U.S. Army Changes Tools and Tactics to Prepare for the Next Pacific War
A ‘terrifying’ era of warfare arrives, forcing America to rethink how it prepares for great-power conflict with China
- The U.S. Army is rapidly adopting new drone technology and tactics to prepare for potential great-power conflict in the Pacific.
- Soldiers are training with diverse drone systems, including 3-D-printed explosive drones and antidrone measures like wearable blockers and smart rifles.
- The Army is shifting toward nimble, expendable equipment and aims to accelerate domestic drone production to match competitors like China.
SCHOFIELD BARRACKS, Hawaii—A winged drone circled 2,000 feet above the jungle. “Three pax,” said U.S. Army Specialist Josiah Whitt, counting enemy troops on a laptop screen.
It has been an unusual year for soldiers like him.
“We get a drone, we train on it…then we get a new drone, train on it, test it out,” said the 20-year-old, who learned to fly the Stalker less than a month earlier.
Crouched under a green poncho, Sgt. Nicholas Cole Hagler lifted a C100 quadcopter—one of five drone systems the 22-year-old has been taught in quick succession. In 23-year-old Sgt. Brock Beckman’s vehicle: 3-D-printed drones that dive and explode with a nudge of the thumb.
These young American soldiers are preparing for the next war in the Pacific.
They brought out some of their newest gear for large-scale Army exercises in November that unfolded over two weeks across several Hawaiian islands. Such systems dominate the battlefield in Ukraine and Russia. The U.S.—long reliant on expensive fighting kit and extended processes—is trying to catch up, shifting to a starkly new era marked by nimble, relatively cheap and expendable equipment.
The timing is tricky. The world’s pre-eminent military power must rethink its tried-and-tested tools and tactics even as it girds for one of its most vexing challenges since World War II: potential great-power conflict with China.
For the U.S. Army in particular, which spent two decades fighting insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, future conflicts may be different on fundamental counts—where, how and against whom.
China has one of the world’s largest missile arsenals and unrivaled industrial strength to buoy forces in a protracted war. Fighting it in the Pacific would involve a vast, watery battlespace speckled with jungle-swathed island chains—all within reach of those missiles. That means the U.S. can’t expect to rule the skies and would struggle to resupply scattered troops.
The Army is thinking boats, buggies and bombardment. Docked at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam during the exercises was a small new watercraft designed to move equipment straight to a beach. Soldiers zip around in light, maneuverable vehicles out of a Mad Max movie that one military official called the biggest game-changer since night vision. To prepare for a cross-island fight, clunkier cannon artillery has made way for shoot-and-scoot Himars missile platforms, 16 of which arrived in Hawaii this year.
First contact
Atop the maritime littorals is the 21st-century problem of “air littorals”—airspace between the earth and high skies where drones lurk, hunt and kill. Soldiers navigating Hawaiian terrain took great pains to blend into it, shrinking command posts to a handful of trucks, draping vehicles with camouflage nets and vegetation, and painting their faces with thick stripes of green.
“The truth of the modern battlefield is that everyone can be seen,” said Maj. Gen. James Bartholomees, commander of the Army’s 25th Infantry Division that focuses on the Indo-Pacific.
Soldiers must prepare to fight with drones, against drones and via electronic warfare. Looking up and dealing with “first contact” from the sky or the electromagnetic spectrum is the new reality, said Bartholomees.
Troops are experimenting with a smorgasbord of buzzing, flying machines—launching more than 600 flights over two weeks during the exercises—and layering them through the depth of the battlefield. They are learning that drones tested successfully elsewhere in the world can wobble in tropical heat. Cloud cover can mean defaulting to human senses over drone sensors.
They are also thinking of ways to stymie enemy drones without accidentally thwarting their own. Several dozen M4 assault rifles now have “smart shooter” add-ons that can lock onto a flying drone and fire a round when the target is aligned.
A higher-tech new arrival: a wearable drone blocker with two units roughly the size of iPhones. One, called Wingman, detects incoming drones and the other, Pitbull, disrupts or jams the drone with what amounts to an electromagnetic arrow.
Jamming, however, means showing oneself on the electromagnetic spectrum.
“It’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse game that we’re watching and learning from in Ukraine,” said Bartholomees. “There are vignettes that are easily seen on YouTube of how you see a drone that’s defeated in one way, that then there’s a counter that’s already planned.”
‘Just insane’
The two mobile brigades that make up Bartholomees’s division—each about 3,500 personnel strong—have both been through what the Army calls “transformation in contact,” the whirlwind shift toward new technology.
The difference is night and day, said Sgt. First Class Kamakaniokalani Mann Tomita, 31. In about a year, his infantry platoon went from having one kind of drone, a small quadcopter, to seven types to experiment with. “The amount of systems and different assets that we’ve had is just insane,” he said.
On a recent afternoon, he learned the art of kamikaze-style attacks using a flock of drones. The chassis of the quadcopters were 3-D-printed in-house, while the technology to move and attack as a swarm came from Auterion, a company that makes autonomous drone operating systems. The firm’s crew was in Hawaii’s jungles to troubleshoot.
Seven drones soared. With clicks on a screen, two peeled off to swoop down for the kill. Tracking the hit from a shrouded nook between towering trees, Tomita reflected on the new world of deadly drone wars. “It’s very, very terrifying to be frank,” he said.
Tomita’s brigade was playing the adversary in an exercise scenario that could someday become reality: A U.S. ally’s island territory is under attack, enemy forces have landed, and America joins the fight several weeks in. China and Taiwan weren’t mentioned, but the parallels are evident.
If Beijing invaded and the U.S. decided to come to the island democracy’s aid, American soldiers might find themselves fighting in the “first island chain” where Taiwan is located, between Japan and the Philippines.
To better prepare them for a war like that, a new combat training center called the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center was created in 2022 in Hawaii. During last month’s exercises, it brought together more than 8,000 personnel largely from the U.S. but also from places including Taiwan, France and Malaysia. Soldiers executed air assaults, simulated missile shots across islands, navigated gulches and slept fitfully under trees.
It was the first year of exercises where both sides—American soldiers playing themselves and the enemy—were given the latest systems the Army is trying out. “We have new tech against new tech,” said Col. Matthew P. Leclair, who leads the training center. Evaluators were looking to see who used it better, how and why.
“The best way to do it then becomes the doctrine,” he said.
Next year, one of the two brigades will go out to the Philippines to stress-test its takeaways—part of a rotation that allows them to take turns training in forward locations.
“We can quickly turn lessons learned,” said Command Sgt. Maj. Shaun Curry of the 25th Infantry Division. “Did it work here in Hawaii and then does it work in the first island chain in 100 degrees heat, in 100% humidity.”
Magazine depth
The Army wants to change not just what it buys but how it buys, since fast-paced technological shifts can render new equipment obsolete within months. It is trying to break out of a laborious acquisition process and give commanders some flexibility to curate their own shopping carts. Like Amazon, said Curry.
To be ready for a near-term conflict, however, the U.S. also needs to scale up. Ukraine and Russia are making millions of drones a year, and China can outproduce them both. The U.S. Army hopes to spur domestic drone production over the next few years.
“The one fear I have is that we develop an army of amazing prototypes but we don’t have a deep-enough magazine depth,” said Benjamin Jensen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The Army needs to move fast on attack drones in particular, military analysts and soldiers said. Russia routinely hits Ukraine with Iran-designed Shahed drones that explode on impact—a capability the U.S. has now copied. Cheap first-person-view, or FPV, drones steered using a live feed on a pilot’s goggles, have also proved highly destructive.
“Since the war between Russia and Ukraine broke out, everybody’s saying, ‘Oh, FPV, FPV,’ ” said Staff Sgt. Thanh Ho, a drone specialist. “We’re a little behind, we need to play the catch-up game.”
Ho used to pilot the RQ-7 Shadow, a surveillance drone used in Iraq and Afghanistan. After two decades, the Army decided last year to phase it out—among several bulky systems to go. The drones he now flies are compact and don’t need a runway.
Still, there’s a lot to figure out. One drone he pilots can throw up an effective cloak of invisibility against electronic onslaughts, but others he has trained on don’t hold up well in that domain, he said. That means a sophisticated adversary could knock them out.
The nerds
Ho belongs to a new formation called the multifunctional reconnaissance company, which brings together human scouts with drone pilots and electronic-warfare specialists.
Some of their new drones fly high and long, seeking enemy coordinates. Others sit closer to the fight, guiding scouts and ground forces into the fray. Alongside these are a few loitering munitions that don’t just “see” and “sense” but also strike.
“We have all these commercial off-the-shelf drones, they month-after-month just build one on top of the other,” said First Sgt. Karissa Lopez. “They’re just coming out of the woodworks.”
But the soldiers know that what they have the enemy does, too. That is why electronic warfare, although not new, has become more important than ever. Soldiers fighting with invisible waves and signals who once stayed in the back are now coming forward “up close and personal with the enemy,” said First Lt. Andres Rodriguez, an expert in the field.
The goal: to find and kill drone operators by detecting the signals their devices emit. “We’re trying to find the controllers out there, and then we call for fires—we call for rounds, bombs coming down on the actual drone controller,” he said.
Moving close to the enemy means soldiers adept in electronic warfare are now also training hard on the physical fight, signing up for programs like the Army’s jungle school. “We get a lot more of the nerds,” Rodriguez said.
