A Pacific conflict may not look like conventional war, SOCPAC commander says

HONOLULU—The better the U.S. gets at fighting in conventional ways, the more likely it is that adversaries will avoid a conventional conflict, the head of Special Operations Command Pacific said.

But that doesn’t mean they will avoid a fight altogether, Army Brig. Gen. Michael Rose said at the Indo-Pacific Irregular Warfare Symposium here last week.

“If an adversary believes that a direct military confrontation with the United States or our allies is likely to end badly for them, that doesn’t necessarily make competition disappear. It changes how the adversaries will compete with us. They look for seams. They operate below thresholds. They exploit ambiguity. They use proxies, information, economic coercion, cyber capabilities, maritime forces, and other asymmetric approaches to achieve objectives without presenting us with a conventional fight for which we are preparing. In other words, our conventional superiority can actually increase the incentive for our adversaries to employ irregular warfare,” he said.

So, in a theater where the phrase “deterrence is our highest duty” is nearly as common as aloha shirts at military functions, how should the U.S. approach technology and competition?

“We must be able to outfight and outthink our adversaries,” and taking an irregular warfare approach to autonomy can help, Rose said. 

That means moving “beyond autonomous systems towards autonomous campaigning, moving beyond exquisite systems toward distributed networks, moving beyond U.S. capability toward allied and partner ecosystems, moving beyond conventional deterrence to deterrence through resilience and denial, and moving beyond asking how many autonomous systems will help us win a future war, and instead asking how they can help us shape today’s competition.”

In the Indo-Pacific, he said, the “fundamental problem” is scale. The distances are too vast, the number of strategically important locations too numerous for persistent presence. But autonomy “potentially changes that equation.”

But military leaders must not rush to buy cool new tech without first identifying the problem they want to solve, said Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Van Antwerp, who turned over command of SOCPAC to Rose earlier this month and now leads the Army’s 25th Infantry Division.

“You can get caught up in trying to get the better technology, but you haven’t done the fundamental things to be able to leverage that technology well,” Van Antwerp said. “We don’t have the time just to experiment without established objectives.”

Adm. Frank Bradley, who leads U.S. Special Operations Command, outlined the challenge at the start of the symposium: “We face an increasingly weaponized cyber domain, a virtual domain that is transpiring and transmuting across our societies, an increasingly challenged space-based surveillance environment, a contested electromagnetic spectrum, and a rapidly emerging agent-driven artificial intelligence challenge to our security of our digital ecosystems.”

The next day, as the symposium came to a close, deputy INDOPACOM commander Marine Lt. Gen. George Rowell reiterated the trends Paparo believes are reshaping modern conflict. The megatrend that includes all three is “the absolute dominance of information in decision superiority,” he said.

“Our forces must be organized to observe, orient, decide, act, and learn faster than the adversary. Whoever can do that, whoever can adopt that mindset, whoever can adopt those technologies and training fastest will certainly win the day.”