Mobilize Land Power to Contain China’s Maritime Ambitions

China’s self-labeled “war without gun smoke” demonstrates how a state actor can wield military forces in unorthodox ways to advance its long-term strategic objectives.¹ The upticks in employing gray-zone tactics, militarizing artificial islands, and gaining exclusive access to foreign ports come to mind. U.S. and allied naval thinkers have characterized these activities as part of China’s “maritime insurgency,” designed to undermine the keeper of the rules-based order—namely the United States—while imposing its own laws on the civilian populations of its neighbors.²

This incremental and insidious behavior is relatively new within the realm of naval operations, but the U.S. Army has experience combating similar strategies in recent conflicts. As Army forces came to appreciate in counterinsurgency warfare, preventing an adversary from exploiting friends and allies hinges on defending their sovereign areas and protecting their civilian populations.

The Army has not walked away from its hard-earned lessons of the past quarter century. Amid refocusing on large-scale combat operations and employing its new multi-domain operations (MDO) doctrine, U.S. Army Pacific’s strategy seeks to empower regional allies and partners to defend their sovereignty and assert their rights under international law. Given the increasingly tumultuous security environment in the Indo-Pacific, regional militaries are rushing to bolster their capabilities—not just for war, but for operations short of war as well. Together with  partner land forces, the U.S. Army is revitalizing the utility of land power as part of a larger effort to “prevail,” as Admiral Sam Paparo decrees, against China’s maritime strategy.³

Political Legitimacy

In the long-term strategic competition short of war, Beijing is employing the same basic strategy as did the insurgent groups in Afghanistan and Iraq—avoiding conventional decisive battle with the defenders of the established political order, while cumulatively and coercively imposing its own laws on vulnerable civilian populations.

Yet, China possesses considerably greater military capability than U.S. adversaries in the Middle East, and the security environment in the Indo-Pacific is far more conducive to U.S. defense cooperation. The United States and its regional partners, many of whom possess significant military capability, have a bedrock of political legitimacy in the eyes of local populations that China simply does not possess. Amplified by new multilateral political achievements and trilateral progress among the United States, Japan, and South Korea, military forces are translating that legitimacy into deeper cooperation on the full range of defense and security matters, which for armies predominantly involves territorial defense.

Land forces are the bulk of every Indo-Pacific nation’s military, which seems uncharacteristic given the maritime geography. But land forces—including soldiers, marines, special operations forces, and other indigenous forces—historically have played decisive roles during peacetime and wartime by seizing, holding, and defending key land terrain. In recent decades, regional armies have collaborated with U.S. Army Pacific’s forces in efforts ranging from peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance training to territorial defense. This collaboration, particularly among treaty allies, is taking new forms to block China’s infringement on sovereignty.

Just as navies are cooperating more in areas such as maritime domain awareness, the sizable armies throughout the region are increasingly banding together because of China’s coercive behavior. U.S. Army Pacific is mobilizing the regional land power network to collectively resist China’s strongarm tactics and outright territorial incursions that aim to gain economic, political, or military leverage. The Army has calibrated its efforts to send clear messages to adversaries that the United States supports its partners by deploying hard power that helps them uphold their sovereignty.

For example, in April 2024, the Army deployed its new Typhon Mid-Range Capability to Northern Luzon in the Philippines. Typhon is a mobile land-based antiship missile system capable of launching the Navy’s SM-6 and Tomahawk missiles. Against the backdrop of escalating tensions over Second Thomas Shoal, the Armed Forces of the Philippines have shifted focus from counterinsurgency operations in Mindanao to a new strategy of comprehensive archipelagic defense. Typhon offers complementary capability to the Philippines’ BrahMos antiship missile batteries coming online, and the deployment demonstrated U.S. commitment to a mutual defense treaty ally faced with escalating threats.

Responding to the Typhon deployment, China’s foreign ministry warned, “The Philippines needs to think twice about being a cat’s paw for the U.S. at the expense of its own security interests and stop sliding down the wrong path.”⁴ The statement not only reveals an obvious hypocrisy but also exposes the weaknesses of China’s strategy against unified political resistance armed with hard-power tools.

Coalition Campaigning

In competition short of war, land forces translate political legitimacy into military advantage through campaigning: the logical and sequential arrangement of operations, activities, and investments. U.S. Army Pacific forces have long conducted episodic bilateral exercises with regional partners, but beginning in 2014, Pacific Pathways instituted a framework linking these events. Ten years later, that collection of bilateral events has been rebranded as Operation Pathways and has evolved into a multilateral campaign linking more than 40 joint and army-to-army exercises.

U.S. Army Pacific’s campaigning efforts draw upon a counterinsurgency framework known as unified action partners, “with whom Army forces plan, coordinate, synchronize, and integrate during the conduct of operations.”⁵ Similar to the Navy’s call for a “new maritime statecraft” to build maritime coalitions, Operation Pathways underwrites the unity and collective commitment among regional land forces.⁶

The 40-year-old signature operational command post exercise Yama Sakura, long an army-to-army exercise between the U.S. Army and Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (JGSDF), now includes joint and multinational unified action partners, such as U.S. Marine Corps elements in Okinawa and other regional allies. In 2023, the exercise integrated the Australian Army’s 1st Division for the first time, and a division from the Philippine Army will likely join in 2025. Both the realism and rigor of the training were improved as well by adding a scenario geared toward defending Japan’s sovereign territory against a nation-state aggressor.

During exercise Talisman Sabre 2023, mobile firing platforms from the Australian Army, JGSDF, Republic of Korea Army, U.S. Army, and U.S. Marine Corps conducted a combined live-fire exercise, guided by a single fire-direction center, with two notable successes. First, the United States achieved human, technical, and procedural interoperability to conduct land-based long-range strike operations with three treaty allies. Second, the joint sustainment enterprise pulled off a highly complex operation involving intratheater transport, customs and agricultural inspections, port operations, munitions handling, and overland movement into an ally’s territory. These outcomes show the potential for land-based fires to support U.S. and coalition naval campaigns in the Indo-Pacific.

U.S. Army Pacific’s campaigning actions are supporting partners’ efforts to assert their sovereignty against Beijing’s threats of territorial incursion. Growing U.S.-India security cooperation near the Line of Actual Control contrasts sharply with the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) buildup along the disputed border, information operations in nearby Nepal, and China’s outright land grabs in Bhutan. In 2023, the army-to-army exercise Yudh Abayas, India’s largest military activity with any nation, took place in the Himalayas, and it will triple in size by its next iteration. Beijing offered up familiar criticisms during the last exercise, which India’s foreign ministry resoundingly dismissed by affirming that, “India exercises with whomsoever it chooses to, and it does not give a veto to third countries on this issue.”⁷

Other longstanding exercises within Operation Pathways focus on humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, or peacekeeping operations. These efforts maintain a steady drumbeat of engagement with regional armies from partners including Bangladesh, Fiji, French New Caledonia, Mongolia, and Timor-Leste and strengthen the participants’ ability to respond together during a crisis. Consequently, they enhance the United States’ credibility as a reliable security partner, while the persistent presence and engagement of Army forces denies key terrain to potential adversaries.

Beyond the increasing multilateral cooperation, U.S. Army Pacific’s campaigning efforts occur on key land terrain in maritime Asia such as areas proximate to strategic choke points, on scattered power projection nodes, and near contested features within exclusive economic zones.

Land-based Seapower

Accompanied by a clear need for stronger naval and air forces, countries throughout maritime Asia are wrestling with how to marshal the largest instrument of their militaries—their armies—to project land power into the air and maritime domains. This presents a unique opportunity to employ the region’s sizable land power network beyond the scope of traditional land operations.

The U.S. Army’s MDO doctrine explores the role of land forces in maritime environments, emphasizing the need for integrated planning, the critical nature of land areas in a maritime environment, and the determinative outcomes only land forces can provide by controlling key terrain.⁸ Informed by this outlook, U.S. Army Pacific is applying land-based capabilities in novel ways. These involve not only mobile land-based assets capable of sinking ships, but also terrestrial sensors, high-altitude balloons, deep-sensing platforms, and upgrades to the Army watercraft fleet.

In 2023, U.S. Army Pacific’s 1st Multi-Domain Task Force (MDTF) established a combined information effects fusion cell on Luzon to enhance maritime domain awareness. Within the cell’s first five days, U.S. Army and Philippine Army intelligence analysts could track suspicious foreign military vessels using unclassified data—a task typically conducted at the classified level. The Armed Forces of the Philippines insisted the capability, which was intended to be a short-term experiment, remain in place so they could adopt these methods for themselves. Based on its success in the Philippines, U.S. Army Pacific’s 3rd MDTF replicated the fusion cell in Malaysia in 2024 by partnering with the Malaysian Army during exercise Keris Strike.

Other countries subject to China’s illegal territorial claims and coercive behaviors are likewise requesting the U.S. Army’s assistance to help their land forces influence events at sea. Taiwan faces similar challenges on a grander scale.

Defending Key Terrain

China’s primary goal is its own territorial and economic aggrandizement at the expense of its neighbors by taking control of critical areas. This requires delegitimizing and ultimately ejecting the current keeper of the rules-based order, the United States. Controlling physical land areas and nonphysical areas (e.g., human and information dimensions) is thus interconnected to maintaining freedom of the seas, in times of competition, or command of the sea in wartime. Alongside Marine Corps stand-in forces and U.S. special operations forces, Army forces are helping secure key terrain in maritime Asia in two distinct ways.

First, the Army is improving regional land forces’ capability to conduct territorial defense of their homelands, which range from archipelagic environments to high-altitude areas with extreme cold weather. Beijing’s strongarm rhetoric paired with the increased aggression by the People’s Liberation Army Navy, China Coast Guard, and People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia have driven many Indo-Pacific nations to renew their focus on territorial defense. The Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center (JPMRC) is the first combat training center the Army has built in more than 50 years. Certified by the U.S. Joint Staff in 2023, the JPMRC has two campuses that reflect the different conditions of the region: one in Hawaii and the other in Alaska. In addition, the JPMRC’s exportable training version, dubbed JPMRC-X, deploys a premier training capability to partner nations, as demonstrated in Australia, the Philippines, and twice in Indonesia.

The JPMRC supports efforts by several regional armies to develop their own combat training centers. Notably, these training centers offer U.S. forces access beyond traditional basing in strategic locations. For example,  Indonesia’s Baturaja Training Area is located near the Lombok Strait, and the Philippines’ new National Training Center is at Fort Magsaysay, one of the nine Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement sites.

Second, Army forces help mitigate other countries’ vulnerabilities to China’s malign influence through alternative methods beyond customary defense cooperation. For example, Oceania Engagement Teams (OETs) made up of Army reservists—many with cultural and linguistic ties to the region—routinely conduct civil-military engagements in the Freely Associated States and other Pacific Island countries. The OETs prioritize local needs, such as disaster management training, while they liaise, observe, assess, and coordinate opportunities for U.S. interagency support.

Pacific Island countries are largely concerned with improving resilience to climate change or natural disasters, not the threat of interstate war. But the OETs’ persistent presence and engagement with local officials reduces the likelihood that these countries will outsource internal security requirements to Chinese forces, as already seen in the Solomon Islands and Kiribati. Though these islands appear as tiny specs on a map, naval historian Andrew K. Blackley warns: “These stepping stones, like the roads of ancient Rome, also provide a means for both defending and invading forces to move in either direction.”⁹ It is thus critical to deny the PLA and its associated militias footholds in these strategic areas by operating at the invitation and with the consent of the host nations to reduce their vulnerability to China’s exploitation.

Similarly, the Army medical community’s global health engagements in Papua New Guinea and ASEAN countries offer vaccinations, healthcare assistance, trauma skills training, and dental support. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Mississippi River Commission support water resource management in Southeast Asia, countering Chinese damming that limits freshwater and food supplies to those downstream. Other tools, such as the Security Force Assistance Brigade, the National Guard’s State Partnership Program, foreign military sales, and international military exchange training, enhance the United States’ reputation and build capacity and resilience against Chinese coercion and intimidation.

Denying the Prize

The Army is tailoring lessons from decades of counterinsurgency warfare to its strategy in the Indo-Pacific, while staying alert to the dynamic security environment in Europe and the Middle East. In stark contrast to China’s bullying tactics, the U.S. Army works with local populations and governments to gain and retain freedom of action in the competitive space, giving joint and combined forces an edge should they have to transition to crisis or conflict. U.S. Army Pacific’s power to convene regional armies, coupled with its own sizable force contribution, supports U.S. allies and partners’ ability to defend their sovereignty and assert their rights.

If China is denied control over key terrain, its maritime strategy will fail. In this new era of land-based sea power, U.S. Army Pacific is marshalling the collective capabilities of regional armies to perform their core functions—holding ground and defending their people—in more collaborative ways. In addition to the vital contributions of the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps, a robust regional land power network is required to defeat China’s maritime strategy and preserve the rules-based order by denying the adversary its prize.