Good:
While the U.S. Army has 85,000 permanently stationed troops in the Indo-Pacific region and is already conducting exercises such as Pacific Pathways with allies and partners, the service is aiming to practice rapid deployment from the continental United States to the Pacific.
The plan is to bring over a division headquarters and several brigades over the course of a 30- to 45-day period along with their enablers, Brown said.
“They will get the challenge of coming to the Pacific with the Pacific-assigned forces already there,” he said, “and we won’t go to Korea, we will actually go to a South China Sea scenario where we will be around the South China Sea; and another scenario we can do that is the East China Sea.”
The exercise will consist of many things the Army has not practiced at such a large scale, Brown said. Forces will be in countries like the Philippines and Thailand, and they will likely work with other countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei.
This is excellent both in raising the Army's sights from the narrow focus on South Korea and recovering the ability to move large ground forces into other areas of INDOPACOM (and let me vent my continued disappointment that the command wasn't renamed PAINCOM). Gaining familiarization with the host countries' militaries and terrain will be useful.
Even India is a possibility.
The practice moving troops like this will eventually be useful for moving a major Army force of 5 divisions to assist allies around the periphery of China, as I argued for in Military Review fairly recently.
And really, as I wrote for the Institute of Land Warfare, even some islands can require a sizable Army effort to secure.
