In the Indo-Pacific, the U.S. Army and its allies and partners are ramping up efforts to gain positional advantage to deter a resurgent adversary in the region.

“In our theater, it’s about how we focus on gaining positional advantage on key terrain, not just physical terrain but human terrain,” said Gen. Ron Clark, commanding general of U.S. Army Pacific. “Our ability to gain positional advantage gives us convergence at the joint and combined levels of capabilities that focus on deterrence, [or] our ability to be able to prevent war.”

Speaking on a panel May 14 at the Association of the U.S. Army’s LANPAC Symposium and Exposition in Honolulu, Clark was joined by Gen. Yasunori Morishita, chief of staff of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force, Lt. Gen. Simon Stuart, chief of the Australian Army, and Lt. Gen. Roy Galido, commanding general of the Philippine Army.

“This is not just about the United States Army. It’s not just about the joint force,” Clark said. “It’s about our allies and partners working together.”

Japan is in a critical location—physically and geopolitically—in the Indo-Pacific, Morishita said through a translator. With a narrow land mass and thousands of islands, Japan has no strategic depth, he said. “To prevent invasions, Japan needs more strategic depth with the U.S., Australia and other partner nations to contribute to peace and stability in the region,” Morishita said.

Armies in the Indo-Pacific face an increasingly complicated and rapidly changing environment, Galido said. As they develop what Galido described as “an all-domain mindset,” the armies must not neglect cognitive positioning, or the human dimension, he said. “Cognitive positioning is as critical as physical positioning,” Galido said. “Cognitive positioning gives us legitimacy and morality of action and clarity of purpose.”

As armies in the region continue working together, their efforts are looking more like a campaign, Stuart said. “We have focused on coordination and synchronization of what we are already doing together to generate that campaign effect,” he said.

These efforts also have occurred at lightning speed, Stuart said. “Look at where we were just three years ago, two years ago,” he said. The armies went from focusing on just having more flags or countries participating in an exercise to focusing on “increasing the sophistication, the depth and the scope of the operations, activities and exercises that we’re doing together,” Stuart said.

At the same time, troops are building readiness, he said. “As we deploy to prosecute a campaign, … we are both training, adapting and transforming our forces,” he said.

As the leaders urged urgency—“Time is simply not on our side,” Stuart said—Clark emphasized the importance of the strategic land power network and strong relationships that exist across the region.

“The asymmetric advantage we have is this network of allies and partners we have,” he said.