I'm all for an Army role in the INDOPACOM region. But I don't want the Army--or the rest of our military--to rush in to early defeat.
The Army's Pacific strategy has these highlights:
Now and in the future, first battles are decisive to the outcome of campaigns. Winning the first battle or preventing a fait accompli in crisis will be necessary to prevent prolonged conflict and escalation. Ground forces will decisively shape the first battle by leveraging positional and capability advantage to rapidly deliver options for crisis response, and to win in conflict.
And:
Fighting state actors from a cold start by projecting power from the homeland over many months is no longer a viable course of action. There is no alternative to the dynamic presence of formations in contested theaters.
And:
Army forces in distributed forward positions, will attack by strikes and raids across intra-theater lines of operation to create operational mobility corridors.
So the Army is to deploy decisive forces forward early inside the enemy's strike envelope to win the first battle?
I worry that this could be the 1940 Dyle Plan that rushes to early defeat.
I'd much rather focus on surviving rather than winning the opening Chinese strike in order to have a core force to reinforce and counter-attack.
By all means inflict as much attrition on the attackers in the early stages of a war. But don't sacrifice our best personnel and equipment in a vain attempt to stem a Chinese attack started at a point of their choosing and at a time of their choosing.
On the other hand, the Army clearly intends very small forces involved in this mission to support the Navy in gaining control of the seas. The small units envisioned are not the same size force as the armies sent in to Belgium in 1940.The risk of losing the Army units may well be more than balanced by the attrition they can inflict on the Chinese if the Chinese strike first in the western Pacific.
And while I'm worried about shoving too many forces--from all the services--too far forward too early, I appreciate the emphasis on looking at what we can do to an enemy rather than being paralyzed by worrying about what an enemy can do to us. This strategy could be worth it whether or not the forces committed survive.
So we'll see, I guess. I'm not sure at this early stage what the operation would look like and what is being risked.
In tabletop exercises with America as the "blue team" facing off against a "red team" resembling China, Taiwan's air force is wiped out within minutes, U.S. air bases across the Pacific come under attack, and American warships and aircraft are held at bay by the long reach of China's vast missile arsenal, he said.
Don't rush to defeat. And don't deploy to defeat. America isn't about to initiate a war against China. So America has to absorb the first blow. As we prioritize are best forces to INDOPACOM, don't put our best forces in range of early destruction.
