“We never fight alone. We've never done that. You can go all the way back to the days of Revolutionary War. The United States has never gone into conflict on its own. We've always built coalitions. We've always involved partners and allies. And we'll continue to do so going forward.”
That was Gen. Ronald P. Clark, Commanding General, U.S. Army Pacific Command, speaking last Tuesday at a contemporary military forum, Decisive Landpower -- Deterrence and Partner Integration Against the Pacing Threat, as part of the 2026 Association of the United States Army (AUSA) Conference in Washington, D.C.
On the panel with Clark was Army Gen. Xavier T. Brunson, Commander, United Nations Command, U.S. Forces Korea, and Tara Murphy Dougherty, Chief Executive Officer of Air, a leading AI software firm that specializes in national security readiness.
The two Army generals spent a good deal of their time talking about lessons learned from Ukraine and the benefits to the U.S. of allies – specifically in the Pacific. That struck me as something to further explore, since one day later, on Wednesday, President Trump continued his running criticism of allies with an October 14, Truth Social screed.
Trump said in part: “Because of the fact that we have had such Military Success, we no longer ‘need,’ or desire, the NATO Countries’ assistance — WE NEVER DID! Likewise, Japan, Australia, or South Korea. In fact, speaking as President of the United States of America, by far the Most Powerful Country Anywhere in the World, WE DO NOT NEED THE HELP OF ANYONE! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
On the other hand, Gen. Brunson had told the AUSA audience one day earlier, “Everything that we do is intricately woven around the ROK (Republic of Korea)-U.S. alliance. That alliance has stood for some 75 years and it is an example or a paragon, if you will, of all that's right when folk work in alliance together. The problems that we solve are joint problems. They're not just U.S. problems. They're not just Republic of Korea problems. What they are is great opportunities for two nations to work in concert with one another in order to arrive at solutions that are beneficial for both countries.”
Gen. Clark explained further, “So our ability to be able to work with partners and allies on their sovereign soil, to be able to share procedures that we build through [military] exercises over the course of a year, some joint, some army-to-army, but always integrated with our partners. It gives us the opportunity to have our systems work technically, to have our procedures nested, and to get to know one another in a way that allows us to build the trust that's necessary in training. Because if we wait until crisis or conflict, it's too late to ask the question, can I trust
you? But because we've been working together, because we've exercised at scale, because we're modernizing our forces alongside one another, it works.”
Clark added, “We've really worked hard at building those relationships at scale inside of the land forces. We have a land forces dialogue that meets multiple times a year -- chiefs of army of Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the U.S. We've invited the ROKs in, we've invited India in, and it continues to grow. So those relationships built army-to-army are what allows us to really integrate across interoperability, and integrate it really across our formations and with our partners in all.”
Brunson described how he and Korean Gen. Kim Sung-min, Deputy Commander of the U.S.-ROK Combined Forces Command, discussed training differently “taking advantage of the knowledge that we have of the threats that exist or that prevail in the Ukraine fight.”
Brunson said, “We talk about how we would operate in a distributed fashion…Just imagine if we trained across the entirety of the [Korean] Peninsula and got ourselves in a shape where we would say you can't utilize the things that you've learned in the fight in the battlefield in Ukraine on us, because we learned the same lessons and we've distributed ourselves in such a way that we don't make ourselves the target. We won't be moored in place.”
Clark talked about Russia, North Korea and China “learning from watching us partner, but the partnerships that our adversaries have built are transactional versus the transformational relationships that we build as a security partner of choice globally…for us it's really transformational relationships that we look to cultivate with partners and allies over time.”
Brunson described how the North Koreans, fighting for the Russians in Ukraine were “able to test systems there…and then bring that back home. So, in one aspect, they've shortened their RDT&E cycle.” He also pointed out, “The fact that you have a combat trained force with recent
combat on the [Korean] Peninsula for the first time since 1953..[and] are now bringing those lessons learned back into their own training cycle, it's shortened their time to develop them.”
Clark said that U.S. forces had also learned from Ukraine about the need for mobility and camouflage, which he described as “age-old army forgotten sciences of how to hide in plain sight and how to camouflage ourselves from observation...Our ability to be able to use electronic warfare, to be able to use just good, old-fashioned camouflage and the ability to deceive our adversary is a must. In those two theaters [Ukraine and Iran] it's not a near-peer adversary that we would be working against -- whereas, in our theater [the Pacific] it absolutely is.”
For Clark, the questions were: “How do we fight, you know, Type One, Type Two UAS [unmanned aerial system, drones]; how do we think through ballistic missile defense holistically in the region. We spend a lot of time working again with the joint force for solutions associated with that. How do we maneuver?”
Brunson raised a new issue by pointing out that, “Our old system was something [a weapons system] breaks, we send it all the way back CONUS [Continental U.S.] in order to fix it so we can then bring it all the way back out again.” That used to take 29 days by ship.
However, he added, “In the ally that we have in Korea we have a an absolutely premier industrial base, if you look at the Korea defense industry, some of the kit that we're producing right now sits along our friends, allies and partners.” Brunson said, “The Army’s new infantry squad vehicle (ISV), for example, is produced by GM Defense and GM Defense is also in the Republic of Korea.”
“So the idea of a regional sustainment hub would simply be…to bring those means of production to the theater,” Brunson suggested, noting, “In the maritime domain, when we look at maintenance, repair, and overhaul, which is being done forward alongside the Koreans, you know that 15 percent of global ship building is done in Korea. And, oh by the way, we've got an ally with a mutual defense treaty in Japan that has 10% of global ship building. And if we take these cases forward, we're able to stay in theater longer.”
The answer, Brunson said, “We've got to try to achieve admirable endurance in theater by partnering alongside our allies, seeing the things that they can do better than we can right now at distance and then keeping them right where they belong. That keeps our [military] forces forward.”
Dougherty chipped in saying: “Tens of millions of dollars saved by simply identifying things like unfilled requisitions or parts that are obsolete that can be replaced with something not obsolete and also less expensive. I think that this is it. This is part of how you generate lethality. You get readiness to pay for itself, because otherwise sustainment is too expensive when it has to be done for the entirety of the joint force all the way on the other side of the world.”
At one point, Clark said, “The secret sauce for us as an Army is our Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) corps, reflecting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s September 30 speech praising the same group.
Clark noted that both he and Brunson were sons of NCOs, and that “with the assistance of our senior non-commissioned officers, senior enlisted leaders across the [PACOM] region have embarked upon conducting assessments with our partners and developing strategies to help them build their NCO development programs inside of their formations.”
To illustrate his point, Clark said his units had just finished an assessment in Cambodia of its army and the Commander, Gen. Mao Sophan, “basically said, ‘Hey, whatever you're asking us to do, we're going to do it because we want to get to a level of proficiency with our Non-Commissioned Officer core that we see in yours.’"
I must point out that during the one-hour-and-thirty-minute session neither General -- Clark nor Brunson -- came near to mentioning President Trump’s repeated critical views about U.S. allies.
The closest anyone came was Dougherty, who at one point said diplomatically, “We'll head into midterm elections here [in the U.S.] in November, obviously as you know, and I think we expect some variation in the political dynamic in the United States, and our allies and partners all navigate their own political changes as well.”
She then added, “If you look over the course of history, however, at least modern history, certainly the United States has invested in those partnerships. And today, we still are -- maybe with a different flavor or a different attitude. And that's not really for me to say. I'm simply observing. But we haven't lost sight of the importance of allies and partners to securing U.S. national interests.”
I would bet Clark and Brunson – along with most U.S. military professionals – would silently agree with her statement.
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