How US Army Pacific is preparing for war with China

 

 How US Army Pacific is preparing for war with China

A sprawling, multi-island exercise hones troops’ ability to fight in the jungle, cross “wet gaps,” and operate with multiple partner nations.

DILLINGHAM AIRFIELD, Hawaii—Capt. Sam Soliday is standing in front of a Black Hawk on a gravel airstrip across the street from Oahu’s picturesque northwest coast, a “jungle” patch velcroed to the sleeve of his combat shirt. He’s one of more than 5,000 U.S, Indonesian, Thai, British, and New Zealander troops spread out on islands from Hawaii to Palau in the western Pacific for an enormous training exercise that simulates “large-scale conflict against a peer adversary in jungle and archipelagic conditions.”

 That’s a long way of saying they’re preparing for a fight with China in the Pacific, even if Army officials prefer to keep it officially vague. But for Soliday, the main difference from previous training exercises is the scenario: an inter-island conflict.

“As a U.S. Army, we have not seen a conflict like this since the World War II era,” said Soliday, an intelligence officer. And there is an “added layer of complexity to the problem set that involves moving assets from different islands, crossing wet gaps. And the aviation task force really provides the support to enable those operations. And the different types of terrain that can vary on islands can go from steep gulches to flat, desolate areas. So operating in an austere environment that these islands provide really, really truly is the best way to train the light fighter, as well as you know, a combat aviation brigade.”

In recent decades, the U.S. Army has done exercises of this scale at its training facilities in California and Louisiana. But this one—the first since the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center was validated and certified by the Pentagon in June as a joint national training capability—is critical to preparing for conflict in the Indo-Pacific region, said Gen. Charles Flynn, commander of U.S. Army Pacific.

Previously, “we would pack up an entire division’s worth of equipment, and we would sail through the Panama Canal” to get to Louisiana, Flynn said, which meant soldiers were separated from their equipment for “a couple of months.”

“We cannot afford to be going out of this region. We have to stay in the region,” he said. “And having an environment like this—this is not Louisiana. And so, we’re using watercraft, we’re using six C-130s and nine C-17s from [Pacific Air Forces].”

Pacific Fleet, Special Operations command, and U.S. Marine Corps assets are also involved in the exercise, dubbed JPMRC 24-01 and held from Oct. 20 to Nov. 10.

“There’s all these benefits of having the joint force in Hawaii,” Flynn said. “This is enormously important for the joint force, because I’m not aware of anywhere else, at least in the Army, where you actually get this amount of joint tactical training.”