As tensions mount in the Indo-Pacific and eastern Europe, the Army will have an increasingly important, global role, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said.

“[The Army] obviously always played the role of the guarantor of security and stability in the Indo-Pacific theater,” she said. “We have an incredibly important role to play in terms of logistics and sustainment, getting troops, equipment [and] supplies around the theater.”

Speaking at the Stimson Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 12, Wormuth said that she was “struck” by “how much closer our relationship with our allies and partners [in the Indo-Pacific] have come” in the face of “a lot of coercive behavior” from China in the region.

Should conflict break out in the Indo-Pacific, the Army “would be doing a lot in terms of helping set up staging bases, helping protect air bases [and] protecting ports,” Wormuth said.

Beyond the Indo-Pacific, the Army is learning about what the future fight could look like from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Wormuth said.

“The battlefield is becoming increasingly transparent. It is increasingly difficult to hide,” she said. “We have to disperse; we have to be more mobile. What that has meant for the Army, … is that we've really been focusing on changing the size of our command post footprints and being able to set up and take down our command posts much more quickly.”

Because “there’s nowhere to hide” on the modern battlefield, the Army is working at “getting [soldiers’] signature[s] as tight as possible.”

“We have a huge focus on decreasing our signature, whether it's from electronics, everything from … the antenna farms, to the Fitbits that our soldiers love to wear and the phones that we all love to carry, both create signatures that can be seen by an enemy.”

As the Army grapples with the Russia-Ukraine war, “the world is watching what happens,” Wormuth said.

“If we let [Russian President Vladimir] Putin basically violate a democratic country's sovereign borders with impunity, what comes next?” she said. “What happens in Ukraine has consequences and implications for what happens in the Middle East, for what happens in the Indo-Pacific. … If other countries see us let Ukraine be consumed, it may make them more opportunistic, more adventurous in ways that are very detrimental to the United States and our own security.”