Facing Cuts, Army Chief Touts Pacific Role

WASHINGTON: With COVID budget cuts looming – especially for the ground force – the Army Chief of Staff is emphasizing his service’s role in the Pacific, traditionally thought of as a Navy and Air Force theater.

Gen. James McConville, who became chief in August 2019, isn’t nearly as blunt as his predecessor Gen. Mark Milley, who went on to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and last month prophesied a budgetary “bloodletting” of ground forces to fund naval capabilities versus China. But in McConville’s cautious remarks this afternoon to a friendly audience, the Association of the US Army, he emphasized the Army’s contributions to the Pacific more than any other theater. Those contributions range from traditional boots-on-the-ground partnerships with friendly armies to high-flying missiles striking ships and ground targets over the vast distances of the Pacific.

“In the Indo-Pacific, we see the Army playing a critical role in working with our allies and partners in posturing critical capabilities,” McConville declared. “In the last 18 months, I have traveled to the theater three times, visited multiple countries, and I have two more trips projected in the near future.”

Later this year, the Chief of Staff continued, the Army will lead a major international exercise, Defender Pacific 21, a sequel to 2020’s Defender Europe wargames cut short by COVID.

Defender 21 is specifically focused on “the southwest Pacific,” McConville said. That’s a vast area, and he didn’t specify countries or island chains. But the southwest Pacific includes key treaty allies like Australia and the Philippines, non-treaty partners such as Singapore, a neutral in Indonesia, and the increasingly contested South China Sea, where Beijing has turned blown up coral reefs in disputed waters to turn them into fortified artificial islands.

For Defender Pacific 21, McConville said, the Army will

• break out equipment from one or more of its global caches, known as Army Prepositioned Stocks (APS), which are essential to rapid deployment of heavy forces that can’t easily be flown in by air.
• exercise its fleet of Army watercraft, which range from small boats to large ships – and which service leaders at one point discussed disbanding; and
• deploy one of its new Multi-Domain Task Forces, experimental units built around long-range missile launchers augmented with expertise in use of space assets, cyber/electronic warfare, and information operations.

In peacetime “great power competition” with China, McConville emphasized, the Multi-Domain Task Force can create “long-range effects” without the use of lethal force, for example using cyber and electronic warfare. In open “conflict,” he went on, the Task Force would provide “long-range precision fires” – i.e. missiles – to help take apart the layered defenses known as Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) systems. (While McConville didn’t say so aloud, many in the Army are concerned that Chinese and Russian A2/AD will include enough anti-aircraft defenses to keep US airpower at bay until land-based and sea-launched missiles can blast open a path).

McConville also noted the service’s recently released Arctic strategy, which calls for focusing a Multi-Domain Task Force, a two-star operational HQ, and an “Arctic-capable brigade” on the far north. (While Russia is the traditional threat in the Arctic, China has become much more active there in recent years). His mentions of the Mideast and Europe were, by contrast, merely in passing.

McConville also hailed the Army’s ambitious modernization program, one of whose main objectives is to arm the new Multi-Domain units. He particularly emphasized the high-speed Future Vertical Lift aircraft to replace existing helicopters – he’s a chopper pilot himself – and the service’s array of new long-range precision weapons, from hypersonics to ship-killing missiles to long-barreled howitzers.

“I’m amazed at how quickly Futures Command, with ASAALT, with industry, is developing their systems,” he said. “By way of example, hypersonic missile capability– we’ve tested that successfully already. That is a game-changing capability and we’ll be fielding the first batteries in 2023.”

But how will the Army pay for all this, especially amidst the coming budget crunch?

“We don’t have a dollar to waste with the budget environment we’re going into,” McConville acknowledged. One way to avoid waste, he said, is that “we’ve taken a different approach now, working very, very closely with the industry,” with the Army setting broad “characteristics” and giving companies freedom to innovate, rather than prescribing rigid technical requirements that may not be feasible at any reasonable price. (The Army’s reboot of its Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle to replace the Bradley is the service’s biggest bet on this new approach).

“We believe we’re going to save a lot of money,” he said, “It’s much more efficient.”

The other crucial economy, he argued, is to stop buying traditional technologies and start retiring them. (The poster child here is the Chinook helicopter, whose earliest versions served in Vietnam; the Army tried to cut purchases of the latest model, the CH-47F Block II, but Congress overruled them and added more funding instead).

“We can’t buy old ‘new stuff,’” McConville said. “A lot of people are very comfortable, they want to buy … really 40-, 50-, 60-year old capabilities. And those are wonderful systems, but we can’t afford both” them and the cutting edge systems.

“We have to invest in the new systems,” he said. “That means we have to divest legacy systems.”

That’s an uphill battle because Congress is historically much more comfortable buying more of the same, while cutting cutting-edge tech that hasn’t yet turned into jobs for their constituents.