‘Land Forces Are Hard To Kill’: Army Chief Unveils Pacific Strategy
A new strategy paper from Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville says forward-deployed Army forces will survive inside Chinese missile strikes and fatally disrupt the PLA's plans.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on March 23, 2021 at 3:28 PM
WASHINGTON: The future Army will fight as a tough, intractable “inside force†— a term usually associated with Marines — forward-deployed in adversaries’ backyards, says a new strategy paper from the service’s Chief of Staff. This approach, Gen. James McConville writes, has already shown promise in joint wargames.
In pop culture terms, the Army’s casting itself as Bruce Willis’s iconic action hero/survivor John McClane, in a new production you might call Die Hard In the Pacific.
Released today, “Army Multi-Domain Transformation†calls for long-range, land-based missiles on West Pacific islands to threaten targets deep within China’s “Anti-Access/Area Denial†defenses. (The approach could work in Eastern Europe as well, but the document only mentions the Pacific by name). Rather than deploy from the US in response to an attack – a deployment that enemy missiles, submarines, sabotage, and cyber warfare can disrupt – these forces will be pre-deployed in peacetime or rapidly deployed in crisis, setting up inside the areas the enemy hope to deny access to. Once on the ground, these nimble, logistically lightweight units will avoid destruction by using cover, concealment, camouflage, decoys and frequent relocation.
https://breakingdefense.com/2021/03/land-forces-are-hard-to-kill-army-chief/
