Army chiefs from 3 nations meet on Oahu
The chiefs of the U.S., British and Australian armies met Monday on Oahu as the three countries pursue closer ties amid boiling geopolitical tensions in both Europe and the Pacific.
The trilateral meeting was held as Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville wrapped up a tour of the region meeting with several other army chiefs across the Pacific and South Asia.
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Hawaii is the home of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command at Camp Smith, the nerve center of all U.S. military operations in the region. The command currently—and always has been—overseen by a Navy admiral, and naval services aren’t shy about proclaiming a degree of ownership of the region. Amid recent tensions at sea, countries around the region are trying to bolster their naval forces.
“The Indo-Pacific, when you look at the map, there’s a lot of blue, ” said Australian army chief Lt. Gen. Simon Stuart during a roundtable with reporters at Fort Shafter. “We’re going to make sure that we’ve got the right maritime and air capabilities … (but ) when you look across the Indo-Pacific, and the militaries that are important in the lives and the economies and the politics of the region, it’s mainly armies.”
“A lot of the attention gets drawn to maritime deployments, ” said British army chief Lt. Gen. Sir Patrick Sanders, referencing the Royal Navy 2021 deployment of its newest aircraft carrier, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, to the South China Sea in the first deployment of a British carrier group in the Pacific in decades as the U.K. sought to make its presence in the region known.
As the carrier group transited the Pacific, U.S., British and Australian officials announced they had signed a new trilateral security pact called AUKUS, which would strengthen military cooperation and technology among the three countries—particularly when it comes to submarines.
“That’s an enormously important deployment, but it’s transitory, ” Sanders said. “What land forces provide is persistence—we’re here all the time. And because we’re on land, where people live and where wars ultimately are settled, we’re able to develop close relationships with a range of our allies and partners in the region and help them improve their own capabilities.”
The British military maintains an army garrison in Brunei and the British Defence Singapore Support Unit, a critical naval facility that the U.S. Navy regularly uses to support its own operations in the South China Sea. Sanders noted that through countries in the British Commonwealth, the U.K. continues to have strong ties—and interests—in the Pacific.
“The region matters enormously to us historically, emotionally but also, candidly, because of prosperity and because of trade, ” Sanders said. “So much of the world’s trade and the future economy comes from this region. So we’ve got altruistic interests, and we’ve got national interests that we want to try and support as well.”
McConville said that the among the topics of discussion during the trilateral meeting was Project Convergence, a U.S. Army program that the service calls a “campaign of learning,” designed to integrate its operations and technology with the other branches of the U.S. military and potentially with allied militaries. McConville said that would give them “the ability to move data very, very quickly between our armies, our joint force, and our two partners here are the first to be involved in that.”
The Army has made Hawaii a key part of its new Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center, which includes training ranges in the islands, Alaska and an “exportable ” set of training held in a different country each year. This year that training will be in Australia, with Hawaii troops set to play a central role.
