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 does now.
We're creating USARJ to be the same thing. To have the Multi-Domain Task Force go there, embed, connect into the existing structure for US Army Japan operationalizes that headquarters. And it does in a couple of ways, primarily in the non-kinetic or operational prepping the environment realm, the Multi-domain Effects Battalion—that's a component of the modern Multi-Domain Task Force—does all the ISR, INW intelligence collection. It looks at the warnings for potential crisis, say it's Korea, say it's China, and it does that every day. We don't have enough of that for now. So think about that. If we could do that prep with, let's just say the Southern Theater Command, Eastern Theater Command in China, you thicken the lines of intelligence preparation, the OPE for theater. It's done forward and that matters. And then you have, that's just the non-kinetics. You do that every day, you get a much better understanding comprehension knowledge of what the potential adversaries are doing. And we're watching them with better capabilities for it. USARJ will become that.
At the same time, interestingly enough, US Forces Japan, USFJ, will also operationalize beyond its current alliance management function, which it'll still do. It'll have an operational requirement snap linked into what the Japanese have now created, their JJOC, their Japanese Joint Operations Center, which is kind of like an NMCC chairman, integrated command structure for all of their Joint Forces for the defense of Japan. It's new and so FJ is coming up to meet that new requirement inside Japan. All of which symbolizes really why this is all happening.
Japan recognizes the threats to their sovereignty. Just in the last few years that China and even North Korea, through their ballistic missile schemes, launching test missiles over Hokkaido in the Sea of Japan in the EEZs, it's gotten a lot more challenging. And they want to do this so we can work better together, with our interoperable facets of human technical, procedural interoperability by creating structures and allowing us to have capabilities that helps provide all of that to both of our formations.
But for the Army, that's a huge contribution. These multi-domain capabilities, if I may, the theory of victory is with all the stuff, and we could talk about China's rise in the military. Let's just cut to the chase. They've got a pretty consequential military buildup in the last 30 years in all domains. And so they've created this structure, anti-access/area denial, A2/2D network of sensors and shooters that's designed to keep the Joint Force out.
If there's a third party intervention, when China decides to do some sort of military intervention themselves to a Taiwan or to a Scarborough Shoal or the Riukus in Japan, that's keeping the carrier strike groups, the 5th gen fighters, the bomber task forces away. It's really hard to get in there and move in when this is activated. And Multi-Domain Task Forces and now Multi-Domain Command Japan sits inside that bubble.
It's designed to fracture it open from the land. It's something that, in this case, China has not accounted for. Disaggregated troops along the first island chain, be they Marines, special operations, or Army Soldiers that have these effects for non-kinetics, think ability to impact the electromagnetic spectrum, space effect operations, or kinetically with long-range fires. We now hold ships at risk, planes at risk, terrestrial targets at risk at long distances. That's something that network’s not designed to go after. So now they have to commit resources looking for us in hard to find places. And that diffuses their ability to look deeper for those other Joint targets. And so this summation allows us to fracture open those windows of opportunity for the JTF to penetrate and exploit that bubble, however, we need to do.
So, a long answer to what's NBCJ? It's the symbol of that theory of victory coming to fruition on the ground in the first island chain. And this hypothesis of what we're doing, we have a lot of evidence because for the last eight years, the MDTF in some form or fashion has been experimenting, innovating, exercising with partners. We're getting it right. We're looking at different things. We're doing live, virtual, constructive ford with this. So we know it's got that kind of capability. You put three in theater, and we think we've got a lot of good capabilities to protect the Joint Force and allow them [to] expand and maneuver at a time of place to the Joint Force commanders choosing to penetrate and exploit a situation. And Japan's gonna be an anchoring piece of that.
COL Long
I completely agree the value of the Multi-Domain Task Force and the command that you have the ability to hold much further territory at risk. And I think what we've seen USARPAC successfully do is use them in some pretty impressive flexible response options, which is something that the Army hasn't been quite as innovative with in the past, that I think that is a great aspect of it.
And I think when we look at the Army Transformation Initiative or continuous transformation, you know, this is one of the key enablers that's brought out, especially to the Pacific of it. And it's easy to look at it, and we've seen a lot of the scholarship written about people, you know, unhappy with maybe 50 percent of the Apache sort of being, or all the Apache squadrons being cut, you know, in favor of putting resources towards drones and, you know, questions about where that's going. But I think the value of the Multi-Domain Task Forces and commands are exponential. And I think that's, that's really valuable
As you look at continuous transformation and transformation in contact, how do you see that from the USARPAC’s perspective, sir?
LTG Vowell
Back when I was a younger man, maybe most of you weren't even thinking about the Army. In the mid-90s, our Army invested in a plan called Force XXI. It took 4th Infantry Division, took it off the GIFMAP, and for a couple of years threw a bunch of kit at it. You’ve seen some of that kit today. The blue force tracker, JCBB, those are all down thread things that came out of this experiment and other things and communications and the signal world, etc. But it was a—we're going to pull this off and use that as a testbed division to go through mission command, command and control at the time, and how to fight it with better understanding of the adversary's location, disposition, composition, strength, capabilities, because you'd have a better situational awareness. And we tested all that out.
Okay. So that was that model. You probably also know the history, your readers, the Louisiana maneuvers, how we tested mechanized maneuver warfare and got some good insights, you know, prior to World War II. Those are forces that were fenced to do that. The chief and the secretary, if you’ve looked at the globe right now with the missions we have between Europe, CENTCOM, the border and Northern Command, and our deterrence requirements right now in the Indo-Pacific, there's no time to fence large formations just to throw kit at them and test it out.
One, that's not economical. It just is not. We have requirements to provide trained and ready forces all the time. So we can't fence units. Two, it's actually pretty practical to have transformation in contact. That's what that means. No one's coming off the line to test. You're forward, or you're doing stuff while you're on a deployment or while you're on Atlantic Resolve, or while you're in Pathways.
You're testing, experimenting with new kinds of kit. And that matters because our theater is different in many ways than Europe, USAREUR-AF, different than Third Army and CENTCOM. And so you have units that are testing, experimenting with small UAS in different theaters, different environments. There's a little best of breed that you know, potentially is going to come out of that. Understanding different environmental requirements will need as a, you know, key performance parameter, using some acquisition language, in these things when they become programs of record that I think, and we see evidence of that in our own theater, testing things in the Arctic, testing things in the Philippines in the jungles, testing things in Australia in the very high dry areas around Townsville, Shoalwater, Rockhampton. Those environmental conditions affect the how the units are using experiments innovation.
Point 2 is we gained a lot of experience in this. I've got vignettes from Iraq and Afghanistan a lot, a lot of folks do. Or we were challenged with a problem that was solved at a Soldier level. Classic example was if you are old enough to remember what a rhino mount was on a Humvee or a armored vehicle, it's about a six foot bar that goes on the front of the vehicle. It's got some sort of electrical heated element inside of what looks like a 50 caliber ammo box, and it's designed to have your PRI initiated IEDs detect that earlier is a heat signature. So by the time it explosively formed projectile IED goes off, it goes into the engine block of the vehicle, not the crew compartment, where we lost hundreds of Soldiers in Iraq from those kind of devices. That came from Soldiers welding a bar on the front of a Humvee, taking a 50 count ammo box, filling it with charcoal and lighting on a fire right before they left the patrol base. That was not an Army program. That was a survival requirement. Adaptation only comes from external environmental pressure, and that crucible of combat, in this case, it was Iraq, Soldiers at that level came up with a solution.
I think a beauty of what our Army senior leaders are doing with continuous transformation is you're allowing all of those points of presence and Soldiers to solve problems. We have flipped the script in some ways on the acquisition programmatics, which is, hey, we kind of see a thing from a test or a CTC rotation. Hey, big Army, take this on and let's go back to some vendors and figure some stuff out. Yes, there were Soldier, you know, input or leader input. It was a lot thinner, siloed, harder to impact if you're a squad leader, platoon leader, battalion commander on some programmatic. Boy, we flip that upside down.
I use the fires planning construct. It's, you know, there's top down planning, bottom up refinement in our doctrine for fires planning. Well, we flip that. It's a lot of bottom up requirements development and some top down refinement, top down resourcing and integration that's happening. With G-TEAD and the PIT, with the headquarters DA. How we've streamlined the acquisition community. That is allowing our Soldiers much, much faster interaction, more iterative, so we can fail fast, learn fast. And if you look at the NGC2, Next Gen[eration] Command and Control Testing, we're doing with 25th ID in Hawaii and with 4th ID in, in Fort Carson with their Ivy Sting series and others. Boy, you're getting iterative, fast stuff with industry on the ground, solving software hardware problems at point of presence.
This [is what] continuous transformation has done for us in the last two years. We have seen fruit born of this. Not only do we have gaps and seams, we identify requirements and fill them faster. And I'll just end with this: acquisition model of force design, 15 years out. Force development, 7 to 15 years out. Force employment, the near-term. Those are long lead times for any major program.
The Chief, the Secretary, by doing all this have taken those overlapping little Venn bubbles of force design, force development, force employment, and squished them together in under five years. That's the that's the intent. So we get updated with technology that changes a lot in the 21st century, and you get fielded things much faster. So again, another long answer to I'm really optimistic about what we're doing with it, why we're doing it and how it's being done with Soldiers’ input at very low levels.
COL Long
I see it very similarly, and I think one, I completely agree with the innovative capability of our Soldiers. You know, we see it. We have Eighth Army does a Shark Tank, USARPAC has a Pipeline. Great name, you know, it gives us thoughts of the North Shore. I think, 18th Airborne Corps has I think they call it the Dragon's Den or—
LTG Vowell
Dragon's Lair.
COL Long
Dragon's Lair. Yeah.
I think that we are doing a good job mining some of that capability of our own forces. So I agree on that.
You know, when we look at the problem, set the budget, the forces, the area we can put energy, it really is a zero-sum game. And kind of to that note, I'd like to kind of get back to what you talked about before.
Your AOR is incredibly large. And when you look at it like you said, there's a lot of blue. A lot of people would say, hey, why isn't this a Navy only or an air only mission? Maybe the Marines. Can you talk to us about the value of the land for this, for your AOR.
LTG Vowell
I'll echo what my boss, General Clark, would say to everybody. It's a Joint fight. It inherently is. It's so vast, so complex, complicated. We are designed Joint. And one of the unique things about INDOPACOM is all the component commands are within about three and a half miles of each other on Oahu to include INDOPACOM. They're all, we're all right there.
So my boss and his counterparts who lead PACFLT, PACAF, MARFORPAC. One, I'll just be honest, they're all, they know each other really well from previous assignments, which is very helpful. The human aspect of interoperability also matters on the blue side, not just in partners. But we get to routinely exercise with each other. So one, it's a it's a Joint problem and a Joint solution.
The Army, to answer your question, because there's this perception that there's a lot of blue air, blue sea. We're not necessarily, I almost said needed, but not necessarily number one in order of march. Well that may be true when you're talking about certain phases of a crisis or certain responses in certain ways. I mean, the Army's not going to do a Taiwan Straits Transit as a flexible response option. There are other Joint Forces that do that.
However, starting with Admiral Harris over ten years ago, he looked at the Army component, said, hey, we have looked at some of the shot doctrine with vertical launch systems and some of this stuff between us and the PLA Navy, which was growing, and said, can the Army figure out how to shoot ships from land? And our USARPAC commander and Chief of Staff of the Army at the time said, yeah, that's actually making sense. We see the need for doing that.
And there's a little bit of DNA, especially out in the Pacific with coastal defense batteries and the West Coast of the United States and out in the Pacific prior to and during and after World War II. There's a little bit of that history where we've been asked to do that before. This time we're talking about cruise missiles. This time we're talking about long-range capabilities to go after ships, which the Army, quite frankly, had not done. Their fires are cannon-based HIMARS, you know, so 100km or so if you're lucky. But something that's not designed to go after a moving target with sea states. That's hard to do. From a fire's perspective, we can now open up a new angle of attack, a new problem, a new dilemma for the adversary which didn't exist in this theater before.
I mentioned already intelligence. We have some unique capabilities from the land to do collection. And in the air, our Air Force brothers and sisters are doing less in that domain from ISR. We're picking up a lot of that. I'll just leave it at that. We have a large contribution to ISR and predictive analysis, PED, OPE, and theater for the Joint Force. Sustainment is probably one of the biggest things. Setting the countries to set the theater. We have a 8th TSC our theater sustainment command, amazing heroes. And they have to be, because they don't have a lot of sustainers in them. They have military police, engineers, several of our boats and watercraft dive teams, which we need uniquely to the terrain in this archipelagic environment to move intra-theater between the islands to help move stuff people and supplies. But we don't have a lot of sustainers, you know, a lot of maintainers in that organization, which is hard. We're trying to figure that out.
But we're also, because of who we are, we're the service that needs a ride in a conflict. So the TPFDD requires us to have a lot of people and stuff move by the Joint Force in crisis. That's not going to be helpful. I go back to my time distance, you know, description up front. It's going to take 21 days to sail from Seattle to get to the first island chain, as an example, 21 days. A lot could happen in 21 days in a crisis, and that's about where we are, I think, with Iran right now, maybe a little longer, and it's still going on. So our ability to respond as a force is not helpful if we have to keep a lot of people and steel back and move it forward.
The Army's contribution is setting the theater with logistics, unique Army equipment too, munitions for the Joint Force. I can keep going. We're doing that now. What General Clark has us doing is called ready forward. Think of it as putting all those things in from different Joint functions so we don't have to ship it in, to include movement and maneuver.
Unlike Europe, unlike Poland and Romania, where we have bases, we don't have a lot of bases other than Korea and Japan. Most countries constitutions prohibit a foreign army from being based in there. So under the exercise rubrics that we have—and I can talk about operation pathways and what that actually means for deterrence, not just exercises—we put stuff into the theater.
We have put in brigade combat teams, the old APS-3, APS-4 capabilities afloat. We're putting them on land. So there's no Corregidor where it's all in one tiny little place and get cut off. No. We're diversifying between Korea, Japan, the first island chain, Australia, others. More stuff for the Army is providing that. We've been asked to do that and our Army senior leadership is working, you know, how do we support this ready forward concept so we can set that forward.
When you talk about deterrence, we could talk about that in detail later, but one of the components is do you have enough stuff for a fight? And if I'm an adversary looking at, you know, how our way of war has always been is let's get a crisis, let's get a mobilization, let's get a TPFDD going. Let's build up a mountain of stuff. Months and months and months and months go by. Desert Storm, 2003. Both are examples where we didn't just go in and invade a country. It took time to build that up. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to take all that time? That's deterrent because we have stuff forward. We just got to put Soldiers on planes and boats and get them there, if they're not already there. And we can talk about pathways.
But the last part of this question I'll answer with, how do we apply Soldiers in this construct to deter? And if I didn't say it, that's our number one job. Prevail forward, with Admiral Paparo is deter a war is the first duty. The second duty in parallel is to be ready in case that happens, which is a deterrent component. Ready forward, a component of that is putting things into countries to set the theater. But some of your listeners know or have participated in operation pathways. It's 49 discrete exercises in the programmatics each year, with about 30 countries in the region to include Oceania, treaty allies, and partners from the subcontinent, you know, all the way to the third Island chain.
Think of that, listeners, not as an exercise. It's really doing two things. It's an assurance deterrence mechanism by being forward, more persistent, more partnership, helping them get better, take the train, advise, assist component, and learning from our partners and allies. Reassure them that America has their interests in mind because we're all connected in a couple, I would say existential things: preserving our sovereignty, protecting a free and open Indo-Pacific. So those strategic things about our current way of life for everybody, a large majority in the region prefers that security framework for that.
Deterrence. We see military deterrence as an equation, which is our job to deter in a war. But what does that actually mean? We're going to have posture number one. Capabilities, number two. Signaling of what we can and can't do, number three—or what they think we can do. And number four is the will and resolve to do this. Posture capabilities we've talked about a little bit already, they're kind of in concert. You've gotta have something with some combat credibility, and it's got to be a place where it's effective. So that means for us a lot of first island chain stuff. Hence the Multi-Domain commands can't do a lot at Fort Carson, Colorado, or in Hawaii or JBLM. We've got to get a lot of their capabilities forward, and that's the case for Japan that that we're doing.
So that's that piece: assure and deter. The second part is interoperability. The Army does USARPAC specifically and all other components exercise and work with work interoperability with their partners, Navy, Air Force, Marines, in some ways. The vast majority of the forces in the region are Army forces. Over 70% of the senior leaders in the countries and their ministries of defense or chiefs of armies, or chiefs of defense, sorry, are army leaders. So this landpower network is where we connect in and have a lot of contribution for interoperability from human, technical, and procedural facets of interoperability.
We provide that. Not that we're unique in that. Again, other services do what they do, but at the volume and scale of what the Army can provide and the reach back into our institutional army, think T2COM think the centers of excellence, we can bring a lot of those subject matter experts forward and help them train on cyber, help them train on work in the electromagnetic spectrum to protect their own signals of interest.
I could keep going. There's a lot of contributions the Army has, but our presence, our values, our Soldiers as good examples on, what I like to say, the knife edge of freedom, that forward thinking, you know, where tyranny rears its ugly head, be they Russians, North Koreans, or potentially the PLA. That presence matters and it shows the US government's, you know, interest in protecting open markets, freedom of peoples, and our common, you know, desire to have a prosperous way of life with our peoples.
That sounds all syrupy, but really, the Army is a linchpin for helping a lot of that happen. We are the baseline and pivot of maneuver for the Joint Force.
COL Long
We've talked a lot about allies, and there are a lot of great partners in the region. There's also some nasty threats, right? Some really capable and powerful threats as you look at it, right? We see Russia, the North Korea and China, all nuclear powered states. We've seen from the open source about 14,000 North Koreans go and help fight in the Ukraine. We've seen targeting data from Russia. Go to Iran and the current conflict that we're a part of. We kind of see this relationship working out. And I think China's open source giving significant dual use material to Russia. So it's a, can be a pretty nasty area as well.
You've been in that in the Pacific for a long time. You served in the 25th. You served in INDOPACOM. We talked about you commanding in Japan and now at USARPAC. Can you talk to us about how that threat has changed over the years with those three countries?
LTG Vowell
Great question. Alright, starting in the North, Russia is a Pacific country. As a result of what I would call Ukraine 2, since that second invasion a couple of years ago, they're still fighting. They've sent about 85% of their eastern military districts land forces into that cauldron. They ain't coming back soon. Trucks, tanks, BMPs, infantry fighting vehicles, Soldiers, it ain’t coming back.
What never left was their fifth generation fighters, their bomber task forces, and their boomer submarines that hold the continental United States at risk every day. NORTHCOM has to deal with that. We have to deal with that at INDOPACOM level and some of our forces in Alaska are involved in that, too, the 11th Airborne with ALCOM mission tied to NORTHCOM, tied to the Alaska National Guard and defending the homeland. Russia's causing a problem with that. They also do auxiliary general intelligence at sea around the Hawaiian island chain many months of the year. Because, again, I said we had the entire Joint Force headquarters in Oahu. They have a collection scheme, you know, looking at their signals of interest collecting on us. And that's a problem when you have surface combatants around the Hawaiian Island chain. We're going to keep an eye on that. That's a challenge. So Russia: not just a Europe problem. It is a Pacific challenge and an Arctic challenge as well.
Thing 2: North Korea. My man Kim Jong Un and the hermit kingdom. I like to say they’ve become even more hermited looking east, but a lot more open looking west. Meaning, yes, they have sent thousands of troops—this is all open source—to go help Uncle Vladimir and his fight in Ukraine. A lot of those initially were special operations troops, and then there's some artillery and some other stuff. The question we actually get asked, General Clark and I think, get asked often is like, hey—and you started to hint at this—what kind of combat experience are they getting out of that? Does that matter, as they rotate forces in there? One, slightly concerning, because North Korea doesn't have a lot of that combat experience that, they just don't. They've got a lot of generals and senior leaders that have medals from their collars down to their pants. You've seen the pictures. I'm not sure that's for the bake sale recruiting, but it's not for combat.
So some of that is important. We don't think it's decisive, at least not what I've seen. What is important, and what I could say here to listeners is you just got to know the technology transfer from Russian science capabilities is going to help North Koreans, this quid pro quo, I assume this. I'm going to give you thousands of Soldiers. I'm gonna make a bunch of munitions, they’re doing that too. 152 & 155 munitions by the millions for the fight for Russia. The quid pro quo on that is, hey, can you help us with our ballistic missile program? We got a problem with sea launch ballistic missiles. We got a problem with multiple reentry vehicles for nuclear warheads. And we got a problem with Hypersonics. Russia's good at all that. So my assumption is some of that's coming back. And that's actually pretty important because North Korea, even just recently Kim Jong Un has said this week they want to double down on their nuclear program as a deterrent. But it also is something that holds America's homeland at risk. ICBMs from North Korea is still a problem.
The last part about that is unique. Right now, the current South Korean administration in the Constitution for South Korea is reunification with North Korea. That is not North Korea's constitution. So North Korea is cut off the Friendship Bridge, cut off communications, cut off the house where they actually discuss. You've seen all that. You know this. So it's concerning. There's not a really great open dialog between North and South or anybody else. So that's why I say Kim Jong Un seems to be more hermited looking east and south versus being more open with Russia and helping in that direction. We're watching that.
And then lastly, this is a really rich, deep question to answer in a short amount of time. But I'll just say last 30 odd years. It really started with Deng Xiaoping after Tiananmen, after Desert Storm, watching what happened, that they needed military reforms, needed to invest to become more professional. The PLA was prime at the time. That shifted a lot to the Navy, to have an expeditionary naval capability to protect the first island territories they would claim. And just I could go to the rocket forces, their nuclear triad. They've developed a lot of capabilities from space to subsurface that are pretty challenging. We know this, our opponents and we see this every day in the theater. They're rubbing up against surface combatants. You see the airplanes that are doing interdictions our partners see this all the time when there's challenges to see features in the South China Sea or East China Sea or Japan and the Riukus. We see that.
Strategically, China is on an insidious, incremental, pernicious and malicious march across the region to be the big brother in the neighborhood and not in a helpful big brother way, a bully. They are adamant a lot of these old territories that have been taken for whatever colonial reason or post-conflict reason in the last 150 years, are going to come back. That Century of Humiliation from the Opium Wars in the 1800s to the creation of the Chinese Communist Party, and they're taking over China in 1949. That Century of Humiliation is over and they’re on the march to be the Century of Rejuvenation by 2049. These are all declared things from Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party. The PLA’s actions are a response to this.
The behaviors belie what they're actually up to. They're not building all this stuff because they're going to use it in benevolent ways for humanitarian assistance. They're building it up to be able to walk across the water and take a sea feature that they think is theirs. Changing the status quo. Changing law in some cases to suit their ends.
Stage one is regional. You can read, your readers can, Liz Economy, Kevin Rudd, former prime minister of Australia, many other people, like, this is a global aspiration by this country. And so that military instrument they've created is the challenge. The military problem I mentioned, what we really face is that a A2/AD network, that's pretty exquisite system of sensors to shooters.
And so the last part of your question, what have I seen since I've been out there since 2018? A couple things. All that has gotten a little worse. All of it has. But three things I think are pretty illustrative about what's changed in the region in that time frame. COVID. What do you mean General Vowell? What happened with COVID and the threats? It showed in a particular case with China, who had the COVAX version of the mRNA vaccine that they developed. They were blackmailing, in particularly small oceanic countries, hey, we'll give you 50,000 ampoules for your people if you don't recognize Taiwan anymore. The region went what? Like, you're serious? This is this is inhumane. It's basically a blackmail. So that kind of woke up some people to how pernicious China could actually be now. Not just economically, you know, we could talk about BRI, debt trap diplomacy, elite capture corruption. But how they could be pernicious about what they're trying to do diplomatically and politically and holding humans hostage, in my opinion.
The second thing was the wolf warriors after 2017. This is well documented. Their diplomats got really aggressive, really bellicose. They actually, I won't give the listeners a whole lot of technical detail on it, but a lot of the political warfare department and the foreign affairs folks had a lot of input on the PLA leadership overnight because of how they structured their policy on selecting those people.
And so these wolf warriors would go to Shangri-La dialog. They would go to these different international fora or conferences and just give them the microphone. My personal example, I was at an Indian Ocean region conference in 2019. Admiral Harris, then-Ambassador Harris to South Korea, was there with me. He was the keynote. He gets up and talks about a free and open Indo-Pacific, which is Prime Minister Abe’s, you know, vision for everybody. This is, you know, open markets, freedom of movement, freedom of speech. Sovereignty is your choice. All this, in the middle of a room of 300 people listening to him. This is a true story. This foreign minister got up like Khrushchev, banged his hand on the table and just yelled in English, “You're the bully. America's the bully.” I mean talk about gaslighting, talk about projecting? At the whole room just went, what just happened? And the story, this horror story ends with just the gravitas of a great leader. Ambassador Harris just kind of looked didn't say a word across the auditorium. He's standing there at the microphone and he just raises his hands, and, you know, just kind of points at this foreign minister, like, everybody understood what the real problem is.
So that has changed in the last few years. They belie what they're really about, not this win-win situation for economic development, which really means China wins twice. Win-win diplomacy is not in your favor, walk away.
The last one I think most decisive was again going back to the second invasion of Ukraine. That's when the region woke up, because China's very close to Russia in ways people don't understand. They've had some commitments with each other, and everybody saw the China-Taiwan thing in the mirror of what Ukraine-Russia is similar stuff. There's Ukraine is part of Russia. It's a false country. Taiwan is a breakaway province from Chiang Kai-shek. The civil war must end. This is China's internal problem.
These are our allies and partners telling us this. This is not Lieutenant General Vowell, Brigadier General at the time, saying this. This was them telling us. And what happened was people realized just how insistent China could become, soon seizing territories in Japan, seizing territories in the South China Seas or Philippines, or seizing Taiwan. The Kovacs, the bellicose statements wolf warriors. Ukraine made people realize, okay, it's actually not too far. It's not six steps to Kevin Bacon on this, that China could do the same thing very soon.
The threats were always building, but then the behavior started to belie itself more and more. And part of that was other operational things. The pressure campaign on Taiwan. More and more the PLA Navy would move around, circumnavigate Taiwan entirely with their ships and then cross the center line with J-20 fighters, cause the F-16s to interdict those from Taiwan, wearing out the Taiwan Air Force and an ADIZ, air defense identification zone, crossing sovereignty of Taiwan. But the ships would set up and look like they're ready to start either a quarantine or a blockade. And that's very provocative for an island nation.
Also, to say that those are the three things that happened, that one have changed a little bit of the threat significance—aggregated threats, Russia, North Korea, China—and to response the perception from allies and partners like, whoa. But it's not as easy as saying they're ready to defend, ready to push back because the issue is China's so big, their influence so vast in the region. And the economic ties to most countries are binding. You can't break some things, like in Philippines, when China has over 50% control of their electric generational enterprise, their power generation. That's Chinese state owned, enterprise run stuff, as an example.
So that's the threats. That's what we see militarily. What's changed, what's happened. And the good news is a lot of what I just said has brought, “the sleeper has awakened”, you know, to quote Dune. Allies and partners like, whoa.
Last examples here. Some of those exercises I talked about pathways were bilateral seven years ago, or maybe multilateral, three or four countries. We went from Garuda Shield overnight to Super Garuda Shield. Where Andika, the Army chief at the time said, hey, we got six countries. We went overnight to like 18. Well, why did we do that? Was there somebody’s, you know, evaluation bullet on an NCO AAR, earlier. No. It's because countries said, hey can we come to your exercise and work together with you? Hint, hint. Yeah, roger. So a measure of effectiveness of the nonexistent alliance. But this land power network started to show itself in Yama Sakura, Garuda Shield, Baluchistan, Talisman Saber, RIMPAC, Navy. Other of these large Joint exercises, the [have] more participants. India started asking if they could observe exercises in Japan. Whoa. Again, Vowell: rational optimist. Those are good indicators of the threats people see with those three countries and what they want to do in response to it.
COL Long
Appreciate that, sir. That's a very detailed overview.
LTG Vowell
I’m talking too much.
COL Long
No, no, this is really good, and exactly what we're looking for when we're talking about the threat. So to put the opposite spin on this, in addition to the value of the of our allies and partners, I'd like to hear sort of about where you think deterrence is going. The National Defense Strategy makes it clear that our goal is to maintain deterrence from conflict in your region. We talked about all the bad actors that are there. Can you talk to us, what makes you optimistic that deterrence will hold and continue to hold?
LTG Vowell
Yeah, it's a great question. How do you know it's working? I could be flippant and say, well, China hasn’t invaded yet. So there's some truth that it's working, right? You know, maybe some inference. I'll just go back to historical facts, and the bumper sticker of “Peace through Strength” is not a bumper sticker. If you are prepared for war, if you are ready and you are forward positioned, you have a better chance—this is game theory—of preventing your adversary from doing something with some initiative, without some sort of cost imposition, because that object is denied. And my historical example is personal to me. The story I tell people is my father was in the military. He was in MACV-SOG, Special Operations in Vietnam, Laos Cambodia, came back, didn't, he told me later on life, did not think that's the way he wanted to go. The future was the armored mechanized fight in Europe and that was our entire army unasked Southeast Asia as fast as they could in 1975 to go to Western Europe to defend and deter. So if you think about that containment policy against the Soviet Union at the time had 750,000 Soldiers, airmen and others in West Germany and Berlin alone, not even, the Benelux is another thing, to defend forward.
I was a ten year old kid in 1979 and the alarms go off at the concern we lived in every 2 or 3 months. Think tornado alarms go off and you're watching, as fast as he could my dad run down the stairwell, across the street, through the fence line, onto the Kaserne, and go into the motor pool. Within ten minutes, tanks and APCs rolling out on the roads.
We were 40 miles from the, at that time, Czechoslovakian Border. I had no context of this as a young kid then. But now I look back like, wow, we were forward. It showed skin in the game. We were, this was an emergency deployment readiness exercise I'm describing, we were EV drilling all the time to test readiness, to test the defense plan. We were signaling our commitment and will to do this because you already had posture and capability, we were signaling what we're doing and we were rehearsing the plan.
I would just say there's other factors. The Soviets’ closed economy was a problem. Maybe the Star Wars Defense Initiative caused them to, like, freak out. Their political infrastructure collapsed. But I got to tell you, I think history is a fact, a big component of the Soviet Union's collapse and why they never invaded was because we were forward, because we were committed as an alliance, because we had a lot of capabilities to deter and fight and win.
I mean, my goodness, the reforge, or return of forces to Germany for what was then CONARC, the precursor to FORCECOM, Continental Army, the United States would send divisions and special operations and Ranger battalions over for flintlock as part of Reforger, because that was the plan. We would rehearse, boom, first 30 days and meantime we'd ship stuff over. It would come through Bremerhaven, get into the fight, move forward. We practiced the defense of Western Europe.
I use that as that's my rational optimism. As a young kid seeing it, now knowing what it was really all about, I go back to that's how deterrence, military deterrence, works. You are able to confront a challenge by denying them the object without some significant cost they aren't willing to pay. That was going to be the case. Multiple US and Allied core and the central region of Europe ready to defend, that was significant. We've got to do something in that vein. That theory, that hypothesis I don't think has changed. You have to do something like that forward. You can't phone it in. Maybe cyber, you can phone in, but you've got to have some steel-forged Soldiers forward, Joint Force forward to do the exact same thing in the western Pacific against a potential, you know, China invasion or incursion or whatever crisis as we did in Western Europe. It matters.
And there's some nuance differences. Context matters. Time is different, I get it. But when you're talking military deterrence and denying an object from being taken by imposing costs or the potential for cost is too much, then you're focusing your deterrence on the decision makers of that adversary. They have to know, and they'll see that. Not because you're saying it, they can observe you close by, within range.
That's why I'm optimistic. Last few years, we've gotten to do more with that. And our Army senior leaders recognize that and have helped us campaign resourcing pathways, resourcing the continuous transformation, investing in the capabilities we need as we change our structure to deal with these changing characteristics of warfare in the 21st century. That is where I'm optimistic on all fronts.
And I just say last of that question, but man, you get out there, see Soldiers—35 years, almost 35 years in the Army. I'm old, I'm a digital immigrant. I'm not native to a lot of the things. And this generation of Soldiers coming in now, I get to see them in Philippines. We just got to see them in Thailand last week, doing great things. I'm very optimistic they're going to adapt. I'm very optimistic they're going to do well. There's no pejorative against their Generation Z or whatever they are. They're going to pick up and to see them do that while they're training with partners or in this case, allies in Thailand. That's motivation because you can see it. You can see what it means when they're on the knife edge of freedom. Doing what they're told to do at individual and small unit teams. Man. Pound for pound, I’d take the American Soldier squad, platoon, company over anybody. China ain't got that. They don't have noncommissioned officers the way we do. Not even close. This totalitarian mission command, just got to throw a little disruption into it. Get them off timetables, where our NCOs can pick up and fight companies? I've seen it. That's where we have the depth and that's where we have an asymmetric advantage, quite frankly, as we invest in tactical leadership. For when the chips are down, the best of people tends to rise up in the US military. I could go on about it because I'm very, very proud of our Soldiers in the US Army Pacific.
COL Long
I appreciate that. And, you know, speaking of Soldiers, we're here at Army War College and we're about ten weeks right now from graduation. I've already seen the PCS truck starting to get here. So I would ask you, what kind of advice do you have for the Soldiers, the troops from our sister services heading to the USARPAC theater. Heading into your AOR. What should they be looking into reading? What advice would you have for them?
LTG Vowell
I'm probably poor at developing leaders or giving them advice. I—only because my experiences —a personal story, I don't have too many mentors. I tend to, the way the Army assigns me, and I don't think the Army's caught up to the fraud I've been perpetrating for 35 years. But I’ll try to help. And when I do senior leader counseling, I talk about this acronym, FERST, I use: family, exercise, read, sleep, think. FERST. Put FERST things first. F-E-R-S-T. I won't talk about all of that. But your graduates here going out, a couple thoughts. Let me just start with being a good staff officer. If you're going to leave here and go be a good staff officer in whatever function, whatever G or J staff. One of the things, I will call these indicators of potential. People like me look at people like you and evaluate you and your potential. Yeah, you could do great performance. You're going to learn, you're going to grow, you're to contribute to the team. But for you to go to the next position or to command position or, you know, increase responsibility, you got to be able to get along with and influence your peers, get along with and influence your peers.
That peer might be a civilian GS14. That peer might be a partner ally, that peer might be in another service, that peer might be another colonel in another command or another directorate. Too many times I've seen people—this is point number two—you gotta be tenacious, not contentious. To many people be contentious and can't get along with peers. I'm telling you, I'm going to smoke you out. You're not going to have much longer in our Army if you if you have sharp elbows. Don't need that because it's unpredictable.
It's not helping to be a calm presence as a leader, a staff officer, when there's significant challenges. We get a lot of fights, real fights on the globe right now. We need steady and unemotional leaders and staff officers. So that’d be the third point, being steady and unemotional when you graduate here. These are also for commander people going from the War College into the command you have a few of those. I would give the same kind of advice to that non-theater specific, just what I would look at—and this is my personal perspective on things, I learned this the hard way. These are all my lessons learned because I screw these up. People like me value people who can influence peers, who can be tenacious and passionate without being emotional and contentious. That's a big deal. We want you to have passion. What you care about all these things.
The last one I'd leave you with is don't fight City Hall unless you're paying your taxes. Too many times people think my unit's the best and you should think this. You know, you should think you're in the best unit in the Army because you're there, not because you're egotistical, narcissistic, or arrogant. It's because you're there to help contribute to that leader, that command those Soldiers to do the mission. And every mission is important. Every mission's hard. It doesn't matter what branch, MOS, functional unit you are. They're all important to the Army. They really are. That's important when you're trying to accomplish the mission. Those kind of things as a leader to balance. You won't see that in 600-23. You don't see that in, you know, the AOR support form, those kind of things. Those are subjective things I would just throw out first, when you come out of the school, just boilerplate stuff. And it's not for colonels, it's for majors too. It's for generals. I counsel generals on this stuff. By then it's almost too late, so now it's performative counseling.
So back to theater specific. You mentioned reading. I read quite a bit. One, I'm just professionally curious, and you should be too, listener. First thing I would tell people, and I do this in my counseling, I'll ask, A) what are you reading? Without being, you know, judgmental. Is it websites? Are you because I’ll ask a question, what websites do you go each day? What is your news coming from? But what are you reading? And then how do you read? People read the Bible. People read business books, whatever. All's great.
What I tell people, number one, be diversified in your reading. You can learn a lot from biographies. I read a good biography of Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, another one recently. They're like fascinating Britain and Israel, prime ministers at one point, for you younger readers, who were leaders of consequence at the time in their country. You can learn a lot from that.
Military history, of course you can learn. I have a lot of books on China and the region, because I've been out here so long responsible for helping to shape some of the execution of policy at INDOPACOM, execution forward in Japan and the alliance where we are at USARPAC with our allies and partners in the landpower network. Because I didn't grow up with that. I've been all over. I've assigned to Europe, Forces Command, South Asia, Middle East. Now, last seven years or so, out in INDOPACOM. You got to stay updated. You have to break time. And it's easy for people like me to say go read Liz Economy’s, you know, books on China. Or like I said, Rudd's book on Xi Jinping. There's many I could give you. Those are a couple right there.
The time to do it. In this FERST acronym, FERST, I give people a clock, 24 hours and go through how many hours of sleep you need a day? Well, sir, 6 to 7. Be honest. Okay. Seven. How many hours of PT do you need a day? Let's just say two so you can shave, prep, go to do your PT, cool down, recover, eat breakfast, shower, two hours out on the net. So that's eight hours, you know, sleep plus PT. How many hours of work are you at a day? Oh, sir 9 to 10. Okay. Let's start adding this up. How many hours do you have for your family and yourself? Sir, we have 5 or 6. What are you doing with that time?
And so it goes back to reading. How are you reading? Are you dedicating 30 minutes? You know, I do it at bedtime, quite frankly. At the end of the day, I like reading, and it helps me fall sleep. I'll get through a chapter or two or something. That's what I do. My point is you got to figure that out. It's not just, hey, General Vowell what's your book list? I'm not going to give you one. There are lots of good ones out there. But if you're coming to Indo-Pacific, I would focus on some of those things about China's rise, China strategy.
There's other great books about partners and allies in the region. There's an author here from the War College, McManus, who wrote a great trilogy about the Army's fight in World War II. Ian Toal, previously Navy-centered, wrote a trilogy, Twilight of the Gods. Others. That's very, very good. But it leaves out the Army's contribution to the Pacific and a 45-odd amphibious landings, combat landings that were done in World War II. Guess how many of those were done by the Marines? Like, it fits in my hand. The vast majority were Army forces that commanded, controlled, executed amphibious operations in the Pacific. So understanding that history portends the Army of today and the future, we're going to be doing a lot of the same things: forward to fight and win. But find time to read. Carve that time out to think and read.
I need you to think. I need you to carve time out to think. I do it during PT. The hard part about that is you gotta come back and write down the brilliant thoughts that I have at PT when I'm running or, you know, pushing kettlebells. Write down those things you think of.
I would argue for your graduates, we need people who can think so you can identify the root causes of problems, not just, oh, you can identify the problems. First step to problem solving. Yeah, how about the root causes? They can't do, won't do, didn’t know root causes to why things are the way they are. Think about the depth so you can come to senior leaders with recommendations for courses of action.
I could give you a lot of creek bank philosophy about Be, Know, Do is a leader and staff officer at the brigade level or a division or JTF level. There's some common sense there. If you think about what you're doing and take the time to think and apportion your time management using that FERST, family, exercise, reading, sleeping, thinking and use a clock for yourself. Man, if you come in that, that's the best time management advice I can give you because the Army's going to take it away from you. I will not promise you balance. I think that's a myth. We know that at some point, the big green is going to take over your two daughters, where you can't see them at the recital. It's going to happen. We don't prefer that. If you come out of this and think about your time management and think about how you read and invest professional development, know yourself and seek self-improvement is a timeless adage of what we need every leader coming out of the War College to Be, Know, Do.
COL Long
I completely agree, and I think all of the best leaders I've had have been avid readers. And I'll vouch for you, sir. I've been flying over Korea with you in a helicopter, and you pulled out a book right out of your bag and just started going at it. I was super impressed, with that commitment to learning, continuing on.
Sir, I want to thank you first for being a supporter of the China Center for so long. You really were a helping founding force for the organization. You’ve flown halfway across the world to come to our PLA Conference. You've been incredibly generous with your time today and offering your insights. So I wanted to I want to say thank you very much for that. I sincerely appreciate it.
LTG Vowell
Of course, Mike. My privilege and honor. Again, I'll just end with, really proud of what our mission is in US Army Pacific is nested with INDOPACOM and what our Army senior leaders are doing to resource those requirements. I'm optimistic. And don't take this the wrong way, listeners. I'm optimistic we'll meet the deterrence requirements. I'm optimistic if we get this right, the history of the 21st century will be written by the United States not going to war with China and not losing out everything we've had from a free and open Indo-Pacific. We won't lose that
POWERED BY BLUBRRY
