The Army wants newer vehicles in case it must fight the Chinese on land. That seems prudent.
It's good to see the Army wanting to provide its core competency to the fight rather than be a Navy auxiliary:
One of the Army's top armored vehicle modernization generals said Wednesday that the service would be needed to face down China's massive armored force in a Pacific land war.
China has 7,000 tanks and 3,000 infantry fighting vehicles, "so 10,000 vehicles that will be decisive if we are not there," Maj. Gen. Richard Coffman, director of the Army's Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross Functional Team, told an audience at a Center for Strategic & International Studies event.
"In order to be decisive, we have to be there with armor to prevent the Chinese from getting into a position of relative advantage," he added.
Yes, INDOPACOM is mostly a naval and air domain. But there is land. And allies who want to control that land. The land should not be the domain that shall not be named in multi-domain operations.
I'm certainly on board the idea in general and in regard to Taiwan specifically when it comes to an Army role in large-scale combat. I wrote about both issues in Military Review here and here.
If war between America and China is inevitable as the chairman of China's Central Military Commission said, why China should get a free ride in the land domain is beyond me. Make China worry about what our Army could do to them.
Maybe the Chinese need to worry that the worst thing that could happen if China starts a war isn't that America repels a Chinese thrust out to sea and we go back to the status quo ante.
Although I'm not on board the notion that a platoon of Abrams airlifted somewhere could be decisive in any reasonable situation.
