Brown Says Land Forces ‘Enable Other Domains’
Brown Says Land Forces ‘Enable Other Domains’
The U.S. Army Pacific commander praised the Association of the U.S. Army for a three-day LANPAC conference in Honolulu that provides a major assist to the Indo-Pacific region.
Gen. Robert B. Brown, U.S. Army Pacific commanding general since 2016, said the conference that involves more than 25 nations allows attendees to get more done in three days than if they had traveled the region for two years, and is something the Army couldn’t do on its own. “We could certainly never do an event like this,” he said. “We could never pull it off.”
“You can say you were at the best LANPAC ever,” Brown said during his keynote presentation on the first day of the conference May 21.
He also praised the presence of industry partners at LANPAC. “We certainly cannot do what we do without our industry partners,” Brown said.
Indo-Pacific, the name used for the region since 2017, has more people than the “rest of the world put together” and will soon contain 70% of the global population, he said.
It is a region of natural and humanitarian disasters, where joint and multinational operations are critical to saving lives. It also contains security threats from criminal and extremist groups, and from major military powers, many of them armed with nuclear weapons.
Not all of the problems, challenges and threats can be solved by land power, he said. “Land enables other domains,” he said.
“Boots on the ground are the greatest signal of resolve,” he said, saying the presence of land forces is a deterrent to aggression.
“When our land forces work together, we can accomplish great things,” he said, citing the 2018 combined humanitarian effort to rescue members of a Thai junior soccer team trapped in the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in Chiang Rai Province, Thailand.