More Details

Adm. Stephen T. "Web" Koehler, commander, United States Pacific Fleet provides insight on the significance of joint force and multi-domain operations at the 11th Annual Land Forces Pacific Symposium and Exposition (LANPAC) in Honolulu, Hawaii, May 15, 2024. LANPAC provides the opportunity to engage with partners and Allies, which enhances regional security and stability. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Taylor Gray)

240515-A-YX677-5489

Adm. Stephen T. "Web" Koehler, commander, United States Pacific Fleet provides insight on the significance of joint force and multi-domain operations at the 11th Annual Land Forces Pacific Symposium and Exposition (LANPAC) in Honolulu, Hawaii, May 15, 2024. LANPAC provides the opportunity to engage with partners and Allies, which enhances regional security and stability. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Taylor Gray)

SHARE IMAGE:

Download Image

Image Details

Photo By: Spc. Taylor Gray

VIRIN: 240515-A-YX677-5489

Good morning!  I am fired up to join you all today more than you know and for a whole bunch of reasons. Thank you to General Brown and General Flynn for bringing us together this week for LANPAC.  I’m the only guy in whites and it’s great to be with teammates. Really, really thankful to deliver this address on Multi-Domain Operations because we all need each other in this profession of arms. Whether that’s in competition, crisis, or conflict, and ultimately, the ability to have deterrence to avoid any of it. That’s why I need everyone here. I’m honored to work with you
all. I share your zeal for advancing our all-domain capabilities and joint and combined integration. Just so you know, anybody in this room who wants to come to Pacific Fleet is welcome! We would love to have you there at the headquarters and part of our joint and combined work – I invite you any time.
  
I want to specifically thank all of our valued allies and partner Chiefs of Army and other distinguished service leaders and guests for making the long trip here to join us for this important event.  And I would like to call out General Walker, who is here from the U.K. and I do that one because he is a good friend, but also because I think he brought this weather. So good to see you.
 
I hope one of the things you take away from this conference is that we are in this together.  It’s important for us to take time this week to discuss the Army’s vision, and our joint and combined vision, but also that of the Navy’s and the future of the Indo-Pacific.
 
When invited to speak here by General Flynn, I jumped at the chance.  I did so for a couple of reasons. One because he is a very good friend and we’re synchronized on the needs of this theater. I did so for the opportunity to message to all of you and anybody listening, the need to synchronize our joint actions for joint effects.
 
I did so to express to all of you that in any mission, whether conducting operations in Competition, Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response (HADR) or combat posturing in Crisis or complete Conflict, it takes the entire joint and combined team to maximize those joint effects.  We must all work together to synchronize our effects in an efficient manner, and continue our joint team effort to maximize those effects.  If the fight goes down, it will require a team effort with everyone, and all of their skills, in all domains, to succeed.  In an effort to deter which is what military people do. You know the person who goes to the fight if you’re a just Soldier, Sailor, Airman, Marine is with a tear in your eye. And so the argument of combat credible power and an effort to deter is our job and I look forward to working that with you in synchronized joint and combined way.
 
That’s going to make the first and second island chains are no longer simply terrain for land forces to defend.  They are now terrain from which our land forces, along with those of our allies and partners, can project decisive combat power.  In the maritime domain, I need our Army and Marine Corps teammates to do so, and they have made great progress on it. 
 
As a Joint Force Maritime Component Commander, I need land-based fires.  I need those fires to support maritime movement and maneuver in support of sea control, SLOC protection and logistics support.  Land-based fires are phenomenal SLOC controllers.  Control of SLOCs and maritime choke points with land-based fires will enable the movement and maneuver of my battle force. 
 
To integrate those land-based fires seamlessly, we must focus on all of the joint warfighting functions.  We must establish resilient command and control, enable mobile logistics, synchronize joint fires, and coordinate our intelligence, protection, movement and maneuver.  Our efforts must integrate seamlessly, and allow agile movement and maneuver across all domains.  This is a critical requirement for our land or maritime forces and helps them to avoid operating from fixed positions. 
 
Those land-based fires are an absolute imperative for support in the Indo-Pacific.  Their integration and synchronization are key to my success as a Maritime component commander.  As CAPT Wayne Hughes said in his publication of Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations during his time as a Naval Postgraduate School Professor, “Sea-based forces often must team with land-based forces that are located in friendly territory.  Effective cooperation—in joint and combined operations, both operational and tactical, is a modern-day imperative.” 
 
Our Navy-Marine Corps team is pursuing a variety of new initiatives that do just that.  Here's some examples of where we’re going. 
 
Last month, DoD awarded a contract for production of the Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, or NMESIS.  NMESIS is a mobile, ground-based, anti-ship weapon system intended to support land-to-sea strikes.  It will be fielded by small Marine Corps teams in the littoral environment. 
 
NMESIS will contribute to our fleet’s ability to achieve sea control, sea denial and defense against adversarial amphibious force missions.  At its core, NMESIS is a combination of several proven capabilities.  That is the key reason why it will be produced and fielded rapidly.  The weapon in the system is the already deployed Naval Strike Missile.  With the anti-ship missile is an existing control system, and the chassis of a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. 
NMESIS exemplifies the flexible procurement policy we are using to acquire what we need rapidly in a security climate that demands timely delivery. 
 
While the Navy-Marine Corps team is making innovative advancements of our own, Army partners are also making long range advancements in land-to-sea power projection in the Indo-Pacific—ready in competition, crisis, or conflict.  
 
Whether we are operating in Oceania, in the archipelagic environment of Southeast Asia, responding to a natural disaster in one part of the Indo-Pacific while conducting exercises in another, we need support from the land domain to succeed in our collective goals.
 
Fortunately, the Army is already driving land to sea innovation during competition.  
 
I witnessed it with particular interest in the Army’s successful development of a Land-Based Anti-Ship Missile seeker for the Precision Strike Missile Increment 2.  We see PrSM as a promising force multiplier in the maritime domain, and we expect it to change the way the Army fights in the Indo-Pacific.  PrSM is just one example, though.  We see many new opportunities in the all-domain innovations of our joint partners in the DoD enterprise. 
 
Replicator is one such opportunity, and it is a major opportunity.  Along with USARPAC and our other joint partners, Pac Fleet fully supports the Replicator Initiative that DoD announced last year.  Replicator is already breaking down barriers to rapidly field all-domain, attritable, autonomous systems.  In the context of Replicator, it means platforms that are unmanned and built affordably, allowing commanders to tolerate a higher degree of risk in employing them. 
Just last week, DoD announced the accelerated fielding of several Replicator capabilities.  These include uncrewed surface vessels, uncrewed aerial systems, and counter-uncrewed aerial systems of various sizes and payloads, as well as loitering munitions. There is opportunity here.
 
PAC Fleet is continually refining our Command and Control capabilities to enable sustained combat operations with all of Replicator’s new multi-domain systems.  
 
Along with our joint partners, we are also drilling into the details of their collaborative employment.  Such team efforts include our participation in USARPAC’s Concepts Council to refine tactics, and USARPAC’s participation in our Replicator Operational Planning Team.  Make no mistake—no single one of Replicator’s innovations solves everything during conflict. Our intent is to achieve the maximum aggregate effectiveness from all of our collective capabilities, and to jumpstart the delivery of these critical capabilities at scale.
 
Replicator is a critical step in delivering the capabilities we need, at the scale and speed we need, to continue securing a free and open Indo-Pacific.  Its success will depend on the best efforts of our joint, all-domain partners working together.
 
As important as Ground Force support is to the Maritime domain; Naval Sea-based support is just as important to the Land domain.
 
Fielding innovative new capabilities at scale and at speed is just one part of our joint effort to advance Multi-Domain Operations.  On another front, General Flynn has made great strides in expanding the scope and scale of Operation Pathways, USARPAC’s operational approach to campaigning in the region.  Going Forward, Pac Fleet will continue to give large and needed levels of support to Operation Pathways as we have in 2023 and currently in 2024. 
And this year we look forward to Super Garuda Shield, Ulchi Freedom Shield, and JPMRC, among other major commitments. That’s returned in the region, working together with you all multi-domain, multi-service, ensuring posture for deterrence.
 
Last year, under the Pathways umbrella, we committed major assets to support the largest ever exercise Talisman Sabre. The AMERICA Amphibious Ready Group supported amphibious operations with the Marine Corps in the Coral Sea, along with USS RAFAEL PERALTA and multiple logistical support ships.
This exercise included two amphibious assaults with multinational participation.
 
Just weeks after completing Talisman Sabre, we demonstrated our agility by supporting the largest ever exercise Super Garuda Shield in Indonesia, with USS GREEN BAY and embarked Marines.   
 
We also committed our forces last year to new levels of participation in Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center, or JPMRC.  
 
During JPMRC 24-1 last November, USS DECATUR supported with Tomahawk strike training, joint Naval Surface Fire Support training, and deck landing qualifications with Army helicopters.  Also during JPMRC 24-1, we witnessed the potential of the Army’s Multi-Domain Task Forces in the maritime domain with their successful HIMARS live fire in Palau.  We now regularly conduct joint fires coordination with Multi-Domain Task Forces to achieve massed joint effects to the maritime domain. 
We look forward to further flexing our joint capabilities during JPMRC this year, whether that is through additional platforms or shared architectures and common operational pictures.
 
We are already off to a good start this year in other efforts.  In February, we sent USS SOMERSET and USS HALSEY to support the largest ever and most complex exercise TIGER TRIUMPH in India. 
TIGER TRIUMPH, in addition to featuring combined training with our Indian partners, focused on interoperability in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.
 
The U.S. Pacific Fleet remains committed as the HA/DR partner and enabler in the Indo-Pacific.  We have demonstrated this with our continual support to allies and partners.  Last year, volcanic eruptions in Papua New Guinea displaced numerous communities and cut off access to food and water.  This occurred right after the conclusion of Talisman Sabre.  We immediately diverted one of our most powerful assets, USS AMERICA, from her planned port visit to support HA/DR operations in Papua New Guinea. 
 
Our carrier strike groups, which are always on call in the Indo-Pacific, also regularly provide emergent HA/DR support.  
 
In May 2023, Super Typhoon Mawar made landfall on Guam.  The strongest storm to hit Guam in twenty-two years, it caused widespread destruction.  We diverted the NIMITZ Strike Group to assist, which arrived near Guam within days.  Along with providing all of the standard HA/DR assistance with her carrier air wing, NIMITZ also served as a communications and radio transmission hub for local authorities.
 
In addition to emergent HA/DR response, we have our longstanding Pacific Partnership mission.  Pac Fleet founded Pacific Partnership after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to assist our partners in building their disaster response capabilities and resilience.  We have renewed that commitment every year since. 
 
These included Subject Matter Expert Exchanges, community relations projects, disaster response workshops and search and rescue training.  We also frequently task our amphibious ships to support Pacific Partnership, and those ships are often diverted to support emergent HA/DR efforts for our various partners in the Indo-Pacific. 
 
While we field new capabilities rapidly, to improve continually as we train and operate together, it’s important to recognize efforts of advance Multi-Domain Operations. All we have to do is look to the conflict in Ukraine to see that. While we’re in the Pacific here, the lessons of Ukraine are mightily important as we absorb them into Multi-Domain Operations that we need here.    
 
The Ukrainian advantage is that they have been fast to adapt in Multi-Domain Operations.  The Ukrainians have demonstrated their ability to integrate land, sea, air, space, cyber, and information to achieve mass effects. We have seen this with their integration of unmanned systems with legacy systems to hold the Black Sea fleet and its military ports at risk, forcing operations further from Ukraine. 
 
Ukraine’s effective use of unmanned systems against an entire fleet is a revolutionary development of warfare.  The space domain has also contributed to operations in Ukraine in transformative ways, particularly in providing overhead imagery for intelligence.  These lessons are important for us to learn as we improve our interoperability during our joint multi-national exercises.
 
Along these lines, it’s not enough to simply possess these capabilities. They must be well-maintained, the crew must be well-trained, the tactics must be well-practiced, and we must be well-integrated amongst all our forces to ensure it is messaged at the right time.
 
This brings me back to why we train and operate together, and why we are all here together. Throughout the Indo-Pacific, the Pacific Fleet is blessed with a strong network of allies and partners, who honor us with their attendance today. 
 
Our allies and partnerships are the unbreakable bedrock of international security.  The stronger that bedrock becomes, the more we will achieve its desired effect.  Our collective work, from HA/DR training, to war games, to complex exercises, and operations all build deterrence and enhance our force posture.  In that light, I encourage everyone in the audience who is able to support USARPAC’s Unified Pacific Wargame Series to do so.  Unified Pacific allows USARPAC to identify strengths and gaps and assess posture and make us better.
 
It is a joint campaign of learning that allows us to get better year after year and improve our joint plans.  It’s a capability builder, operations and tactics test with huge deterrence effects.  As I mentioned before, deterrence in the Indo-Pacific is a team effort. And I’m looking at the team. It takes all of us to maintain a safe, stable, and secure Indo-Pacific. We have maintained that relative peace in the Indo-Pacific for almost eighty years due to the willingness of like-minded partners to work together and maintain credible combat power. 
 
All of us have a choice to make and a role to play in maintaining our rules-based global order.  I couldn’t be more impressed of the progress we have made together in accomplishing that mission.  Together, we will continue to seize and maintain the initiative in the Indo-Pacific.  To prevail, we will continue to innovate and refine our joint and combined capabilities and integration and to ensure regional stability through persistent joint and combined operations. 
Pac Fleet is synchronized with all of the joint components and the whole combined group here.  I’m fired up to work with all of you and that is from the bottom of my heart and it’s a joy to be here so thank you very much. Let’s get after it! Mahalo!
 
With that, I will take a few questions from our audience.