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The big and cumbersome Army is trying to transform itself to deploy quickly to Asia, if needed. It is an inherently dangerous business..
Early one morning this month, 864 Army paratroopers bundled into C-17 transport planes at a base in Alaska and took off for a Great Power War exercise between three volcanic mountains on Hawaii’s Big Island.
Only 492 made it. Some of the C-17s had trouble with their doors, while others were forced to land early. A few of the parachutists who did make it sprained ankles or suffered head trauma. And one — a 19-year-old private — began to fall quickly when his chute did not open.
Across the field, shouts of “pull your reserve” could be heard before the young private hit the ground and medics ran to treat him. The horrifying scene and its aftermath encapsulate every jumper’s worst nightmare.
But Pvt. Second Class Erik Partida’s 1,200-foot fall was also a stark reality check as the U.S. Army transforms itself, and its hundreds of thousands of young men and women, for yet another war, this one a potential conflict with China.
The Pentagon calls it a Great Power War, and it would be exponentially more dangerous. It would put the world’s two strongest militaries — both of them nuclear superpowers — in direct conflict, possibly drawing in other nuclear adversaries, including North Korea and Russia. U.S. troops would be killed, in numbers that could possibly go beyond the toll from America’s deadliest conflicts.
Such a war would be fought on the ground, at sea, in the air and in space. So the Army is practicing for exactly that.
Forget the Marines, who can get anywhere quickly, because they travel light. Or the Navy, which practically lives in the Pacific. Those services, which featured heavily in the Pacific during World War II, have the planning for a conflict in Asia baked into their DNA.
But now, as the chances of war with China increase, the big and cumbersome Army is trying to transform itself after two decades of fighting terrorism in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Unlike the Taliban or other insurgents, China will have satellites that can see troop formations from the sky. The Army must, in essence, learn how to fly under the radar.
To stress-test the Army’s ability to deploy quickly and fight on Pacific island chains, soldiers with the 25th Infantry Division, along with Japanese, Australian, Indonesian and other partner troops, rappelled into jungle ravines and then made the humid climbs up, laden with gear.
Some 28 miles away at Pearl Harbor, Army transport ship crews ironed out various ways to discharge the military equipment and the troops they will need in the event of war in the Pacific.
And not far from the North Shore of Oahu, soldiers worked to disguise a multivehicle command and control unit, complete with big-screen computer stations, so that it was almost indistinguishable from the deep green forest.
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For instance, America’s Pacific allies could lose faith in U.S. deterrence and try to make security deals with China. Japan and South Korea — both treaty allies of the United States — could join the nuclear club as a way to defend themselves against China.
“Is it quite the fall of the Roman Empire?” Mr. Jones said. “I don’t know, but that’s the right kind of question to ask.”
‘Tyranny of Distance’The U.S. Army knows how hard it would be to invade Taiwan.
During World War II, when the island was called Formosa and was occupied by Japan, the Joint Chiefs of Staff came up with Operation Causeway, an invasion plan that would give the United States a base closer to Japan from which to attack. Gen. Douglas MacArthur opposed invading Taiwan as too risky; it meant crossing a contested sea to fight on complex terrain against a well-defended army. Military planners said an amphibious assault on the island would have been far harder than the D-Day landings at Normandy.
Few Army planners think the Chinese military is ready to undertake an amphibious assault of Taiwan.
“The first thing you have to do is you have to generate an invasion force, which would be a pretty large force, to go onto an island which has a prepared defense,” Maj. Gen. Jeffrey A. VanAntwerp, the director of operations for the Army’s Pacific Command, said in an interview. “There’s 100 miles of Taiwan Straits that you have to get across, and you’re doing that in large transport vessels that are very vulnerable during that crossing.”
China would most likely use light amphibious vessels to try to secure a beachhead in Taiwan, military planners say, but those vessels would have to plow through heavily mined waters. And while air assault forces would probably try to target infrastructure, in the end there is no viable way to seize an island as large as Taiwan, with its own defenses and 23 million people, without putting a force on the ground — troops who would have to come by sea.
“You can’t do it without pushing a large landing force across the straits on ships,” General VanAntwerp said. “There’s no other way.”
So China is working on it. Chinese military planners have repurposed civilian ferries to transport troops and equipment across the strait and are working to construct floating piers, American officials say.
The Pentagon would not go into detail about how American trainers are helping Taiwan build defenses. But making clear to the Chinese that an amphibious assault would be fraught is part of the U.S. military’s deterrence plan..
Army officials also say they hope joint exercises with Pacific partners will show Chinese military officials all the capabilities that the United States has and can bring to bear.
The officials point out that more than a quarter of the service’s 450,000 active-duty troops are already tasked to the Pacific. But they define that region liberally, to encompass troops not only in Japan, South Korea and the Philippines but also in Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon and California. Taiwan is more than 6,000 miles from Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash., a separation the Army refers to as “the tyranny of distance.”
Docked in Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army vessel Maj. Gen. Robert Smalls will be critical to getting all the apparatuses of the Army into the Pacific theater. The 300-foot-long ship, which recently arrived from Norfolk, Va., via the Panama Canal for the exercises, can beach itself, discharging 900 tons of vehicles and cargo — and, if necessary, troops — onto islands.
Capt. Ander Thompson, the commander of the Seventh Engineer Dive Detachment out of Pearl Harbor, was part of a detachment that spent several weeks this past summer with Filipino military divers clearing debris from a strategic port in the northern Philippine island of Batan, about 120 miles south of Taiwan.
20241007-16聯合軍演在夏威夷瓦胡島、毛伊島和夏威夷島展開。近9000名美軍士兵和900名其他國家軍人參與。重點訓練對象是駐扎在夏威夷的美國陸軍第25步兵師。
此次軍演目的是模擬美軍部隊在與中國解放軍交戰時可能遇到的情況，特別是在台海沖突危險升高之時。美國陸軍20241018日發布的聲明中提到，演習的目的包括為了“在美國太平洋陸軍責任區內采取決定性行動”。
美國陸軍太平洋司令部作戰主任（ Jeffrey A. VanAntwerp）的分析稱，僅靠空中突擊部隊對基礎設施的攻擊無法奪取台灣島，最終還是要派遣一支大型登陸部隊穿越100英裡的台灣海峽，才能做到這一點，而這頗有難度。
美國顯示出必須派遣軍隊提前進駐台灣,加強防禦工事,以抵抗中國軍隊的登陸作戰?
情報顯示出美國有意派遣倆棲作戰部隊駐紮台灣,同時協助台灣升級海軍陸戰隊的武器裝備及反登陸的訓練包括演習等項目?
.華府智庫戰略與國際研究中心（CSIS）高級副總裁（Seth Jones）說：“我認為中國成功入侵台灣將會在整個地區引發巨大的連鎖反應，中國可能成為該地區的主導軍事力量，而不是美國。這將引發一系列的二次和三次沖擊。”而美國的亞太盟友將對美國失去信心，日韓將立即發展制造核武，其他國家則可能直接向中國靠攏。
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國際戰略與軍事學者專家分析認為,美早已派遣倆棲作戰特種部隊進駐台灣,協助訓練海軍陸戰隊等軍隊,因應未來爆發的海峽兩岸的戰事,但是北約某位退休的軍事將領認為,美國的戰略錯誤判斷迷失方向,扔然停留在第二次世界大戰的大型倆棲登陸戰爭的遊戲, 他分析認為美國從關島,夏威夷及日本等基地,運輸派遣海軍陸戰隊及空降部隊前往台灣支援作戰,就已經失敗,不用正面與中國軍隊交鋒已經擊沈於太平洋或是台灣四周的海域,即使少數的空降部隊及海軍陸戰隊登陸台灣,也就是說無法抵抗人數眾多的中國軍隊(空降部隊及海軍陸戰隊),因為戰爭爆發初期他們已經佔據優勢(時間及空間)成功執行搶攤登陸戰,建立橋頭堡的前進指揮作戰中心,而且空降部隊也已經進駐各個台灣的3軍基進行作戰,雖然有傷亡,但不影響整體的作戰實力,美國喪失優先的最佳作戰實機(時間及空間的差異),無展現出實力與中國軍隊在台灣正面交火作戰,僅有少數的特種部隊進行特殊的任務作戰如此而已.換句話說美國藉由軍事演習騙取台灣人的血汗錢購買美國武器罷了.
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SEAL Team 6 may be training Taiwanese forces to fight back against Chinese forces,
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Preparing for a China war, the Marines are retooling how they’ll fight.
The operation, which also deepened the harbor, will give Army and Navy ships better access to the port should conflict break out. Batan is near the Bashi Channel, a potential transit point for American forces headed to the Taiwan Strait.
The American Air Force cannot establish air superiority over the entire Pacific Ocean, but it can open up corridors, what the Army calls “interior lines” for unfettered movement, between, say, the Philippines and other islands. The United States has some troops already in place — about 54,000 in Japan, 25,000 in South Korea and a far smaller number in the Philippines.
The Hawaii exercises, which ended in mid-October, were devised to replicate the conditions that troops can expect in a war with China. Gone were the desert-sand-colored fatigues that became de rigueur during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The troops in Hawaii wore jungle fatigues and face paint.
Troops worked on new maneuvers patched together from watching Ukraine fight Russia. They dismantled and moved large and cumbersome command and control operations in 20 to 30 minutes, and communicated with one another without using Army satellites, so that an adversary would not be able to pick up their conversations.
Learning how to advance in small teams that can attack and then dissipate into thin air was key. The Army sent to the troops 96 new rainforest-green infantry squad vehicles that can quickly move up to nine soldiers each through jungle terrain.
“It is so powerful to be able to send a company’s worth of personnel, which is about 130 people, on those vehicles, along multiple routes, and then at a point bring them together to attack the enemy, and then disappear in different directions,” said Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans, the 25th Infantry Division’s commander.
‘From the ground, the sight could easily pass for an Army airborne commercial, as waves of jumpers shot out of the side of the C-17s and floated to earth, their chutes billowing. All of the soldiers were supposed to be equipped with two chutes, including a reserve if their primary chute did not deploy within four seconds after they jumped out of the plane.
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"I think Chinas successful invasion of Taiwan will trigger a huge chain reaction throughout the region, and China may become the dominant military force in the region, not the United States. This will trigger a series of secondary and tertiary shocks." And the United States Asia-Pacific allies It will lose confidence in the United States, Japan and South Korea will immediately develop and manufacture nuclear weapons, and other countries may directly move closer to China...
Former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have outlined vastly different approaches to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Their approaches to turmoil in the Middle East are also expected to be at least rhetorically different.
But no matter who wins in November, the United States will continue to prepare for war with China.
Beijing has made clear that it will seek to expand its power in Asia, from militarizing uninhabited rocks in the Pacific to claiming sovereignty over international waters. And all of that starts with Taiwan, which President Xi Jinping has ordered the Chinese military to be ready to invade by 2027.
While Taiwan has its own defenses, military experts say it is difficult to see how the island would repel a Chinese invasion without U.S. help. Such a move would be a decision for whoever is president at the time, but American policymakers worry that staying out of it may not be an option if the United States wants to maintain its dominance.
“My sense is that a successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan would send massive ripples throughout the region,” said Seth Jones, a senior vice president with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “China would likely emerge as the dominant military power in the region, not the United States, and it would trigger a range of second- and third-order effects.”
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