CLSC Dialogues – Ep 26 – COL Mike Long and LTG Joel B. Vowell – On the Pacific, USARPAC, and China

In this episode, COL Mike Long and LTG Joel B. Vowell discuss the US Army Pacific and the role of USARPAC.

COL Mike Long Welcome to CLSC Dialogues, a production of the China Landpower Studies Center at the Army War College. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or the US government. I'm Colonel Mike Long from the Strategic Studies Institute, and today I'm lucky enough to be joined by the USARPAC Deputy Commanding General, Lieutenant General Vowell. Sir, thank you very much for joining us. We really appreciate having you. LTG Joel B. Vowell Thanks, Mike. Good to be here. COL Long Absolutely, sir. And we'll just jump right into it. I'd love to hear you talk about what US Army Pacific, USARPAC's role is in the Pacific. LTG Vowell Great question. I think it needs to be preceded by a little theater framing about how complex, how challenging, and how just diverse the theater is. We work for INDOPACOM, as the Joint Force commander we’re the Army Service Component Command to that. But that theater of operations, the area of responsibility for INDOPACOM, we kind of say in a funny vein, from polar bears to penguins to Pikes Peak, Colorado, and all the way to the Himalayas in India. That's the vastness of the theater. So if you were to take Southeast Asia in the South China Seas, put them together, that is all of Western and Eastern Europe, 2000 by 2000 kilometers. That's just a minor portion of the entire theater. It's two Atlantic oceans, from San Diego to Manila. It's two and a half Atlantic Oceans from the Aleutians to New Zealand. And then we have to go through the Straits of Malacca, Malaysia, and Indonesia, to get to the Indian Ocean region portion of our theater. So a lot of blue air, a lot of blue sea, but there's a lot of green land, and archipelagic environment Theater is much more challenging because it's noncontiguous land space, and we, part of the land power network, are used to large open fields and countries connected together. This archipelagic nature—Indonesia, 15,000 islands, Philippines, 7,500 islands, Japan, over 5,000 islands, and I could continue—makes it a little challenging for movement and maneuver as we go forward. The theater is interesting and complex, just from geography, from threats to development, governance and natural disasters. Humanitarian assistance, consequence management is something we're also into all the time: floods, landslides, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, you name it, we're involved in those all the time. So, it's not just as we'll talk later, I’m sure, the Russia, North Korea, China problems of the aggregated threats in the region, it’s the region itself is challenging. So back to your question. You know, framing it that way, the theater that we're responsible for providing some level of deterrence and security with our partners and allies. Our role is the Army Service component command under General Clark to Admiral Paparo, the Joint Force Commander or Combatant Commander at INDOPACOM. We are the landpower contribution to the Joint Force. I would argue we're probably the backbone of the Joint Force, because if you look at Army support to other services, sustainment, intelligence and some others, we uphold the backbone of the theater. The theater gateway for all the communications we have is going through Army capabilities, in theater. The intelligence from the land, terrestrial, extraterrestrial intelligence, a lot of that comes from Army capabilities. Sustainment, we have that responsibility with the Theater Sustainment Command and other capabilities in theater to support the Joint Force. And then, of course, you've got a lot of several divisions, five, ten brigades in theater, to include an airborne brigade and to include the Korea Rotational Force in South Korea. A lot of movement and maneuver options that we can provide to deter or do flexible response, or respond in cris