Col. Sean Heidgerken, commander of the 1st Theater Information Advantage Detachment, greets a soldier following the unit’s activation ceremony at Fort Shafter, Hawaii, on Nov. 7, 2025. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)
FORT SHAFTER, Hawaii — The Army on Friday stood up a Pacific-based detachment tasked with countering disinformation and “malign influence” aimed at America and its allies and partners by adversaries.
The 1st Theater Information Advantage Detachment, headquartered at Fort Shafter in Hawaii, is the first of three such units the Army aims to stand up before the end of 2026.
The second is slated to be stood up this spring at Army Cyber Command, with the third expected to be activated next fall at U.S. Army Europe and Africa.
“This detachment is the first of its kind,” Col. Sean Heidgerken, the unit’s commander, told reporters Thursday during a conference call. He was joined by Command Sgt. Maj. Avery Bennett.
“It’s a formation designed to maneuver within the information environment and maintain positions of advantage,” Heidgerken said. “Our mission is clear: to enable the United States Army Pacific to sense, understand, decide and act faster than any adversary, while strengthening cooperation with our allies and partners throughout the region.”
The 65-soldier detachment consists of five teams specializing in areas of cyber intelligence, psychological operations, public affairs, electronic warfare, civil affairs and information operations, he said.
He described the activation of the detachment as “our commitment to promoting transparency, countering malign influence and ensuring our friends and partners to rely on the truth.”
The detachment is a departure from the Army’s information warfare task forces in the past that were organized under special operations commands focused on, for example, operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those were organized for a very specific mission “with a sunset in mind” and manned by personnel that rotated in for short periods from their home units, Heidgerken said.
The Army also conducted cyber and psychological operations through the 1st Information Operations Command for the past 23 years, but it was deactivated in May and its billets transferred to the three new information detachments.
“That [command] was also an established unit, but because it wasn’t forward deployed in the Indo-Pacific as we are, it really was a support function and wasn’t designed to be a unit of action that is actually engaged in the day-to-day operations that are required in the information space,” Heidgerken said.
The Army formed the detachments in recognition that disinformation and malign activities are not just challenges to be overcome during crisis or conflict, but throughout periods of competition, he said.
“We cannot wait until a balloon goes up someplace to actually get after these activities,” he said.
“We want to make sure that we’re providing accurate things, truthful things, coordinated with partners, building resiliency and resistance to either malign activity or manipulative activity from an adversary.”
When asked for a real-world example of such malign activities, Bennett pointed to China’s machinations and claims of sovereignty in the South China Sea, where Beijing has used gray-zone conflict, coercion and financial entanglements to leverage its position.
“So our job would be to go in and help our partners and allies in line with whatever their goals are for their sovereignty and ensuring that we can inoculate both their populations from things that an adversary might put out in the environment — whether it be through state-sponsored activities or any other state-sponsored corporations or agencies — and then ensuring that our allies and partners can be heard in the environment so that their sovereignty is protected,” Bennett said.
