Sea Control - Sea Control 565 – General Bartholomees on the Army’s Contribution to Deterring China

Episode Date: February 25, 2025

Links1. “Land Force Integration: The Army’s Contribution to Deterring China,” by James B. Bartholomees III, CIMSEC November 20, 2024.

Welcome aboard the Sea Control Podcast from the Center for International Maritime Security. I'm your host, Walker Mills, and my guest today is Major General James B. Bartholomew III. Third, Major General Bartholomew is the Chief of Staff of U.S. Army Pacific, and we are super excited to have him on the podcast today. We're going to discuss his recent article with CIMSEC, land force integration, the Army's contribution to deterring China, and generally what the Army is up to in the Indo-Pakom theater. As a reminder to the listeners, the opinions are our own and not necessarily reflective of any other institutions. Sir, welcome aboard. We're super excited to have you, especially being a soldier on the Sea Control Podcast. Can you start just by introducing

yourself to our listeners? Thank you, Walker. My name is Major General James B. Bartholomews. I'm the Chief of Staff of U.S. Army Pacific, as Walker outlined. I've been very fortunate to serve in Indo-Pacific for the past four and a half years. For the last year and a half as the chief of staff and the three years prior as our operations officer here. And over the last nearly half a decade, I've been blessed to work with some awesome leaders, joint leaders out here to learn about the Army's role in the Pacific and how we can apply land power to solve joint problems. And so that really drove me and my focus on the article that I provided. And this venue was great to host. And I really appreciate the opportunity to speak on this

Sea Control podcast. So thanks for this discussion. We're excited to have you, sir. And we'll make sure that we put a link to the article in notes to the show so that any of the listeners can check that out. Starting with some context, can you just give us kind of an overview of the forces assigned to U.S. Army Pacific? I know it's a big, big theater, big command, but just so we kind of cage ourselves so that we know what we're talking about when we talk about U.S. Army Pacific. Yeah, thank you, Walker. It is a large command. U.S. Army Pacific consists of roughly 100,000 soldiers across multiple continents, spanning from Washington State to Alaska to Hawaii, out through Guam, Kwajalein, and all the way to our forces in

Japan and Korea. It consists of roughly a quarter of the active duty Army force, and it is a compilation of command and control predominantly here in Hawaii with our theater army headquarters that not only serves as a army service component command, as do the Navy, Air Force, and Marines, all together as joint partners here on Oahu, but also our theater enabling command. So we have sustainment, we have medical, we have signal, theater signal capability, we have theater military intelligence capability. All of the joint functions are represented in the theater enabling commands that support not only the theater army, but also the joint force. We have assigned to us America's First Corps that's stationed out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord,

as well as three divisions, the 25th Infantry Division here in Hawaii, the Pacific Division, the 11th Airborne Arctic Division in Alaska, as well as the 7th Infantry Division, all historic divisions from World War II and beyond from this theater, and all remaining in operations here. And then finally, I'll talk later about some of our new enabling capabilities to include our two multi-domain task forces, our security assistance brigade, and other capabilities that we built over time in order to address the threats of the People's Republic of China. So I really want to make sure that I provide this audience an appreciation for the scope, size, and the capability of these forces that are really designed and purpose-built to support the joint force

across the theater. Really a large mix of capabilities in a massive command. I think, sir, kind of to your point, sometimes what gets left out is the role that US Army Pacific has in the sustainment of the joint force. And I think people sometimes kind of laser focus on the combat power, which can be the most exciting, but they can forget some of the other functions, really key functions that the army has in sustaining the joint force yeah i think uh i'll just say with that the army has been focused in the middle east for the past 20 plus years with the primary uh primary formation of of of employment being the brigade combat team and so the army is sort of known for its employment of brigade combat teams which we have multiple brigade combat teams that

are incredibly important to the fight and incredibly important to a future fight but What this theater army provides are those theater enabling commands that I outlined that are at an echelon above the division level and really to use joint parlance that really sit within the ECH-3, in some cases ECH-4 level that are built and designed not only to support soldiers, but Marines, airmen, and sailors, as well as our allies and partners. So really important as we look at how we employ those forces, and that's what General Clark is keenly focused on. Sir, how are the forces assigned to USRA Pacific involved in kind of day-to-day operations and day-to-day deterrence? How do they support deterrence of our adversaries in the region or support other joint forces that are contributing to deterrence? Yeah, thank you, Walker. I think I'll just start by focusing on the adversary first, and that's the People's Republic of China as our pacing challenge, and that has really manifested itself in the

People's Liberation Army, and our focus being the ground order of battle of the People's Republic Army Land Force, their army. And I think it's important that we all appreciate, and there's a lot of focus in what's seen is their anti-access area denial capability, which is predominantly focused on targeting its adversaries' aircraft and naval capability. So it's built and designed to deny access and push us further away in the maritime space and the airspace. But we have to appreciate what they're describing to us and how they've been very overt in talking about and what they've demonstrating the South China Sea, which is ultimately to attempt to try and seize land.

And if where they can't seize land, they're creating land. And we know very clearly Xi Jinping's his desired end state for his force, his ability to seize Taiwan by 2027. That's not necessarily widely appreciated, not necessarily a date that we know is fact of what will occur, but more a building of capability. So we in the Army and as a land force need to focus on how do we help support our allies and partners in protecting their land, helping them protect their land, And four of them being mutual defense treaties in Korea, in Japan, Philippines, and Australia, as well as our critical partners that are thinking more and more about this problem. As in the 21st century, Russia has demonstrated to Ukraine and to the world that great nations

are willing to use their force and their will to seize the land of other nations. And I think that that's caused us all to look at the problem. So to your question on what our forces are doing to support the deterrence of PLA malign activity, as well as to assure our allies, is we are simply working to close the distance and to attempt to gain positional advantage through our exercise construct, which is Operation Pathways. And that's knitting together 40 plus joint and land focus exercises that are not only enabling bilateral interactions, but also multilateral building, multilateral interactions, which is a quality and a capability that the United States has as a strength and something we should maintain as a strength. is our alliances and our multilateral partnerships. So getting into a position of advantage is really our key focus. And it's placing not only the key capabilities that we know are gaining traction, such as the mid-range capability in the Philippines, but it's also all the enabling capabilities from sustainment to protection to command and control to signal supporting to collection, all those capabilities that are in place to embolden and support our

allies and partners that they need and they're asking for, but also in support of the joint force. And just a comment on that in terms of what we're doing to deter the PRC day-to-day, I think Philippines President Marcos said it best in a question and answer period on the 30th of January, when he was being asked about the maintaining of the Typhon weapon system, which is a mid-range capability. It's a land-based Tomahawk SM-6 system that's employed by our multi-main task force that's on exercise in the Philippines. He said, quote, let's make a deal with China. Stop claiming our territory, stop harassing our fishermen, stop ramming our boats, stop water cantering our people, stop firing lasers at us, and stop your aggressive and

coercive behavior, and I'll return the Typhoon missiles, to which there wasn't much of an answer to that. So I think anybody who hears what he's saying is that they are interested in procuring that capability so that they can use land forces to secure their maritime spaces and that we need to work with them. And that's Army, that's Marine forces, that's SOF. Altogether, all of us land forces together work to help them, uh, the Philippines to secure their, uh, contested spaces. Um, so that's, that's how we're, uh, working day to day to support the joint force in this, in this, uh, deterrence, uh, problem set. You mentioned a couple of new technologies like the, the Typhoon missile system, uh, in the Army's, uh, multi-domain task forces.

Can you expand on those and talk a little bit about where the Army is investing in the Pacific with new infrastructure or new formations or new technologies and kind of how those come together, if that question makes sense? Yeah, thanks, Walker. That is squarely what we're focused on here in U.S. Army Pacific and truly enabled by the United States Army in this. It was probably about nine years ago that we were charged by Admiral Harry Harris, the PACOM commander at the time, that he wanted the Army to sink ships, to jam satellites, to put land power in a position to support this juggernaut that is the anti-access area denial capability of the People's Republic of China. And so we started working very quickly. The Army started shifting not only from our counterinsurgency operations that we had been heavily committed to in the Middle East, along with the rest of the Joint Force, the Marine Corps heavily committed alongside us in heavy fighting. And as the Marine Corps transitioned to the Marine Littoral Regiments, we started to stand up multi-domain task forces. And the first multi-domain task force stood up in 2019 in Joint Base Lewis-McChord with command and control capability before we started landing some of the systems that I'll talk about here in a second. But the idea was to get that capability forward to start to learn and iterate over time of how we integrate with the joint force, how we start solving these problems with the Air Force and with the Navy and with the Marine Corps so that we could enable operational maneuver over time.

And in doing that, we stood up first multi-domain task force as stated. In Europe, we stood up second multi-domain task force, which is predominantly focused on supporting Ukraine in the security assistance group, Ukraine element and supporting some of their targeting where we've been learning as a joint force about how we can target in this 21st century and really up our game using a bunch of different tools. And then we stood up third multi-domain task force here in Hawaii within the last two years. The key capabilities that they are meant to wield are across four different battalions supporting the battalions. The first battalion is a multi-domain effects battalion. It contains space capabilities, ground-based space capabilities, extended range collection capabilities, HAPs, high-altitude platforms of different types that we're experimenting with, cyber capability, electronic warfare, as well as information operations capability, and an intelligence company within that. So all of that effects is meant to wield long-range, non-kinetic effects in support of the second battalion, which is the long-range fires battalion. And that contains three capabilities. The first that was stood up was our long-range hypersonic weapon battery, which we've stood up and is operational.

The second is the mid-range capability that I mentioned, which fires SM-6 and Tomahawk out of a tractor-trailer capability. And then the third is the HIMARS, which is much better appreciated, a high-mobility rocket-launched system that is being provided to the Ukrainians that is battle-tested. and we're continuing to improve the munitions with the Marine Corps with that as the Marines also have HIMARS. And so those three platforms in the Long Range Fires Battalion really complement that piece. The 3rd Battalion is focused on air defense and is fielding a series of capabilities that will increase our protection of multi-main task force elements, but also thicken the air defense systems that are manned predominantly by the Army through the Patriot and the THAAD. We're putting in capabilities that are going to help hit lower tier threats and protect

the joint force from the land. And then the final battalion is the sustainment battalion. In order to put all these forces forward, they have to be sustained. Most of our maneuver formations have a sustain up to time. And this is absolutely important as we feed munitions, fuel, and other capabilities to the force. All of this combined, it's taking years to build. First multi-domain task force is nearly fully fielded with all of its systems. Third is not far behind. And each one of these formations are tailorable to hit specific requirements and are meant to be scalable scalable and tailorable with other joint forces. They also require and cannot fight alone. They require security elements from the ground to seize terrain with infantry forces. They require

Army aviation to help with their maneuver and enable their maneuver. And they require other protection in situ to be employed. But this is something that we fielded the capability early, much like the MLRs, the Marine Littoral Regiments, as the iron is being fielded so that they're already brought into the joint force. And what we're finding is they're helping to assure our allies, our critical allies, because we're making these bilateral or multilateral operation centers. So we're managing how we work with our allies and partners and helping them to develop their own concepts within their own military forces, which are predominantly land forces. And so this is giving, as I mentioned before, it's giving them opportunities to figure out how

they want to organize their land forces to defend their predominantly air and sea littoral nations. I really appreciate you breaking down kind of the components of the multi-domain task forces for us because I think that's something that our listeners are familiar with and a lot of them are trying to understand how that compares to the Marine Corps' marine littoral regiments like you mentioned. I'll make another comment on that. We've been working very closely with the Marine Corps on the development of the MDTFs and MLRs. There's a lot of synergy that we pull together in different exercises. One of those exercises we do is the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center here in Hawaii, in which we're working with 3rd MLR at Kaneohe and our 3rd Multidomain

Task Force. And so the more we exercise and we train together, we work through things like Project Convergence Capstone 5, which is an upcoming experiment exercise that the Army's sponsoring, but it's in support of the Joint Force, and it's in support of Admiral Papparo and INDOPACOM. That's where we learn. Every exercise includes an experiment, and we shouldn't do an experiment without an exercise. And that's where we learn together, and we determine how to operate these concepts. It is a massive theater that requires all of the Joint Force engaged in order to ensure that we're assuring our allies and deterring aggression where we know it counts most.

Are there areas where you think U.S. Army Pacific might be still falling short of some of its goals, where more investments or more change or kind of more focus is needed? Or are there obstacles to some of the things that y'all are working on that need to be overcome? Yeah, thanks, Walker. This is really what I tried to hit in my article, because I think that there is great opportunity out there, and we have to apply resources and make tough decisions in order to ensure we're in a position of advantage and we're not on our heels. And this is a tough conversation always as we are a resourcing headquarters. We're predominantly resourced by the United States Army. So I hit three key areas in my paper that we need to address. The first is positioning more land-based fires forward. I read to you the effect that our MRC battery is having in exercises for as we produce more capability. We've stood up our second mid range capability battery and we get more capability for we need to employ more of it for it.

And that's we've actually prioritized that as a theater army. There's there's tough decisions we're having to make in terms of what we do and not do. But we are prioritizing placing multi-domain operations effects forward that we know are going to need to be ready and in position should they be in any contingency. And also, more importantly, to build confidence and rehearse with the Navy, with 7th Fleet, with the MLRs, with our Marine Expeditionary Forces partners, 1MEF and 3MEF. And so we need to put more of that land based fires capability forward. And that takes investment. The second thing we need to work on is increasing our sustainment footprint forward. And so we as an army own the joint contested logistics lead for the joint warfighting concept. And so we have an obligation as a joint force to the joint force to place our sustainment capability forward. And so a lot of our operations pathways exercise feature in placing as many of those forces and capabilities forward, but we really need to leave more of it forward. And that's why at this point we're pushing preposition stocks through our Army preposition stocks program to be positioned in key locations.

We have a lot of capability in Japan and Korea, and we are pushing efforts to place more of that on the ground in key terrain in support of our joint theater distribution concept, which really supports Indo-PACOM. The final thing we need to work is just maximizing our current agreements that we have with our allies and our partners. We talk a lot about where we are in history and our 129 years that the Army has been operating in the Pacific, and that's changed and it's ebbed over time based upon our political will, based upon the wars that we fought over time. And so we are where we are. When we're stationed in Korea and Japan, these other nations we work with that were allies, we're only there at their invitation. But we have visiting forces agreements. We have agreements in place with a number of these nations that we just need to continue to maximize what our policymakers have given us and to move at the pace of the partner and move at the pace of our allies and meet their needs. Because as we do that, in many respects, we're pushing on an open door because they see the challenges that are there. We are the partner of choice and the PRC knows it. And so our maximizing our advantage is really just taking the opportunity to to to move forward and to use these agreements that are in place. And if if more stationing agreements occur and there's opportunities, then great. But in the meantime, we need to we need to position ourselves forward when we can with what we we have so that we are ready should there be any crisis that might lead into conflict.

Are there any other specific examples of integration with either the Joint Force, the other services looking for Marine Corps specifically as a Marine? And then with our allies and partners in the region. And again, I know you've spoken to it some already, but just if there's any particularly good examples that you'd like to highlight. Sure. I'll start with the Air Force and finish with the Navy and the Marine Corps. So the Air Force has a concept called Agile Combat Employment. And in this concept, they need to be agile and move to positions of advantage and in protection of their forces in doing that. And as we've learned over time, they the Air Force inherently bases on the ground and need support in the locations they're at. And so our partnership together is that we provide something called Army support to other services. ASOS is the term. And this is widely unappreciated, but hugely important, particularly in this vast theater that covers over half the Earth's surface. So we know as while our services pay for the capabilities that we field, we will fight as a joint force.

We've learned this in CENTCOM. We've learned this in UCOM. We need to practice this further in this theater. And we are doing this by weaving together our multi-domain operations concept with their agile combat employment, which essentially means that the places that they base from or their hubs and their spokes, we need to consider sustainment, we need to consider protection, we need to consider any other fires that support them in a joint force. So lots of ground being made there, and we're seeing this in an Army to Air Force talks. Transitioning to the Navy and the Marine Corps, I've hit some of the Marine Littoral Regiment partnerships with multi-domain task force work. I think the key one that is often not appreciated is the employment of Army watercraft, as Army watercraft are really truly served as the actual connector between the Deep Blue Navy and the Marine Corps. As a matter of fact, one of our biggest customers on our Army watercraft, our LCUs and our LSVs, are the Marine Corps. And that's by operational employment.

That's by their employment concepts. And those vessels are predominantly meant for sustainment operations. They're meant to sustain the force. And it's not just the vessels. The vessels are really not the important part. The important part is the connector capabilities, the causeways that they build, the tugs. It's the whole contraption that pulls together. That's a capability that only the Army provides to the joint force.

And so we have to rehearse it. We have to sustain it. We have to have it in position so that it is ready to support and can operate as need be to provide mobility to the maritime force, the Marine Corps being the lead in that, but also serving the other services. We've even looked at and we've tried to push for using Army watercraft to support Air Force movements as well, where it makes sense something can move slower and doesn't have to move as fast and take as much room. Those vessels are highly capable, and we need to continue to employ them. We provide communications capability to the Joint Force. Our regional hub nodes support the joint force and are a necessary capability that we're continuing to modernize and to make more agile and more capable over time. And then the final piece I mentioned before, but it's worth mentioning, is that the 94th Army Air and Missile Defense Command is the sole air defense capability for the joint force from the land.

And as the Marine Corps, as SOF, and as the Army grow more air defense capability, management of air control, and just air management as a whole, where in CENTCOM, it's predominantly managed from the CAOC. in this vast theater, we are having to come up with more creative means with the Air Force and with the Navy and the Marine Corps on how to regionally manage air defense. And a lot of that expertise resides within our Army Air Defense Corps that supports. And a lot of the things we've learned over time from the multi-main task forces that really come from air defense. In our Army, we tended to kind of separate field artillery from air defense artillery, but we've learned multi-domain task forces have taught us is we need to think of them very much the same, that they're all in the same kill web, much like the Navy considers. So all these things are helping us

really work better together as a joint force. Thank you, sir. Really appreciate you highlighting the Army watercraft. That's something kind of near and dear to my heart and something that pops up on SimSec and articles and podcasts every so often. But I think it's kind of an underappreciated, uh, capability, but a super critical one, uh, that, that the army contributes, uh, to the joint force. Before we wrap up here, do you have any final thoughts that you want to leave us, uh, in our audience with? Walker, thank you for the time today. It's been great talking with you and I appreciate this, this, uh, venue in order to express, um, army and land thoughts in this theater that is often thought of as an air and maritime theater. It is not. It's a joint

theater that has joint problems that require joint solutions. And this is the most consequential theater of our lifetime. Our mission is clear, is that we need to campaign to provide land forces to the joint force so that we can ultimately prevail in accordance with Admiral Papparo's vision. General Clark's vision is to provide people, to create partnerships, and ultimately to prevail so that we are providing a commitment that ultimately the alliances that our forefathers have forged, the readiness that we've generated and that we place into the theater is in a position so that we can prevent war. The goal ultimately of all of our efforts is not to fight a conflict. We're watching a large-scale ground conflict unfold, multi-year conflict unfold in Ukraine,

and the losses are eye-watering. The challenges should not be understated, and it is simply a conflict that we as a nation do not want to face in our lifetimes or to pass off to our future generations. So putting our forces in a position of advantage, allowing all of the services to come together in order to come against any of these challenges out here, to let our allies know that we're serious and that we'll stand with them, is ultimately our focus and our drive and our goal. So thank you for the time today. I really appreciate this podcast and the opportunity to provide my feedback and to join the conversation on sea control. Well, thank you, sir. I'd like to thank my guest, Major General James B. Bartholomew.

Major General Bartholomew is the Chief of Staff of U.S. Army Pacific, and it's been a great conversation today. Thank you again for joining us and to the listeners. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks, Walker. I walked up to the fire room counter. Hey, hey, put it in the alley. There I met with Greasy Annie. Put it out the shimbo now. So help me, Bob, I'm putting it in the alley.

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