As the Army transforms for the future, land power remains as relevant as ever, the commanding general of U.S. Army Pacific said.

“Today, as we think about our responsibility to prevail, it’s land power that comes to the fore,” Gen. Ron Clark said May 13 in a keynote address during the Association of the U.S. Army’s LANPAC Symposium and Exposition in Honolulu.

“The nature of warfare remains timeless, and some of the challenges that the Continental Army worked through during the Revolutionary War are some of the same sort of challenges we’re dealing with today,” Clark said.

The Army of 250 years ago relied on allies and partners for legitimacy and direct military support, including military support from France and loans from the Dutch, Clark said. The Continental Army also fought across multiple domains where it did not have supremacy, and the troops of the time had to adapt.

“We were not prepared to fight battles in the European style of warfare, so we had to transform in contact,” said Clark, who has commanded U.S. Army Pacific, the Army’s largest service component command, since November 2024. “Most importantly, the Revolutionary War proved that we could prevail through land power. It was land forces that guarded the sovereignty of our new nation.”

Pivoting to modern times, land power remains relevant in large-scale combat operations, Clark said. “It’s relevant to our challenges here in the Indo-Pacific … despite misperceptions that it’s simply an air and maritime theater,” he said.

After more than two decades of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army today faces a “very different” adversary, Clark said. The Army is preparing to deter an adversary that has an anti-access, area denial network designed to fix U.S. air and maritime assets and put them at risk, he said. “Our mission, our responsibility, is to understand that threat and attempt to neutralize their ability to impact our other domains,” he said.

America’s adversary has been “repeatedly aggressive, belligerent and coercive,” can mass forces and has developed magazine depth that can support troops at extended ranges and attempt to contest the sovereignty of many of America’s neighbors and allies, Clark said.

“These challenges are real,” he said. “They intend to test the joint force … in a way that we haven’t seen before.”

To counter that threat, the U.S. must “prevail through combined, joint, all-domain operations on and from the land,” Clark said. “We must maintain the ability to execute multidomain operations as part of a joint, multinational force to gain positional advantage.”

Key to that task is maintaining the strategic land power network—the relationships, “built on bonds of trust,” that the Army has cultivated with its allies and partners, “our ability to work together in time and space with our allies and partners on the land,” Clark said.

The Army also is placing capabilities forward in the theater, including deploying troops to train with partner armies and setting the theater for the joint force, Clark said, emphasizing his priorities of people and partnerships with the mission to prevail.

“Land power opens those windows of opportunity to meet, partner and to win,” he said.