WSJ reporters Niharika Mandhan and Timothy W. Martin have an “exclusive” in which “America’s New Pacific Army Commander Lays Out His China Strategy.”
When Gen. Ronald Clark took charge of the U.S. Army in the Pacific in November, his boss in the region, Adm. Samuel Paparo, had a stark security assessment for him: The situation had worsened since Clark was last posted in the Indo-Pacific, three years earlier.
Six months into the new job, Clark agrees. China’s “aggressive behavior” has made the environment more dangerous, he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
“These are extraordinary times,” said the commander, who has spent 37 years in the military and oversees 106,000 personnel. “Some of the things that you see our opponents and adversaries undertaking are things that really leave you speechless at times.”
Case in point: China’s rehearsals of a potential blockade of Taiwan, he said. Five years ago, Clark said, he wouldn’t have thought Beijing would consider such a maneuver. “Now it’s commonplace that the PLA would make a move like that,” he said, referring to the People’s Liberation Army, as China’s military is called.
China claims Taiwan as its territory and doesn’t rule out the use of force to seize it. One of the ways in which it could try to squeeze the democratically governed island into submission is to encircle it and cut it off from the rest of the world. Since 2022, Beijing has launched a series of military exercises that simulate such a blockade. It has also intensified its near-daily “gray zone” pressure around Taiwan using combat aircraft, warships, coast-guard vessels, drones and more.
The commander of U.S. Army Pacific—whose area of operations stretches from Hollywood to Bollywood and polar bears to penguins, he quipped—is taking notes. “It gives us an opportunity to really understand how they would go about something like a blockade or potentially a cross-strait invasion, which as we all know is exceptionally difficult,” he said, referring to a potential Chinese amphibious attack to capture Taiwan.
Unlike a blockade, such an operation would involve Chinese warships crossing the Taiwan Strait, a waterway several dozen miles wide, to land troops and equipment on Taiwan.
“To think that you could execute a mission like that over a contested space that’s roughly 80 nautical miles—it would be a challenge,” Clark said. “We just have to make sure that they understand that our efforts to deter that type of activity is exactly what we’re willing to do.”
Clark, like current Army Chief of Staff Randy George and CENTCOM commander Eric Kurilla, was a classmate of mine, although I don’t remember any of them. They’re extraordinarily capable men who have been preparing for these roles since taking the oath of office and joining the West Point Class of 1988 way back in July 1984–more than four decades ago now.
But the repetitiousness of the US military’s talk about a future fight with China, which I’ve been following since at least the 2011 Asia Pivot and, especially, since assuming my current job in 2013, is astounding.
- There’s a “tyranny of distance” in the Indo-Pacific theater
- China has an anti-access, area-denial (A2/AD) system that makes our usual way of fighting next to impossible
- They’ve been massively building up their capacity while we’ve taking our eye off the ball fighting in the Middle East (or, in the case of this article, distracted by a proxy war in Ukraine)
- China is getting ever more aggressive, commensurate with its increased capabilities, and getting ever-closer to an inevitable invasion to retake Taiwan
Like the Marines, the Army is radically restructuring their force structure for a future fight in the Indo-Pacific AOR. In both cases, a big part of that is an investment in long-range fires.
That is where ground forces come in, said Clark. The Army, moving away from the earlier era of fighting insurgencies, has created agile new units to operate on front-line territories including the first island chain. In a conflict, the idea would be for these forces to disperse, hit Chinese targets from land, collect valuable battlespace information and create openings for U.S. air and naval forces to maneuver.
Two such units, called Multi-Domain Task Forces, have been constituted for the Indo-Pacific. A third is in the works.
To help them do their jobs, the Army is deploying new missile systems. That includes the Typhon, which can go after enemy ships, aircraft and land targets as far as mainland China. The Army sent the platform last year to the Philippines—where it remains—accompanied by U.S. soldiers, drawing rebukes from Beijing.
As to the fabled tyranny of distance:
Clark sees an opportunity to get around that—now. His forces are spending more time in key locations through a packed schedule of military exercises and other activities that are aimed at strengthening America’s partnerships, which also means that if a fight broke out, they would already be close by.
In recent days, as part of annual drills called Balikatan, U.S. soldiers and Marines along with Philippine and Australian forces were out on a distant beach along the South China Sea. Their mission: to practice repelling an amphibious invasion. The enemy fleet was imaginary—standing in were makeshift offshore targets, such as barrels lashed to bamboo rafts and small remote-controlled boats. But the hundreds of bullets and missiles the defenders fired were real.
The troops, many of them positioned in trenches in a tree line along the beach, unleashed a range of firepower: precision missiles, antiaircraft weapons, shoulder-fired missiles, rifles, machine guns and more. An American P-8A patrol aircraft and MQ-9 Reaper drone circled overhead.
The finale was the U.S. Army’s Himars system, which shot six training missiles at notional targets in the water. It had traveled to the Philippine island of Palawan by air, sea and land. That meant flying in a transport plane, sailing 100 miles in an amphibious boat and finally rolling off for a drive over jungle terrain to the beachside.
Balikatan has been ongoing for many years and has grown larger over time, as more allies and partners participate. I’ve never really thought of it as forward positioning, but rather as something more akin to the REFORGER exercises during the Cold War, designed both as a demonstration and building up a skillset for rapid reinforcement for forces already stationed in Germany.
Unlike the Cold War, a fight with China wouldn’t be fought against an enemy on a contiguous landmass. It makes sense, then, that our ground forces are preparing to fight it from afar, using rockets and missiles, while reinforcing our allies and partner in their homelands or, in the case of the Marines, supporting naval operations.
Regardless, we’re on our sixth Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and sixth PACOM/INDOPACOM commander since President Obama announced the “pivot.” It’s probably time to stop talking about our attention having been diverted, complaining about the realities of geography, and marveling that a competitor we’ve been referring to as a “near-peer” and “peer” for many, many years will provide greater operational challenges than Third World forces.
