Army seeks greater Pacific role

Approaching from the Hawaii coast, the mosquito-shaped helicopter buzzed around this guided missile cruiser twice before swooping toward the landing pad. The Navy crew on the deck crouched, the helmeted faces betraying more than routine concern as the aircraft, flown by a pilot who had never before alighted upon a ship, hovered a foot off the tarmac and then set down with a thud. The sailors' trepidation was prompted by three words painted in black block letters on the drab olive fuselage: United States Army. The Army, which fights on terra firma, does not usually land its helicopters on ships — the domain of the Navy and the Marine Corps — but these are not usual times in the U.S. military. As the Obama administration winds down the Army-centric war in Afghanistan, Pentagon leaders are seeking to place the Air Force, Navy and Marines in dominant roles to counter threats in the Asia-Pacific region, which they China High Temperature hoses manufacturers have deemed to be the nation's next big national security challenge. Fearful that the new strategy will cut its share of the defense budget, the Army is launching an ambitious campaign to transform itself and assert its relevance in the Pacific. And that, in turn, is drawing the Army into a fight. Calculating that there are only slim chances of the Army fighting a big land war anywhere in the Far East other than the Korean Peninsula, the new top Army commander in the Pacific, Gen. Vincent Brooks, wants his forces to more quickly and effectively respond to small conflicts, isolated acts of aggression and natural disasters. Doing so, however, has traditionally been a challenge for the Army, which bases most of its soldiers assigned to the Orient in Hawaii, Alaska and Washington state. To overcome what he calls "the tyranny of distance," Brooks is trying to make his forces more maritime and expeditionary. To cut travel time and increase regional familiarity, he is seeking authorization to send key Low Temperature hoses suppliers elements of a U.S.-based infantry brigade to Asia and keep them there for months at a time, moving every few weeks to different nations to conduct training exercises. The rotating deployment, which amounts to the first proposed increase in U.S. forces in Asia in years, could enable the Army to move more speedily to address humanitarian crises and security threats. Brooks said he wants "a capable force that can respond to a variety of contingencies" — rapidly. "Forces that are already in motion have an advantage in responding," he said. The initiative, which Brooks is calling "Pacific Pathways," is also an opportunity to recast the Army's image in Washington, yielding television images of soldiers — not just Marines and sailors — responding to typhoons and cyclones. "We can no longer afford to build [combat] units and put them on a shelf to be used only in the event of war," Brooks's command wrote in an internal planning document.