The Chinese Communist Party cannot picture peaceful coexistence of President Xi Jinping’s rejuvenated China and the United States’ democratic way of life within the liberal world order. Accordingly, the People’s Republic of China continues its work to coercively rewrite norms and underwrite irresponsible behavior that undermines global order, including its own missile launches over Taiwan, North Korean missile tests and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In this environment, many think the U.S. Army plays a small role in a so-called air and maritime theater named for two oceans. At best, these arguments are misinformed. At worst, they’re dangerously wrong. The Indo-Pacific is a joint theater with challenges so complex that only a fully integrated joint force can solve them.

Though underdiscussed and poorly understood, the Army plays a powerful role in Asia to defend our nation and maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific. The Army is warfighting, campaigning and war-gaming to increase joint readiness, build capacity and confidence with our allies and partners, and deny key terrain to adversaries. Here are five things to watch in 2023 that underscore the Army’s Indo-Pacific role:

1. Unified Pacific War Games

Partnering with the Navy’s Global series of war games, the Army chief of staff’s Unified Pacific Wargame Series (UPWS) delivers a joint Indo-Pacific campaign of learning, providing analytics to shape and posture the joint force. Unified Pacific 2022 delivered seven key insights, including insight No. 1: The People’s Republic of China holds advantages of mass, munitions depth and interior lines—operating from a central position that enables an army to move faster than opposing forces can counter—that will take the entire joint force to deny its military objectives.

Unified Pacific 2023 war games are digging deeper into two parts of the fight: intelligence support to joint targeting (UPWS 23-1) and joint theater logistics and sustainment (UPWS 23-2).

In January, UPWS 23-1 examined intelligence support to targeting with the U.S. military’s Five Eyes partners. Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance among Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S. The war game improved the U.S. Army’s understanding of indications and warnings, examined the transition to targeting support in conflict and identified collection capability shortfalls. It reinforced the importance of land-based collection when aerial and space-based platforms are disrupted. The U.S. Army’s work alongside Five Eyes partners also drove home the need for our armies to learn together in the Indo-Pacific.

The capstone war game, UPWS 23-2, examined joint theater logistics and sustainment at the scale and speed of war. In 2022, Unified Pacific highlighted a missing joint logistics framework that supported new service concepts; issues compounded over time. Logistics networks drove operational endurance, and they made attractive targets, meaning they needed to be survivable: distributed, mobile, hardened, networked and defended.

In UPWS 23-2, a simulated joint logistics command synchronized the enterprise as we war-gamed pre-conflict pre-positioning to buy down risk, factored in allied sustainment capacity and assessed key capabilities in the reserve component and active-duty force.

This summer, U.S. Army Pacific will publish top-secret, secret and unclassified reports on Unified Pacific 2023. Continuing the joint campaign of learning, these Army war games will inform Navy’s Global 17 starting conditions this fall.

2. Campaigning Through Pathways

Retired Gen. Vincent Brooks, who commanded Army Pacific from 2013 to 2016, taught me that maneuver plays a distant third in the Indo-Pacific. If you can’t sustain or command and control them, maneuver forces are useless. Beyond being able to “sink ships, neutralize satellites, shoot down missiles, and hack or jam the enemy,” as described in 2016 by then-U.S. Pacific Command commander Adm. Harry Harris Jr., the Army must be—as Army Secretary Christine Wormuth puts it—the “backbone” of joint operations in the Indo-Pacific.

That backbone is built on the foundation of collection, protection, sustainment and command and control. It requires interior lines from Southeast Asia and Australia through the first and second island chains. Today, however, the U.S. military’s interior lines are concentrated in the north, in South Korea and Japan, with permanent posture elsewhere in Asia remaining a persistent challenge. Building interior lines requires a creative approach.

Operation Pathways is the Army’s operational approach to campaign and build interior lines. With more than 20,000 forces forward-deployed for regional exercises each year, the U.S. Army is layering in the people, supplies, equipment, connectivity and leadership to improve the joint force’s ability to collect, sustain, command and control, and protect. In 2022 and 2023, Operation Pathways has focused on sustainment.

In 2022, the Army built activity sets, a versatile counterpart to Army pre-positioned stocks, to increase equipment and supplies in theater. We used Army watercraft to support joint and multinational forces across the western Pacific. And we employed Army Prepositioned Stock-3—our afloat stocks—for the first time since establishment in two Philippines-based exercises.

Operation Pathways 2023 expands our contested logistics capability. Working with the U.S. Army Materiel Command and the joint logistics enterprise, the 8th Theater Sustainment Command is directing six months of continuous operations across Southeast Asia, Australia and the island chains, culminating with joint logistics-over-the-shore at Exercise Talisman Sabre in Australia.

Combined with advancements like the new U.S. Army Composite Watercraft Company in Japan and the Philippines’ decision to expand Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement sites, Operation Pathways is laying interior lines groundwork through focused investments, actions and rehearsals that will improve every year.

3. Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center

Established in 2022, the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center (JPMRC) is the Army’s Indo-Pacific regional combat training center. It executes three annual rotations for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command-assigned forces: one across the Hawaiian archipelago, one in Arctic Alaska and one exportable rotation with an ally or partner west of the international date line. Each rotation enables units to train and fight in Indo-Pacific conditions.

More importantly, the JPMRC facilitates joint training to stress-test interservice proficiencies. At JPMRC 23-1 in Hawaii, joint forces practiced the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment concept, and the Army’s 1st and 3rd Multi-Domain Task Forces exercised with the Marine Corps’ new Marine Littoral Regiment. Generating readiness with the United States’ allies and partners, the 25th Infantry Division also trained alongside Thai, Indonesian and Philippine forces from Oahu to the Army’s massive Pohakuloa Training Area.

JPMRC is also yielding unexpected gains.

After the Army’s first Arctic combat training center rotation in 2022, the Indian army relocated Yudh Abhyas, its annual army-to-army exercise with the 11th Airborne Division, to the Himalayas near India’s border with China.

Throughout fiscal 2023, the U.S. Army is expanding training with allies—including South Korea, Japan and Australia—by networking their combat training centers with the

JPMRC. We are also collaborating with partners seeking to build their own regional training centers.

4. Improved Combined Warfighting

Beyond the JPMRC, the Army is reshaping military exercises into better warfighting rehearsals. Australian Chief of Army Lt. Gen. Simon Stuart observed that multinational interoperability is complex. It requires mutual understanding of “how you force project, how you do logistics, and who’s going to contribute what to which part of any potential fight,” Stuart said—and that has to be practiced. 

In June, the theater army will recertify as a combined joint task force during U.S.-Australian Pacific Sentry 23, with Army Pacific overseeing joint combined operations. I Corps, Indo-Pacific Command’s operational Army command, will take this further in Talisman Sabre, as it leads a combined U.S.-Australian joint forcible entry operation across northern Australia.

Other major exercises with treaty allies will undergo similar upgrades to realism and complexity this year, including Balikatan in the Philippines, Yama Sakura in Japan and Cobra Gold in Thailand.

5. LANPAC and IPACC

Allies and partners form the decisive counterweight to destabilizing forces in the region. Across the Indo-Pacific and Asia, armies are often the stabilizing institution. Partnering with them, the U.S. Army understands—and improves joint and national understanding of—regional security demands in a way only possible through persistent presence and engagement.

Each year, the Army hosts two large regional forums: Land Forces Pacific (LANPAC) and the Indo-Pacific Armies Chiefs Conference. Following a 2022 post-COVID-19 relaunch, LANPAC 2023 will bring together allies and partners in Hawaii in May to address emerging changes to warfare. In September, the Indian and U.S. armies will co-host the chiefs conference, assembling the chief of staff and sergeant major of the Army’s regional counterparts in New Delhi.

These events foster shared ideas, strengthen relationships and address security concerns. They are a powerful message of unity and collective commitment, and a direct counter to China’s efforts to fracture regional relationships and stability. In Asia, this land power network is the glue that binds the region’s security architecture together.

Pushing Back

Leon Trotsky, an initial member of the Soviet Politburo and Red Army creator, said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

We have chosen warfighting as our profession. We must prepare for war. We must talk unabashedly about war to better recognize if it is coming toward us. Nations are pushing back against coercive, authoritarian People’s Republic of China actions, and there is urgency in our counterparts’ eyes and voices as they describe China’s actions and their future fights. We must get positioned—geographically, physically, intellectually, emotionally—to fight war if it should come. And it may come. Individuals and nations before us thought world war couldn’t happen on their watch, and they paid dearly for it. By being ready for war, we do our part to deter it. But, as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin frames integrated deterrence, our ultimate measure of success is no war. How do we know if we’re succeeding?

Teamwork in Action

Watching the local news in Sydney, Australia, in early August last summer, I was struck by two sequential clips: the first was footage of the People’s Republic of China launching missiles over Taiwan. Five landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone. In the second, I was standing with diplomatic and military leaders from 14 countries at a news conference in Sumatra, Indonesia, during Exercise Garuda Shield.

The latter was a clear expression of the teamwork that keeps the Indo-Pacific free and open. It stood in stark contrast to the People’s Republic of China’s actions after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit.

Garuda Shield used to be a small bilateral exercise. In 2022, it evolved into a joint exercise with 4,000 forces representing 14 nations. It is but one example of a host of new multilateral initiatives. New Caledonia’s Exercise Croix Du Sud 23 brought together the Blue Pacific nations of Oceania for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. Indonesia invited Thailand to participate in Garuda Shield 23.  Later this year, Indian and Japanese forces will conduct their first exercise together in Japan.

To me, this multilateral cooperation is the cornerstone of integrated deterrence. States are empowered to improve their sovereign defenses; they are strengthened from within a coalition. Countries have observed how the Ukrainians have outperformed the Russians. Many are eager to reap the same advantages. These ideas point to Western leanings, and they present us with important opportunities in the future of our regional relationships.

The People’s Republic of China’s policy is “a constant search for leverage,” a U.S. official told The Washington Post in February. Ours is contributing to a free and open Indo-Pacific, and we are living up to our promise.

The U.S. Army is doing incredible things in Asia and the Indo-Pacific, but what we do in the next few years will chart our course for the next two decades. We have a big challenge ahead of us. We must do more, and I am confident the Army will deliver for the joint force and our nation.

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Gen. Charles Flynn assumed command of U.S. Army Pacific, Fort Shafter, Hawaii, in June 2021. Previously, he served as deputy chief of staff of the Army for operations, plans and training. He has served in a variety of command, staff and leadership positions from platoon leader to division commander, with many of those positions in the Indo-Pacific Theater. He holds a master’s degree in national security and strategic studies from the U.S. Naval War College and a master’s degree in joint campaign planning and strategy from the National Defense University.