Soldiers with the 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force and the Tennessee National Guard fire precision strike missiles during a ship-sinking drill for the Valiant Shield exercise on Palau, June 16, 2024. (Nello Miele/U.S. Marine Corps)
WAIKIKI BEACH, Hawaii — A decade ago, Navy Adm. Harry Harris challenged a roomful of Army leaders to think beyond land.
“The Army’s got to be able to sink ships, neutralize satellites, shoot down missiles and deny the enemy the ability to command and control its forces,” Harris, at the time in charge of what is now U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, said at the 2016 Land Forces Pacific symposium at Waikiki Beach.
Today, the Army’s three multi-domain task forces — with two more in the works — may be the most tangible result of Harris’ charge.
“Multi-domain task forces in the field now, as I utter these words, in commission now, represent the centerpiece of this response … and this fundamentally alters the strategic calculus in the contested environment,” Adm. Sanuel Paparo, today’s INDOPACOM commander, said Tuesday in the keynote speech opening this year’s LANPAC.
The task forces are designed to operate across land, air, sea, space and cyberspace and are key to countering China and Russia’s area denial strategy.
“The Army built these capabilities specifically in response to what was happening in the Indo-Pacific,” Brig. Gen. Mike Rose, commander of the 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force, said during an interview Wednesday on the symposium’s sidelines.
The 3rd MDTF was stood up at Fort Shafter, Hawaii, in September 2022, and since then has been building out its fires and sustainment capabilities, he said.
It is the second task force aligned with the Indo-Pacific, joining the first stood up in 2017 at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash. Another task force was stood up in 2021 in Germany.
The 3rd MDTF has become an integral part of Operation Pathways, which is U.S. Army Pacific’s campaign to keep troops deployed across the International Date Line from spring through fall through back-to-back exercises.
The task force is adding a long-range precision fires battalion this year, armed with a battery of the Army’s long-range hypersonic weapon, a missile dubbed Dark Eagle. The Washington-based 1st MDTF was the first Army unit to deploy and integrate Dark Eagle, which has a range of about 1,700 miles.
The 3rd MDTF will also be fielding a Typhon battery, the Army’s mid-range missile system designed specifically for the task forces. It launches both Tomahawk cruise missiles and the Standard Missile-6.
The U.S. deployed a Typhon missile launcher to the Philippines last year.
Typhon “gives us a pretty significant amount of range” in the hunt for “a moving maritime target,” Rose said.
Rounding out the fires battalion is a battery using the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, to launch the short-range precision strike missile, or PrSM. The 3rd MDTF sank a target ship off Palau with two strike missiles last summer during the Valiant Shield exercise.
In the next couple of years, the task force will begin building out its air-defense battalion for what the Army calls indirect fire protection, Rose said.
Some of the technology in the works for that defense, such as directed energy via lasers or microwave, are still in the prototyping and experimental stages, he said.
“We are part of that process,” Rose said.
“The most interesting thing about the indirect fire protection capability is how we’re thinking now about integrating offensive and defensive fires,” he said. “In particular, the data that feeds our defensive fires can very quickly transition to feeding an offensive deployment to go after the shooter.”
With such a system, the task force could simultaneously hunt the arrows and the archers, Rose said.
