US Army details First Island Chain preparations
By Jake Chung / Staff writer, with CNA
The US Army would improve its warfighting infrastructure in the Pacific with its forward-deployed “inside forces” ready to act immediately on day one of a conflict in the First Island Chain, which includes Taiwan, it said in a report released this month.
How the Army Fights, an operational warfare guidance report released on Oct. 7, states that the US Army would counterbalance “the pacing threat,” which it defines as the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA), by improving its warfighting infrastructure across the region.
Because of China’s “rapid deployment capabilities,” the US Army is “developing the infrastructure to support forward-positioned multidomain capabilities and munitions, starting in the” First Island Chain, it said.
US Army soldiers shoot rifles during a military training exercise in an undated photograph.
Photo: screen grab from US Army’s Facebook page
The US Army must “organize, train and equip against” the PLA “with the same institutional focus that the Cold War generations brought to the Soviet Army.”
“The Homeland is no longer a sanctuary, and peer adversaries can disrupt our ability to generate and project combat power before our formations close with the enemy,” US Army Acting Chief of Staff Christopher LaNeve, who previously commanded the US Eighth Army in South Korea, wrote in the foreword.
Military experts in Taiwan have interpreted the document as reflecting a Pentagon expectation of enemy strikes against railroads and harbors on US soil to delay US reinforcements in a conflict abroad.
To counter such possibilities, the US Army should reposition its “land power stocks and forward sites” to enable “inside forces” to overcome anti-access/area-denial capabilities, “deny a fait accompli, and win the first battle.”
The US Army plans to implement four operational elements: convergence, strike, close battle and endurance.
Under that protocol, the army would first combine electronic warfare, cyberwarfare and space-based capabilities to jam communications and disrupt air defenses, it said.
The forces would then use medium and long-range precision fire and uncrewed systems to degrade and dislocate the enemy and its supply lines before it can deploy ground forces, the report said.
The Russia-Ukraine war highlights the need to develop advanced capabilities in deception, concealment and counter-reconnaissance to disrupt an enemy’s “operating picture” of the battlefield, it said.
The report presents a hypothetical scenario in which the US Army Multi-Domain Task Force is deployed in the Luzon Strait within the First Island Chain, which includes Taiwan and stretches to the southern Kyushu in Japan.
That region is within the operational range of the PLA Navy.
The US Army is hardening logistics across the Second Island Chain — which includes Japanese islands, Guam and Palau — with fuel stockpiles, and engineering, medical and air defense assets to sustain operations in the region, the report said.
In Europe, the US Army would maintain a “relevant posture,” providing limited, but critical capabilities needed to support NATO-led deterrence, it said.
The army would “support a modernized, warfighting-focused NATO, where European allies assume primary responsibility for conventional ground defense,” it added.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.