HONOLULU—The greatest risk the Army has in the Indo-Pacific region is inaction—“being late” when a crisis or conflict emerges, out of position, not fast enough, “or even worse, doing nothing at all,” said U.S. Army Pacific commander Gen. Ronald Clark.
The command is the “Army’s innovation testbed,” Clark said, and continuous transformation is imperative. “So as leaders, we have to become comfortable with failing fast, iterating quickly, and developing better solutions,” he told an audience of defense industry representatives and troops at the AFCEA TechNet Indo-Pacific conference.
The Army is amid a rapid modernization effort called Transformation in Contact, and several of the units created or chosen to test new technology and concepts are part of USARPAC. The command has also “embraced AI to shorten workflows and enhance the speed and efficiency at which we think, learn, and work,” the general said.
As soldiers walked through the keynote area holding drones, Clark said the command is “at the forefront of testing new systems and processes that are driving the formation of an Army unified network based on zero trust principles, and we’re innovating with unmanned aerial systems.”
A drone was originally supposed to fly over the audience during the event, Clark explained, but the buzzing sound it makes “scares the crap out of everyone.”
In an interview with Defense One earlier this year, Clark explained what he sees as the two major challenges for the Army in the region: the “tyranny of distance,” and the “increasingly aggressive, belligerent, and coercive” actions of the Chinese.
“It’s not just about the Taiwan Strait,” Clark said. “It’s across the region, in multiple areas, where the [People’s Liberation Army] is threatening the sovereignty of our treaty allies and partners, so our ability to be ready to respond to crisis through our activities as we operate in the theater—it’s important that we’re in the right place, at the right time, with the right capabilities to not just match that threat, but to deter.”
Deterrence, he said at TechNet, “is our highest duty and the cornerstone of our strategy in the Indo-Pacific.…We know that the cost of failure is too damn high, and we owe it to our soldiers and their families and our allies and partners…to be prepared for any challenge.”
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