a consignee name that differs across documents or a broker who has not been authorized to act. These details appear bureaucratically trivial until a shipment is held while an operational facility waits. Each PIPIR annex should therefore maintain standardized document templates, validated tariff classifications, approved consignee details and designated customs brokers before a crisis begins. The green lane should move paperwork before it attempts to move cargo.

National-security exceptions cannot be drafted away. In a great-power war, the very emergency for which the pact was designed could prompt a government to invoke one. The agreement should therefore not claim to make defection impossible. It should make defection visible, politically costly and less attractive. An invocation should identify the measure, product, duration and operational reason; apply only to the minimum quantity required; and trigger immediate attempts to source an equivalent shipment from another annex participant. Continued priority access to the reciprocal schedule should depend upon compliance. These measures will not bind a state that believes its survival is at stake, but they raise the reputational and reciprocal cost of opportunistic hoarding below that threshold.

The proposed ‘green lane’ also presents itself with precedents. The European Commission created freight green lanes in April 2020 with a 15 minute border crossing tangent. The EU’s more recent military mobility package seeks harmonized permissions, priority access, digital process and a transport-capacity pool for moving military personnel and equipment in exceptional circumstances. A PIPIR lane would add a different application: pre-clearing commercially ordinary inputs for named Indo-Pacific sustainment projects across jurisdictions that do not share the European Union’s single legal order.

That lane would still be useless if a port had been demolished or the only available hull had been sunk. Each project therefore needs a physical continuity plan alongside its legal annex: dispersed inventories, at least two qualified ports, alternative air and sea routes, contracted surge lift, manual customs procedures for cyber outages and exercises that test the whole chain.

Inventory also has to be positioned at the level at which it can be used. An item being “available in-country” does not necessarily mean it is available to the facility that needs it. It may belong to another company, be reserved for another contract, lack the required certification or sit hundreds of  miles away without approved transport. Minimum inventory commitments should consequently specify location, ownership, release authority, technical compatibility and replenishment arrangements—not merely aggregate national volumes.

PIPIR should pressure test these arrangements through exercises built around industrial failure rather than military planning alone. A useful exercise would ask what happens when a repair facility loses access to an approved chemical, a customs platform goes offline and the primary port closes simultaneously. Operators would then have to activate manual documentation, release pre-positioned inventory, contact the designated broker and reroute replenishment through a secondary port. That is how governments discover whether the supposed alternative route exists outside a briefing slide.

Singapore and Australia have already substantially concluded a protocol on essential supplies and economic resilience. PIPIR could build on that lineage, with its contribution being to connect established trade-facilitation tools to specific defense-industrial projects, pair them with upstream-source and supplier-qualification requirements, and replace leisurely consultation with pre-delegated authority.

A pilot attached to one PIPIR sustainment hub would be modest compared with the cost of another production line. It would not guarantee supply in a war with China. It would do something more credible: force partners to identify and qualify alternative sources before a crisis, pre-authorized  the movement of available goods, test the physical and administrative routes between facilities, and reduce the chance that an operational repair hub is defeated by its own coalition’s paperwork.