CLSC Dialogues – Ep 26 – COL Mike Long and LTG Joel B. Vowell – On the Pacific, USARPAC, and China

In this episode, COL Mike Long and LTG Joel B. Vowell discuss the US Army Pacific and the role of USARPAC.

COL Mike Long

Welcome to CLSC Dialogues, a production of the China Landpower Studies Center at the Army War College. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or the US government. I'm Colonel Mike Long from the Strategic Studies Institute, and today I'm lucky enough to be joined by the USARPAC Deputy Commanding General, Lieutenant General Vowell. Sir, thank you very much for joining us. We really appreciate having you.

LTG Joel B. Vowell

Thanks, Mike. Good to be here.

COL Long

Absolutely, sir. And we'll just jump right into it. I'd love to hear you talk about what US Army Pacific, USARPAC's role is in the Pacific.

LTG Vowell

Great question. I think it needs to be preceded by a little theater framing about how complex, how challenging, and how just diverse the theater is. We work for INDOPACOM, as the Joint Force commander we’re the Army Service Component Command to that. But that theater of operations, the area of responsibility for INDOPACOM, we kind of say in a funny vein, from polar bears to penguins to Pikes Peak, Colorado, and all the way to the Himalayas in India.

That's the vastness of the theater. So if you were to take Southeast Asia in the South China Seas, put them together, that is all of Western and Eastern Europe, 2000 by 2000 kilometers. That's just a minor portion of the entire theater. It's two Atlantic oceans, from San Diego to Manila. It's two and a half Atlantic Oceans from the Aleutians to New Zealand.

And then we have to go through the Straits of Malacca, Malaysia, and Indonesia, to get to the Indian Ocean region portion of our theater. So a lot of blue air, a lot of blue sea, but there's a lot of green land, and archipelagic environment Theater is much more challenging because it's noncontiguous land space, and we, part of the land power network, are used to large open fields and countries connected together.

This archipelagic nature—Indonesia, 15,000 islands, Philippines, 7,500 islands, Japan, over 5,000 islands, and I could continue—makes it a little challenging for movement and maneuver as we go forward. The theater is interesting and complex, just from geography, from threats to development, governance and natural disasters. Humanitarian assistance, consequence management is something we're also into all the time: floods, landslides, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, you name it, we're involved in those all the time. So, it's not just as we'll talk later, I’m sure, the Russia, North Korea, China problems of the aggregated threats in the region, it’s the region itself is challenging.

So back to your question. You know, framing it that way, the theater that we're responsible for providing some level of deterrence and security with our partners and allies. Our role is the Army Service component command under General Clark to Admiral Paparo, the Joint Force Commander or Combatant Commander at INDOPACOM. We are the landpower contribution to the Joint Force. I would argue we're probably the backbone of the Joint Force, because if you look at Army support to other services, sustainment, intelligence and some others, we uphold the backbone of the theater. The theater gateway for all the communications we have is going through Army capabilities, in theater. The intelligence from the land, terrestrial, extraterrestrial intelligence, a lot of that comes from Army capabilities. Sustainment, we have that responsibility with the Theater Sustainment Command and other capabilities in theater to support the Joint Force. And then, of course, you've got a lot of several divisions, five, ten brigades in theater, to include an airborne brigade and to include the Korea Rotational Force in South Korea. A lot of movement and maneuver options that we can provide to deter or do flexible response, or respond in crisis or in some of our contingency planning.

So General Clark's got a robust command and control architecture, the most number of Soldiers assigned to any Army service component command across the globe. Because the theater is vast, we have a lot of aggregated threats, and the Army has a huge contribution to the Joint Force to prevent conflict or to prevail as needed.

COL Long

Thank you, sir. I came here from Eighth Army out of South Korea, where I was working for you down there, sir, as one of our higher headquarters. And South Korea is one of those partners that we talked about. We really kind of hit on three threats. But, would you mind talking a little bit more about the allies and partners in the region and how you work with them?

LTG Vowell

Sure. Europe has NATO, a construct of an alliance mechanism with multiple countries, dozens, since 1940s. And we know the history there. Nothing like that exists in our theater. We do, however, have five treaty allies. South Korea is one of them. Japan, Philippines, Australia, and Thailand are the five treaty allies we have. Now, really, those first four all have Mutual Defense Treaty connotations and responsibilities where there could be a declaration of a hostile event in Japan, they would activate Mutual Defense Treaty requirements, and we would try to respond and assist those.

It’s the same with South Korea. A little different we’ve had an armistice there since 1953. We have obligations as the primary component of the Joint Force there. USFK, CFC, UNC in Korea to help provide trained ready forces to respond to a Korean invasion and defend South Korea in that case.

So the ally construct is interesting because we don't have that mechanism. ASEAN's not an ally construct mechanism. It's more an economic forum, a stability forum. And that's the Southeast Asian nations alone. But it doesn't have a huge security alliance mechanism of any, you know, threaded importance that can respond to security threats with each other or from outside.

The interesting thing about all that I just said is every country is treated bilaterally. Everything we do with South Korea is pretty much different than how we work with Japan, how we work with Australia, Philippines, all of which are treaty allies. Different than Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam. Just complicated working—If you're talking access, basing overflights or presence and influence or the exercise rubrics as we try to get deterrence and interoperability—every country is different.

Korea as an anchoring ally on the Asian continent is unique because we have this frozen armistice. We're still at war with North Korea. By all technical, you know, definitions. And we have to be trained and ready. General Brunson wearing those three hats USFK, UNC, CFC. Eighth Army, the Army's component to that Forces Korea Command has the responsibility help the South Korean army to defend that country.

Number 9 or 10 GDP across the globe. Japan number 3 or 4, China 1 or 2, US number 1 or 2. These are all very important things that tie the future of the rules-based international order, or just the 21st century stability in the region together.

COL Long

You talked a lot about some of the subordinate commands you had in Korea. Japan is one that I know you have a special relationship to as a former US Army Japan commander. And I would ask, what are your thoughts on how the transition is going with USARJ, with US Army Forces Korea has sort of transition to a Joint Headquarters command, what that relationship looks like and any thoughts you have that you'd like to share on that.

LTG Vowell

Absolutely. So when I was there in 2021 to 23, as the USARJ commander, and it's interesting, I had two hats. I was the commander of US Army Japan and I Corps Forward, and that's pretty interesting. I Corps does not have a headquarters in Japan, but it was kind of the vestige of what we were planning to do in the early aughts, and that was to bring a robust command post, and capabilities from I Corps into Japan.

My staff at the time, and to this day at USARJ has a lot of O6 colonels on it because its origin was IX Corps, which went away in the early 90s when the Army decided to downsize some of their capabilities. Forward didn't need that much and focus on Korea. There wasn't a case to be made to have an operational corps in Japan.

So that's where we are right now is this interesting structure of a command that has operational requirements for reception, staging, onward movement, integration in Japan and support to South Korea with some of the rear area operations, NEO operations, sustainment operations, force flow as part of that connected defense between Korea and what we would do to help them. So that's what that headquarters does now.

It is necessary but insufficient. Insufficient in that there's a lot of capability it could become. And so that's, to answer your question, USARJ will become an operationalized headquarters again as a multi-domain command Japan. We’ll have three of these commands in theater. We already have one: 7th Infantry Division with the Multi-Domain Task Force. First MDTF are combining right now at JBLM to become kind of this integrated all-domain multiple-domain command and control headquarters, that is essentially the deep operations fighter for a JTF.

Some of that use battlefield framework deep close rear as a striker / light infantry division, kind of a hybrid there, is going to be expansive. The ability to have mid-range, long-range precision fires inside the organization means that with Tomahawks, SM-6 and other capabilities, that division now has to see much, much, much further. See, sense, makes sense, track, target in the deep fight much, much farther out into doe...