The Association of the United States Army’s annual Land Power in the Pacific Conference — better known as LANPAC — kicked off Tuesday at the Sheraton Waikiki. This year the conference, which brings together armies from across the Pacific and beyond, has attracted participants from a record 32 countries, including 16 national chiefs of army.
“The United States Army is working hard to gain positional advantage,” said Gen. Ronald Clark, commander of U.S. Army Pacific at Fort Shafter, during a media conference early Tuesday morning as attendees were still arriving at the conference. “We’re doing that with decisive land power to deter aggression in the Indo- Pacific, specifically aggression by China, so that we can maintain regional security stability and reassure our allies and partners.”
American military leaders and policymakers have often thought of the vast blue Pacific as the domain of the Navy and Air Force when it comes to defense policy. But in recent years the Army has sought to more vocally assert its role in the region, and the LANPAC conference, sponsored by the Association of the United States Army, a private, nonprofit organization that serves as the professional association for the military branch, has been a key occasion to promote it.
In particular, Army brass have promoted the concept of a “landpower network” linking the U.S. and its allies in the region. As the military services have fought each other for funding and resources, Navy and Air Force leaders have at times sought to play down the Army’s role in the region.
But in a keynote address opening the conference, the U.S. Indo- Pacific Command’s top officer, career naval officer Adm. Samuel Paparo, embraced a mantra Army officers have used for years, telling the audience that “human beings live on the land.”
“The Army provides the backbone of our ability to sustain combat power across the region,” he said, addressing soldiers from across the globe.
With its high-level commands, Hawaii is the nerve center of all U.S. military operations in the Pacific. It’s one of the few places to have troops from every U.S. military branch, as well as a host of military attache and liaison officers from foreign militaries stationed in the islands.
Gov. Josh Green welcomed conference attendees, telling the crowd that “we here in Hawaii recognize the incredible value of our geopolitical position. … We are all keenly aware of what’s at stake here.”
In his second presidency, Donald Trump and his new defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, have pledged to make cuts at the Pentagon and throughout the military. Environmental and cultural programs that Hegseth considers “woke” have been targets.
Trump and Hegseth have also expressed a desire to heavily scale back the U.S. military presence in places like Europe, the Middle East and Africa. However, Hegseth requested the Pacific be largely exempt from budget cuts.
“When I saw that they had chosen not to threaten cuts to the Indo-Pacific … I was grateful, grateful to hear from our leadership that at least this region is going to see growth in our resources and not see any pullback, because it’s simply that important,” Green told attendees. “It is central to my thoughts every day, my thoughts of how you protect us, how your expertise moves us forward or really how vulnerable we would be otherwise if we didn’t have this relationship.”
But the conference kicked off as the military faces scrutiny over its presence in Hawaii. On Friday the state Board of Land and Natural Resources rejected the Army’s final environmental impact statement on its plan to renew a lease on state land at the Pohakuloa Training Area on Hawaii island.
The rejection was preceded by a long day of public comments by isle residents who overwhelmingly expressed opposition.
For Clark it’s just the latest chapter in a long story. He has been stationed in Hawaii many times before; his daughter was born at Tripler Army Medical Center; and he led the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks before taking on a senior staff role at Fort Shafter.
He most recently worked in the Pentagon before returning to Hawaii over the summer to succeed Gen. Charles Flynn as top Army officer in the Pacific.
“Army training, land retention is a challenge, and it’s something I’ve personally been working on for the better part of 10 years,” Clark told reporters. “Our ability to live and train in Hawaii is very important, not just to the Army and to U.S. Army Pacific, but to national security.”
The BLNR voted 5-1 to reject the EIS, ultimately concluding that it contained data gaps on potential impacts to endangered plant and animal species, traditional Native Hawaiian burial grounds, wildfires and potential threats to groundwater.
The Pohakuloa Training Area is the U.S. military’s largest maneuver and live-fire training area in Hawaii and possibly the entire Pacific. With its rugged lava fields and volcanic soil, Pohakuloa is also classified as a subalpine tropical dryland forest, one of the world’s rarest kinds of ecosystems and home to wildlife that exists nowhere else on Earth.
The Army obtained its lease on the state parcel at PTA and others around the islands in 1964 for a mere $1, and will have to renew or vacate by 2029. Clark said, “The Board of Land and Natural Resources made a decision. We accept that decision and look forward to continuing to negotiate in good faith with the state of Hawaii to come to some workable solutions with regard to land retention.”
PTA has become an increasingly active training ground, used by both the Army and the Marines, and has become a central part of the the Army’s new Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center, a series of training ranges in Hawaii and Alaska aimed at preparing soldiers for operations in the Pacific amid tensions with China.
“It’s not just the United States Army that trains here. It’s a joint force. It’s a number of our allies across a number of training areas in the state of Hawaii, to include our National Guard,” Clark said. “We have to be good stewards of the land — we understand that — and good partners in this process.”
The U.S. for years has been trying to make a “pivot to the Pacific” to forge closer ties with booming Asian economies. Yet American policymakers have continuously tried and failed to untangle the country from costly conflicts in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, tensions in the Pacific have been on the rise. Paparo said, “China, Russia, North Korea, among others, have formed a transactional symbiosis that threatens regional stability. The threat’s particularly acute and increasingly interconnected across our global supply chains.”
When asked by a Dutch military officer how Paparo views alliances, he said: “When we’re talking about our alliances and partnerships, if you are in this room, we’re really talking about market democracies. We’re talking about countries that are committed to a free and open Indo-Pacific and world.
“And here we notice that increasingly threats are global, they are interconnected, (and) events in one continent have a great bearing on the events in others.”
This year the Army will celebrate its 250th birthday. In a keynote address Tuesday afternoon to conference attendees, Clark argued that the U.S. military has relied on allies from its earliest days as a rebel force fighting the British crown for its independence.
“Two hundred fifty years ago, our allies and partners provided us legitimacy and direct military support,” he said. “Direct support from France in the terms of naval support at Yorktown, Prussian military training, loans from the Dutch, welcome military pressure on the British from Spain, and — not to be lost in this discussion — the Indigenous people of the United States who helped us to understand and leverage both the physical terrain and the human terrain.”
LANPAC continues through Thursday.
