Lt. Gen. James Glynn, head of Marine Corps Forces Pacific, speaks with reporters on June 16, 2026, during the Pacific Amphibious Leaders Symposium at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)
HONOLULU — The biggest challenge facing Marine Corps Forces Pacific is not firepower or manpower but logistics, the command’s top general said Tuesday.
Lt. Gen. James Glynn said sustaining forces across the region’s vast reaches remains the command’s most difficult operational problem as the service shifts to smaller, more mobile units designed to work alongside allies and partners.
The issue took center stage on the opening day of the Pacific Amphibious Leaders Symposium, a three-day conference that brought together naval and marine leaders from 25 nations to discuss how to better integrate their amphibious operations.
“Our challenge is no different than any corporation that operates in the Pacific region,” he told reporters after his remarks at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies.
“You have these vast distances where effectively you have to run a supply chain,” Glynn said. “And depending on where what you need is made or stored, you have to have the means by which to get it where you need it, when you need it. And obviously the more contested that supply chain is, the more challenging it can become.”
The challenge of logistics in the Pacific is one shared by the Army.
During the Land Forces Pacific conference in Honolulu in May, U.S. Forces Korea commander Gen. Xavier Brunson updated attendees on plans for a regional sustainment hub in South Korea to deal with the Pacific’s “tyranny of distance.”
For the Marine Corps, the problem has grown more complex under Force Design, a modernization effort launched in 2020.
The initiative is intended to shift the service away from the kind of landlocked counter-insurgency missions that were front and center in Afghanistan and Iraq for two decades.
In the Pacific, that means less reliance on massive amphibious assault forces and more on deploying small, highly mobile units directly into hot zones.
Sustaining those units, with the help of allies and partners, is a “work in progress,” Glynn told the conference.
Much of that relies on “synergies of co-production,” he said.
That means “3D printing, co-storage, co-movement, co-training” and other bilateral and multilateral operations that shorten supply chains “towards our collective benefit,” he said.
As an example, Glynn pointed to this spring’s Balikatan exercise in the Philippines, where Marines carried out a “preposition ship offload” to deliver much of the heavy equipment and supplies needed for the training.
Marines then relied on “Philippine means and methods” to distribute it, Glynn said.
A free and open Indo-Pacific, he told the audience, relies on a sustained security environment upheld “by operating in synergy, by harnessing our collective will and remaining vigilant in upholding our sovereignty.”
