Sea Control - Sea Control 513 - The US Army in the Pacific with Tim Devine

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

Links: To Upgun Seapower in the Indo-Pacific, You Need an Army, By Gen Charles Flynn and Lieutenant Colonel Tim Devine, US Naval Institute Proceedings, February 2024.Fire and Fortitude: The U.S. Army in the Pacific, 1941-1943, by John C. McManus, Dutton Caliber, July 30, 2019.Island Infernos: The U.S. Army's Pacific War Odyssey, 1944, by John C. McManus, Dutton Caliber, November 9, 2021.Sea Control 181 - The "Amphibious" 8th in the Pacific War, CIMSEC, June 7, 2020.Sea Control 269 - USMC Commandant General David Berger on Force Design, CIMSEC, August 20, 2021. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. This week I have Lieutenant Colonel Tim Devine, a strategist for U.S. Army Pacific, joining us. He's going to tell us all about potential contributions the Army can make in a Pacific campaign, as well as what the Army is doing to prepare for one. This episode was edited and produced by Marie Williams. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication.

And now, Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Lieutenant Colonel Tim Devine. We're going to discuss an article that he co-authored in Proceedings with General Charles Flynn, making the case for the Army's role in a Pacific fight. So, Tim, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about your background, please? Yeah, Jared, I'd be glad to. But first, let me say thanks for inviting me to the podcast.

I think it's a real privilege for me to share some thoughts about how the Army contributes to the fight at sea. And I'd venture to guess you don't get a lot of Army officers on sea control. So hopefully I'm not the first or nor am I the last. I get more than you think. Well, it's good to hear. So a quick thumbnail on me. I graduated from the Citadel Military College in South Carolina and commissioned into the aviation branch of the U.S. Army. And for really the first 10 years of my career, I flew Apaches. I deployed to Afghanistan a couple of times. And then I became an Army strategist by way of a fellowship where I served then afterwards on the Army staff. And so while I was on the Army staff, I was a strategic planner in the Army War Plans Division, and then I was the speechwriter to the Army G357, which is, you know, the equivalent of the N3 for the Navy.

But really, the last three years, I've served as a strategist at U.S. Army Pacific, or USRPAC as we call it, which is the Army Component Command to Indo-PACOM. And the organization I work for is doctrinally referred to as a theater army. And USERPAC is, it's been located in Fort Shafter, Hawaii for over 100 years now. So it's longstanding presence on the island of Oahu. But during my time at USARPAC, I've written several strategy documents and concept papers, and I led the development of our Theater Army campaign plan. And currently, I serve as a strategic advisor to the commander, General Flynn, who you mentioned that I co-wrote this piece with. All right. Thanks, Tim. Now, you and I were talking offline before we started this about the Army's history in the Pacific Theater. And I know you looked into that as part of your prep work for your job at USARPAC.

So could you give the listeners sort of the thumbnail sketch of what the Army's history is in that theater? Yeah, I'd be happy to. And I think do it in a way that was personalized for me, because coming to the Pacific was honestly, it was a new experience for me. For the majority of my career, I'd focused on operations in the Middle East and served, I mentioned, on the Army staff and in other institutional assignments. So I'd never served in this theater, and I'd really only visited Japan and Korea. That was really the limit of my experience and my exposure to the Indo-Pacific. So to prepare, I started reading, or prepare for this assignment, rather. I started reading a lot about the region and, as you mentioned, the history. And once I began, I realized I knew far less than I ever really would have imagined.

But in particular, I was fascinated by the Army's history. So the Army's history really had its roots in coastal artillery. As the United States began its expansion of territories out into the Pacific, the Army was there providing security and protecting bases and the coal routes and so forth. But other events like the China Relief Expedition, the Siberian Expedition, and of course, the four major wars that the Army participated in, the war in the Philippines at the turn of the century, World War II, Korea and Vietnam. But some of the readings that I found the most intriguing were by Dr. John McManus, who most of your listeners probably have heard of him before for his predominant work on D-Day and other histories of the European theater. But he just completed what I think is a superb trilogy about the U.S. Army in the Asia-Pacific theater of World War II. And I really appreciate a phrase that he uses to describe the Army during that theater of conflict, which, as he quotes, was 1.8 million soldiers, the third largest force ever constituted by the United States. But it was his phrase he called a force that remains, quote, curiously anonymous. And I thought that was really interesting because serving in the Pacific today, I'll tell you, it's often a wonder what the Army's role is in a theater that's named after two oceans.

But going a little bit back on the history bit, I didn't realize how substantial the Army's contribution was. So whether it would be engineering, logistics, medical, patient evacuation, administrative functions, and really all of these other support forces, not to mention, and McManus points this out too, is that the soldiers during the Pacific Theater did the plurality of fighting. And so, you know, the Marines raised six divisions during the war. And, you know, their stories are well known. Their bow are certainly hard earned. But the Army also, you know, to its credit, raised 21 divisions in the Pacific theater. So about three and a half times the amount of combat power that the Marines raised. and I'm not mentioning this to denigrate the Marine Corps at all and you know McManus makes the same point too but I think it's quite the contrary is it's a means to illuminate a relatively unknown chapter in America's Pacific war story and the fact that the army has played a major role in military operations in this theater for well over a century so when you look at what the army must be able to do today you know personally I find it incredibly useful to draw on the insights that history offers to understand how land forces can contribute as part of this larger scheme,

even if it's in a theater named after the two oceans. And moreover, the legacy of the American soldier, I think, can help explain the contemporary utility of land power that General Flynn and I discuss in the article, that is, whether it's asymmetric advantage of fires and effects at extended distances, fostering unity of effort with the sizable armies of our allies and partners, or providing staying power to the joint force in the form of joint interior lines. So I'm going to look up that McManus trilogy you mentioned there, and we will throw that in the show notes as a reference. For anyone who's curious, you can find it there. I will also refer the listeners back to Sea Control 181, the Amphibious Eight in the Pacific,

which talks about Eichelberger's campaign, Amphibious Campaign, through the Philippines archipelago there, and that featured Major General Pat Donahoe and Professor Don Chisholm of the Naval War College. Tim, to your article now, what does the Army mean by the phrase Transform in Contact in the context of the Indo-Pacific? Yeah, so Transform in Contact is an initiative led by the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Randy George. And I think the best way to describe it is it allows commanders to experiment with emerging technologies and organizational prototypes without changing the basic structure of the unit itself. So it's fielding new equipment and other things that could potentially be game changing or at minimum advanced capabilities to soldiers on the front line. But it also it's a means to encourage innovation and initiative. So it focuses on the near term horizon of what the Army calls its continuous transformation.

And I'll note, too, that the Army is undergoing its largest transformation since the 1980s. So many listeners are probably familiar with what we call the Big Five. So the big five platforms of the Apache, which is near and dear to my heart as a former aviator, the Blackhawk, Patriot, the Abrams tank, and the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle. But I also think it's important to point out that, you know, my interpretation of, you know, quote, in contact, and I'm not sure if this was originally intended, but I think it's really important to your question, is to account for exactly what Army forces are in contact with. So we're transforming in contact. What is it that we're in contact with? So I, you know, I stand from where I sit and I serve in the Indo-Pacific. I think it's, you know, looking at the AOR where Army forces operate out where I currently am, it's incredibly complex. The geography ranges from the extremes, from tropic jungle to archipelagos to Arctic-type environments with extreme cold weather and high altitude.

It's got the largest geographic feature on the planet with the Pacific Ocean, but it also has the world's largest cities. So, you know, six out of ten and soon seven out of ten people live in this AOR. And so when you look at what Army forces are in contact with, it's the environment, it's the people, it's our allies and partners. and, to an extent, the adversary. So an important question, I think, looking inwardly towards the Army, what the Army should be asking itself is, how do we transform ourselves to meet the unique demands of the theater? And we've got to be thoughtful about how to operate in conditions,

whether it's the jungles in New Guinea or negative 50 degrees, 14,000 feet along the line of actual control in India, or on the Korean Peninsula facing off against the DPRK. So these are all conditions that the Army forces must be able to operate in. And I'll just expand on, you know, drawing a little lesson from history here since you could tell I'm fascinated by it. So one particularly interesting episode in the Army's history was during the Battle of New Guinea, which was really the Army's first experience in combat outside of the initial attack

by the Japanese in the Philippines and so forth. So, during the Battle of New Guinea, the Army experienced a significant rate of non-battle injuries due to jungle maladies, tropical diseases, torrential rainfall. They had a really difficult time and challenges figuring out how to maneuver in the thick jungles, how to resupply forces in mountainous terrain. And then you look at another example on the other end of the spectrum and the Aleutian campaign in Alaska. Army forces were committed to the island of Attu where they were not properly equipped for cold weather, nor were they trained in how to operate in that type of environment. And, of course, you can't always avoid these types of circumstances. But if you carry forward some of what I think are universal lessons to emphasize the importance of how we train, We have to be able to train in the environment and under the conditions where forces, whether it's an army force, Marines, special operations, you know, all the sea services to those conditions that forces are most likely to operate and fight.

And I'd say the same is true for our transformation efforts, which finally, I'll just emphasize, is bigger than just equipping units. It's how we organize. It's how we prepare leaders. So it involves aspects across what we in the military refer to as dot mil PFP. So the doctrine, the facilities, the policy, you name it. And to its credit, the Army's done a lot in pivoting itself to focus or transform rather on operations in the Indo-Pacific. It created the 11th Airborne Division in Alaska to fight in extreme cold weather, high altitude. It created a combat training center in the Pacific, which I'll touch on later. But I think it's just important to keep in mind the environment has to be at the forefront of the transformation because that really has all these determinative factors of what the Army and all forces, for that matter, must be able to do across the continuum, including potential wars in the future. so i'll pause here and timestamp this for listeners we're recording this on wednesday the 13th of march these typically come out four to six weeks after they're recorded that's probably important because we're about to talk about a bunch of uh like potential army amphibious stuff and we did

just see a flotilla of army watercraft leave the east coast of the united states today uh headed towards gaza so if we're not talking about that and like what is happening in the amphibious environment here with the United States Army Watercraft. It's only because it hasn't happened yet, so we can't necessarily draw any parallels to the discussion that we're having. Tim, can you explain the Ring of Fires concept, why the Army's developed it, and how the service is going about realizing it? Yeah, and I planned on touching on the Army Watercraft later on, so I'll put a pin in that for now. But to the Ring of Fires question, you know, that was developed by a woman by the name of Dr. Carol Evans, who she is the director of the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S.

Army War College. And I think principally what her Ring of Fires concept is, is meant to more or less describe how to regain military advantage amid several downward competing pressures. So whether it's defense budget cuts, the effects of the pandemic, and then the upward trajectory of the People's Liberation Army. So her concept involves two prongs, and those are deterrence and relationship building, which, you know, can coincide with assurance. So deterrence and assurance. General Flynn likewise explore these interrelated ideas in our article as well. But to define what, you know, according to Dr. Evans, and this is a quote, a ring of fires that could target China's critical land-based maritime assets, end quote. So several years ago, Admiral

Harry Harris, who was the commander of then PACOM, issued a challenge for the Army to be able to sink ships. And, you know, I've heard General Flynn tell this story before because he was there when as the deputy commander of U.S. Army Pacific and took those words to heart. And so the rest of the Army enterprise has as well. And really has ever since been the Army has been developing its long range precision strike capabilities. But I think if you back up a little bit and take a broader view, this idea of sea control and sea denial from the land isn't necessarily a new idea. And, you know, we point that out in the article as well of Alexander the Great, you know, defeating his enemy, the enemy fleet from the land. So it's an ancient idea in many ways. But, you know,

in more recent times, I think this idea is gaining a lot of volume. Individuals like Albert Palazzo and Peter Dean in Australia, and of course, Jim Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara in their book, Red Star Over the Pacific. It's also in Chinese writings too. And speaking of which, when you look at China's anti-access area denial network or the A2AD network, that's really meant to defeat our strengths. So the United States air and maritime capabilities, which I'll add are second to none, but that network is consisting largely of land-based capabilities. So being able to conduct sea control, sea denial from the land is something that China has been espousing for the, you know, well over a decade, if not two. And I think we're also seeing a lot of supporting

evidence to the theory, whether it was in 2022 in Ukraine, when they sank the Russian Moskva ship in the Black Sea with a Neptune anti-ship missile, or even as recently as just a few days ago, the British-owned vessel in the Red Sea was sunk by an anti-ship ballistic missile fired by the Houthi rebels. But when you pivot back to the Indo-Pacific, you look at some of the investments that the land forces of our allies and partners are making in this regard. So India has a Brahmos anti-ship missile, which the Philippines likewise purchased. The Japanese have a Type 12 anti-ship missile system that they've deployed to the Southwest Islands. And I'll add, too, that this idea is, I think, bigger than just a bunch of missiles. If you use your imagination and think

of the potential for swarm UAS, unmanned aerial systems, or shore-launched underwater unmanned vehicles, AI support to targeting, and then, of course, what the Army is doing, too, with its anti-ship capabilities. And in many ways, I think it's complementary to what the Marine Corps Stand and Force concept offers, and that it's essentially flipping the script on China's A2AD network. So in many ways, building a friendly version of the A2AD to allow the joint force and our allies and partners to hold at risk capabilities that could threaten our own, our own critical capabilities and put at risk or threaten strategic areas that are connected to our vital interests. And lastly, that threaten

our homelands to include the U.S. homeland. You know, it's just a friendly reminder to the United States has a sizable portion of territory on sovereign soil out in the Pacific. You know, America's day begins in Guam. And just a few more points I'll make, too, because I think it's fair to offer that, you know, this idea of a ring of fires has faced a lot of criticism. And it's right. You know, it's it's a I think any new idea will face criticism and it helps flesh out our own thinking and understanding of ways to better approach what we're doing. But I would say most of the criticism has been surrounded around policy constraints, saying that, you know, it's unrealistic to put, you know, missiles or other types of lethal capabilities on the sovereign

soil of our allies and partners. But what I'd offer as a counter is that, one, I think that argument fails to appreciate what I've come to see firsthand is the dynamism of this region. You know, doors open and close, and there are opportunities that arise that you just never think would possibly come up. And in some cases, you can see them coming. So the idea is that you plan ahead of policy, because China's aggressive behavior, I think, is driving a lot of these new opportunities. And I'll just highlight one example, too. Back in 2014, Thailand experienced a coup and, you know, it soured relations with the United States. And, you know, at the army-to-army level, the relationship was difficult.

But where we are today, the U.S. Army has a company set of strikers, the mobile armored platform, inside of Thailand in a place called Loboree. And so if you would think 10 years ago, it wouldn't be possible. You couldn't even imagine having a permanent footprint of U.S. Army presence inside of Thailand. But today we do. So I think you have to be imaginative and thinking in ways like that in order to realize what, you know, this concept Dr. Evans came up with in terms of the Ring of Fire. So you mentioned the Marine Corps and what they've been doing. We've been following the debate here around Force Design 2030.

You can go back to, again, for the listeners, he controlled 269. We had General Berger on as that was being rolled out. And there's subsequent transformation for structure to include the Marine Littoral Regiment. So what can you tell us about the Army's counterpart, what I think of as the Army's counterpart organizations, the multi-domain task forces? Yeah, thanks. I think this is an important distinction because, you know, in my current position, I've heard a lot of people conflate the two organizations, the MLR with the MDTF. And while I'll say there's a lot of differences, there's also a lot of complementary capabilities between the two, much as like there is between a Marine Corps Expeditionary Force and an Army Corps. They're similar, but they're not the same. And I'll go back to my time that I worked in the Pentagon on Army staff to tell a little bit about the origin story, because just simply being there, I heard enough of these conversations while working in the building to kind of piece this origin story together. In essence, I think the Army just needed a way to explain its operating concept at the time, which was multi-domain operations.

And I think I've touched on this already a little bit, but MDO is now Army doctrine, and it's really at the center point of the Army's transformation efforts. So this multi-domain task force was really a way to contextualize and to pin things on how the Army was going to shift from unified land operations, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we were focused on counterinsurgency, to pivot back towards an emphasis on large-scale combat operations. and then really what comes next in terms of how the character of war is changing. So what the Army did is it created this experimental MTO, which is a modified table of organization and equipment, and it put a general officer in charge. And that individual's name is now Major General Jim Eisenhower, who is, I'll just say his team and what General Eisenhower did,

I think was quite remarkable because they formed this organization before any of the met metal arrived and by doing that it allowed leaders to integrate i mentioned dot mil pfp earlier to integrate all of these aspects like doctrine the leader development models the policy tactics techniques and procedures and understand how to integrate the mdtf's capabilities not only in and across the army but for the joint force and in all these other domains where Army forces typically haven't operated much in. So to the point of in the Indo-Pacific, in the maritime domain especially. So now that most of this material is starting to arrive, the NVTF has really been able to hit the ground running. And there's two that are currently

operating in the Indo-Pacific with third on the way. The Army just announced that recently. And they are very active in the joint forces campaigning and deterrence activities. And if you take a step back to the origins of MDO, or rather the evolution of MDO, those that are familiar with the Army's history a little bit over the last four decades or so may be familiar with terms like air-land battle or multi-domain battle. But now that we have multi-domain operations, this organization really, I think, is a bridge to allow the Army itself to better understand how to support and enable all forms of power, whether it be land power, air power, cyberspace, and of course, sea power. So it's this kind of a transformation

in and of itself of how the Army is able to integrate various elements of the combined arms team. And I'll use an example in the maritime domain. I mentioned the long-range strike capabilities earlier. The MDTF has those, the lethal and non-lethal, kinetic and non-kinetic effects. But it also has reconnaissance capabilities, routinely experiments and employs high-altitude platforms like balloons, ultralights, 3D-printed UAS, very active in the information space, use and sharing of data. So there's one experiment that the MDTF ran in the Philippines last year, VEX fusion cell. And really what this cell was, is a team that partnered with the Armed Forces of the Philippines and some of the other US services like the Navy and Marine

Corps and Air Force, and to pull and scrape all of these open source data applications like Seascape and others to where they could identify anomalies in maritime traffic. So they were able to spotlight where there were suspicious activities or flag vessels that were operating in suspicious manners. And it's just an example, I think, of how the Army can contribute to something like maritime domain awareness, which traditionally you wouldn't think of an Army formation doing that. But, you know, it's just, again, one example of how the Army is exploring and operating in new ways. And just a few more examples, too. On the targeting side, the MDTF serves as more or less a clearinghouse to enable the Joint Fires Network. And I think it's really impressive a lot of the things that the MDTF has been doing and experimenting in places like Project Convergence, Capstone 4, which I just came from actually a couple weeks ago in California. And I saw firsthand what the MDTF has been able to do with the joint force, with the active participation of Five Eye allies and some of the other allies in the region to really kind of cement the idea of JADC2, turn that into reality, but in plain speak, to take really any sensor and pair that with the best shooter.

So it's been pretty neat to see the development of that over the years. And then lastly, how ground forces can achieve effects in space and from space. The MDTF has a lot of capabilities that can do that, which is important for one, because land forces are the biggest consumer of space assets. But more fundamentally, I think it's just evident of how the Army is shifting beyond traditional land operations. So in essence, I see the MDTF as an organization designed to deliberately reinforce one of the fundamental principles I think is key to success in everything that we do, and that's jointness. So above all, I would say jointness is our secret sauce, and the MDTF is one of the principal organizations that helps reinforce that. I'm going to shift gears a little bit here. And if this is outside your purview, you know, feel free to push back on me. Is the Army changing any of its PME curriculum, whether it's at Leavenworth or Carlisle Barracks, sort of exploring war game, how it can best contribute to a fight in a maritime theater? I mean, do we have a bunch of majors running around with Wayne Hughes now? I don't know if we've gotten that point yet, but maybe sometime in the near future.

So I'll take on the PME question first, because I am aware of some of the efforts that our Training and Doctrine Command is working on and has put in place. And I certainly won't be able to highlight them all, but I'll just quickly name a few. So the Army War College up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, I'm aware that their curriculum now includes a required course on China. They also created a, excuse me, a strategic competition course for all of the Army regional foreign area officers that serve in the Indo-Pacific, which I think is really good because it helps paint the strategic landscape of all the activities that are occurring throughout the

region and not just those that are individual to a specific country. The Army Command and General Staff College, I've heard a lot of great things about what the Army University is doing, like utilizing Indo-Pacific scenarios. Some of the papers that I've heard students are working on are all focused on the Indo-Pacific, whereas they weren't as much before. But the second point I'll make is on publications. So, you know, within the Army's doctrinal publications, they published, the Army published a new manual on PLA tactics, which, you know, spending time around some of our senior leaders, I've often heard them talk about how the Army needs to get back to this sense of knowing, you know, intimately knowing your potential adversary. So a lot of the senior

leaders that are currently serving grew up during the Cold War years. So they often recount how they had this intimate familiarity with the Soviet order of battle. And so I think it's really encouraging that we have resources now that are allowing our formations and our leaders at the tactical level and above to be able to do just that. So studying PLA tactics, understanding some of their capabilities in a little bit more intimate detail. And the other aspect of the publications that I'll highlight is from what I've seen, there's just a lot more professional discourse about the Army in the Indo-Pacific operating in maritime environments. And I'll definitely credit General George with helping our chief of staff with helping stimulate a lot of this because he just created an initiative called the Harding Project, which is encouraging a lot more grassroots professional writing to reinvigorate the Army's three dozen or so professional journals. So it's been really great to see a lot of the discourse taking place inside of the Army.

Another big impact in areas that I mentioned on publications is within the Army's doctrine. So within the last year and a half or so, the Army released its newest capstone document, FM 3-0, which is multi-domain operations. and inside of that document there's a chapter on the army operations and maritime environments which is new i mean we've never really had anything like that before and you know i'll admit as part of the nation's land force we often fall victim to when we hear maritime we just kind of default like well that's the navy's turf or the marine corps got that uh but i i really have to go back to the history of the american soldiers and past conflicts in this theater and just one anecdote you know the army did more amphibious operations in the philippines in the span of i think six weeks than the marine corps did during the entire course of the war and again i'm not

saying this to denigrate the marine corps by any means but it's just these are stories that and admittedly and someone is uh uh you know i'm ashamed to admit the army doesn't quite understand its own history so you know understanding that we do have uh experience in this region doing these type of operations in these environments is really important to highlight. And so earlier, Jared, you mentioned that the Army is deploying its joint logistics over the shore capabilities to support the humanitarian assistance mission at Gaza. So I'll flag here, too, that the Army also has a large fleet of watercraft, whether it's doing inland transfer, ship to shore, joint petroleum over the shore, not just the J-lots. But these assets, I'd say, are critical

for intra-theater distribution, and in many ways, complementary to the capabilities offered by Military Sealift Command, Transcom, and some of the other transportation assets within the DOD inventory. And the third point, final point, you mentioned the war games. So here, I'll just flag one of the Army's newest war game series that was created within the last few years. It's called Unified Pacific. And so I'm sure many listeners are familiar with the Navy's longstanding global series, which is held in Newport every year. The Army's companion to that effort is Unified Pacific. And so together, which has been really cool to participate in firsthand and see is that these efforts are creating a joint campaign of learning. So year after year, game after game,

the analytics, the insights, the conclusions, the questions, they're all feeding, you know, each other's war game efforts. So the Navy feeds the Army, the Army feeds the Navy. And I think this is really important because it allows the joint force, our Five-Eye partners, who are also participants in these, to view conflict in the Indo-Pacific through multiple lenses. So, you know, it allows you to ask the question of what does a naval war look like from the ground? Or, you know, how does the Army fit into what many would view as just, you know, maritime operations? Because there is a role. And, you know, if you look to the past, if future war is anything like our previous experience, it's going to involve an awful lot of ground fighting.

But really more to the point is these war games are rigorous. They stimulate intellectual curiosity. You know, General Flynn often says the questions are really the most important outcomes of these things. And I'll have to, you know, I agree with them because the questions allow us to challenge our assumptions. And if we look introspectively, it in many ways reveals our bias, which we all have. And I think that's important to identify because sometimes our bias can be a strength, but other times it can be a weakness. So the other part too, and this is the last point is it reveals the interdependencies of not just the service, so the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, what have you, but it really reveals these interdependencies of the combined

joint force. So with our allies and partners, various, you know, interdependencies among the services. So these wargaming efforts allow us to gain a better appreciation for not just how the Army supports the Sea Services' efforts, but, you know, how the Sea Services can vice versa support the Army's as well. Tim, then a final question. So you mentioned the FOB concept in the article. How's the Army planning to supply dispersed units if it goes that route? The logistics in a contested environment is something that a lot of inks build at CIMSEC, at War on the Rocks, other places here about how are we going to get supplies forward to these smaller units who are yeah so i just mentioned the unified pacific war games so i think it'd be appropriate to apply some

of the insights from those efforts and one of the war games in particular that was conducted last year focused exclusively on contested logistics and i'll caveat that the games are held at the top secret at TSSCI level, but I'm drawing insights from an unclassified report that our team produced. So should be no issue sharing those on the podcast here. And really this report won't shock anyone because I get the sense that there's a common understanding of the challenges we face as a joint force. So, you know, everything to deal with contested logistics in a theater that's defined by the tyranny of distance. But when you look at particularly the contested aspect of it, I won't go into detail about the defense industrial base or vulnerabilities of the supply chain.

Those bear heavily on the problem as well. But one of the key insights from the war game was the limiting factor for combined joint sustainment. And it wasn't due to necessarily a lack of resources. Rather, it was because resources could not be delivered forward to the point of need on time. And again, you know, drawing back to earlier comments about the A2AD network of, for one, how do you penetrate and open avenues of approach and counter the adversary's capabilities that can conduct sea control or sea denial in order to deliver these type of capabilities at the time of need? And, you know, I briefly mentioned the Army's Project Convergence Capstone 4 project earlier. And I got to tip my hat to the Marine Corps, what I saw them doing there and their approach to tackling this challenge, I thought was really innovative and really impressive.

And I don't think I can go into too much detail. I'll just, you know, give them applause where applause is due. But one of the things that, you know, I witnessed at that event in California was just how encouraging it was to see every service was part of this conversation about logistics. And the Army, you know, has a prominent part in this. And I'll emphasize that, you know, in the organization that I work for, one of the subordinate commands is theater sustainment command. And, you know, the Army watercraft that I touched on, that's a piece of that. But there are so many other enabling capabilities that the Army provides

and really provides at scale that no other organization does. And those are all really important, whether you're talking in logistics, in terms of protection, in terms of C2, so command and control at Echelon, you know, the Army provides more DoD executive agency responsibilities than all the other services, departments, agencies, direct reporting units put together. So I think it's telling that, you know, a lot of the support and enabling capabilities, what, you know, we'd call foundational capabilities, you can only find in the Army. And, you know, all the other services have sustainment pieces to it. But when you're talking about operations at scale and particularly operations in non-contiguous areas in multiple locations, multiple transportation hubs, spokes, airfields, ports, you name it, staging areas, warehouses, distribution centers, you know, the logistics and sustainment enterprise has to be nimble.

It has to be organized and integrated across all of the various components. And the Army has such a large contingent of that. And, you know, I'm not a logistician, but I've had, you know, since my experience working in this theater, just such a new found admiration for all of the various things that our sustainment enterprise does, because they, in many ways, are the young sung heroes. And if you look back to the Army's history in World War II, I would I would make the same claim for them at that time as well. Yeah, a final addition to your point there. The Army has a lot of weird stuff attached to it. I remember pulling into Kuwait Naval Base back in 2014 for the first time with my PC and seeing all these weirdo Army watercraft all over the place. I'm not talking about the LSVs that just kind of look like normal landing craft.

I'm talking about all sorts of these weird cranes and auxiliary support vessels stashed all over the place, decoys and everything else that I had never seen before, did not realize existed until we came into the harbor there. But that is all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Tim Devine. Tim, where can we find you online and what else are you working on? Well, I'm not too active in social media, but I will flag what projects we're working on next. So General Flynn and I are writing a follow up for USNI's proceedings. And really, the topic we're exploring in this is how the Army is approaching military competition against China. So whereas this article that we talked about today focused on some of the more aspects of the conflict side, this one is about competition. So I suppose I'll tee up what I think might be a provocative statement about what we're working on. And just to be clear, by provocative, I mean to provoke thinking and to provoke further discourse on the topic, not to be controversial.

So here it is. The United States can successfully deter war in the Indo-Pacific, but it can still lose. And so, you know, some of the ideas that we explore in this or will explore in this next piece is how the Army is applying hard power in ways short of war to achieve policy goals and joint objectives. And I'll highlight, too, that, you know, deterrence is the most desirable outcome. You know, nobody wants a war. And I would say, you know, everyone could agree, or at least I would hope everyone could agree, that's the common goal amongst everybody. You know, there shouldn't be a war amongst two nuclear-armed superpowers or any power, great power nation in the Indo-Pacific, for that matter.

But deterrence isn't the only goal. So the question really worth wrestling over is how the United States, together with its with its allies and partners, deters Chinese aggression and DPRK aggression or Russian aggression, for that matter, in the Pacific while preserving the liberal order. So deterrence and preserving the order, I think, are just two objectives or two ends of policy that are inextricably linked. and, you know, focusing a little bit more on China, you know, they're on a path to ideally win without fighting. We see that a lot in the public discourse and so forth, or to achieve a fait accompli without coming to blows. I mean, they're definitely playing the long game.

So how do we, as the army, as part of that larger scheme, flip the script and beat China in its own game? So I hope readers will appreciate some of the ways the Army is just contributing in that regard. Well, I don't know. Congress passed the TikTok bill today, so we may have turned the corner, but we'll see what happens. Tim, thank you again for joining us here late on a Wednesday night. To the listeners, thank you for tuning in. We'll see you next time. My pleasure. © BF-WATCH TV 2021

© transcript Emily Beynon