Exclusive: The Admiral Who Must Prevent War With China

In the summer of 1986, when he was a college student in Pennsylvania, Samuel Paparo took his future wife Maureen to watch Top Gun.

Many young Americans emerged from theaters across the country with a new hero: the brash, daring, risk-taking Maverick, played by Tom Cruise, who became an avatar of American power at the twilight of the Cold War.

But Paparo took away a different lesson.

“The hero of the movie is supposed to be Maverick, but the hero of the movie is actually Iceman,” Paparo tells TIME, referring to the main character’s rival at the elite Navy pilot training school.

“Maverick’s got all the personal charisma, but Iceman is fastidious, quiet.

He’s the hard-working guy that does the right thing, that doesn’t do flashy, dangerous stuff for its own sake.” Paparo had already passed the Navy’s entrance exams when he went into the theater that day, and joined the next year.

His career would precisely mirror the fictional Iceman’s: He attended the Navy Fighter Weapons School, also known as TOPGUN; became a fighter pilot; then a four-star admiral; and eventually commanded the Pacific Fleet.

But Paparo would go further, taking the helm of the U.S.

Pacific Command, the nation’s oldest and largest geographic combatant command, which covers about half of the earth’s surface.

Few Americans will have heard of Admiral Paparo, and that suits him fine.

“If I do my job right, history will never know my name,” he says in his office at the headquarters of the U.S.

Pacific Command in Hawaii, on a hill overlooking Pearl Harbor, in late July.

But his role places him at an inflection point, as American dominance in the Pacific faces its most serious challenge since World War II.

His command is designed to be the immovable object that blocks the unstoppable force of China’s expansionist ambitions in the region.