Many think “war in the Pacific” and immediately think “U.S. Marine Corps,” and indeed, the Marine Corps has a long and storied history of operating and fighting in the Pacific.
Yet the U.S. Army — three field armies, six corps and 21 divisions — fought 24 campaigns in the Indo-Pacific in World War II. That’s more campaigns than the Army fought in all other theaters combined in that existential global conflict, and far more than the Marine Corps.
It’s easy to dismiss the Army as irrelevant today in the Indo-Pacific. Yet history tells us otherwise.
Indeed, if America is to effectively deter aggression in the Indo-Pacific, we must be seen by adversaries to pack a serious punch, and that means a significant role for the U.S. Army, because if war comes, America will have to give it all we’ve got.
The Army fights as an integral part of the entire joint force, and it fights as part of the combined force with our allies and partners. We can’t have one of the major elements of the joint force — the Army — mostly sitting on the bench.
That’s why the Army has been investing heavily in the past several years in modernization, not only so it has the right capabilities for any contingency anywhere in the world, but also so it can effectively counter aggression from a peer adversary in the Indo-Pacific.
No feature of Army modernization is more important and relevant to this effort than the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) — a tiltrotor aircraft that can take off, hover and land like a helicopter, yet fly horizontally like an airplane.
Flying conventional helicopters, the U.S. can’t leverage the bench strength that the Army can bring to bear, especially in the vastness of the Indo-Pacific theater. The truncated range and speed of the UH-60 Black Hawk, for example, simply does not provide sufficient capability to give the Army the reach it needs.
With the FLRAA advanced tiltrotor, the Army becomes meaningfully additive to the joint force in the Indo-Pacific.
Just look at what happened to the Marine Corps when they replaced the conventional CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter with the Osprey — the tiltrotor fundamentally transformed the Corps’ concepts of operation.
The Corps went from being able to carry eight Marines 60 miles in a single aircraft, to being able to transport an entire platoon hundreds of miles. Marines suddenly could base farther from shore and strike deeper inland.
The increase in speed and range, combined with runway independence, also opened up new mission sets. Marines could self-deploy over long distances. They could operate in austere, unimproved environments, whether desert or jungle.
Distributed operations became a reality, where Marines could be dispersed over wide areas, making targeting more difficult for the enemy and increasing survivability. This distributed operational posture also gave Marines more flexibility in maneuver, creating more dilemmas for the enemy.
The Army currently lacks these capabilities and thus, these advantages. The Army pioneered the concept of air assault, forged in the crucible of Vietnam, that gave our fighting forces the ability to overcome the tyranny of terrain and take the fight directly to the enemy.
It’s time to give today’s soldiers that same advantage over our future, sophisticated enemies.
The Army is a maneuver force. That means it embodies both movement and fires. If you engage only at range with fires, you stall out in attrition warfare. To finish the fight, you need to move assault forces at distances consistent with long-range precision and joint fires in order to achieve decisive results. FLRAA gives the Army a 21st-century capability for conducting such maneuver warfare.
Whether seizing terrain or conducting raids and ambushes, the FLRAA tiltrotor’s speed, range, survivability and payload will be critical, especially in the vast distances of the Indo-Pacific. Consider what this tiltrotor technology will mean to medical evacuation, maritime interdiction, combat search and rescue, humanitarian relief, tactical resupply and armed escort. It changes the fundamental concepts for how our Army will fight.
The Army is developing new concepts of operation to achieve “large-scale, long-range air assault,” or L2A2. This is intended to “deliver one brigade combat team in one period of darkness, over 500 miles, arriving behind enemy lines, and able to conduct sustained combat operations,” said Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, who leads the 101st Airborne Division. Today’s force, equipped with Black Hawks, requires multiple periods of darkness and large numbers of soldiers, equipment and fuel to achieve the same result.
If we fail to modernize the Army’s air assault and adopt new doctrines around advanced tiltrotor capability, we will be leaving significant forces off the field. Imagine a war in the Pacific where the Army, our largest service in terms of personnel, is forced to sit on the sidelines for lack of relevant capability.
That’s why Congress and the Army need to stop spending precious funds on modernizing legacy Black Hawks. Modernizing the Black Hawk provides only incremental improvements; it does not give the Army the meaningful quantum leap in capability that we need in the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere.
We are in a zero-sum budgeting environment, and every dollar spent on Black Hawk modernization is a dollar not spent on a game-changing transformation of the Army. Very simply, that program does not provide enough bang for the buck.
The decisions our policymakers in Washington make today will decide whether America can bring to bear all of our potential military end strength, or just some of it, to resist aggression in the Indo-Pacific and elsewhere for the foreseeable future.
Let’s not sideline some of our best players — we need to go all-in for the win in the Indo-Pacific. That means full-throttle support for the FLRAA tiltrotor program so we can bring the Army to the fight.
Maj. Gen. Rudolph “Rudy” Ostovich (ret.) is the former chief of branch and commanding general of U.S. Army Aviation Center. He also served as the Army’s director of doctrine, J5 Commander in Chief, Pacific Command (today’s U.S. Indo-Pacific Command) and vice director of the Joint Staff with over 30 years of active duty as both an infantry and aviation officer.
