Gen. Ronald Clark, commander of U.S. Army Pacific, speaks at the Strategic Landpower Dialogue in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2025. (Center for Strategic and International Studies)
China would be unlikely to succeed in a cross-strait invasion of Taiwan, the commander of U.S. Army Pacific said recently.
“We’re talking about an adversary that has to cross an 80-mile wet gap that’s being watched by an unblinking eye, multiple countries working together to deter them from that activity today,” Gen. Ronald Clark said Friday during the Strategic Landpower Dialogue at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
The chances are slim that Chinese forces could successfully make a crossing of that scale, Clark told his audience.
“We spend a lot of our time thinking about how to counter cross-strait invasion, which is the most dangerous course of action,” he said. “We build our warfighter programs at division and corps level around the most difficult problem set the division or corps headquarters would have to plan for and execute. And that’s a wet-gap crossing, the crossing of a body of water where there’s any of a number of capabilities you have to have in place in order to do that successfully.
Beijing regards Taiwan, a self-governed island less than 100 miles off China’s southeast coast, as a renegade province that must at some point come under its political control — by military force if necessary.
Adm. Samuel Paparo, head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, routinely describes China’s increasing levels of military exercises and activities around and over Taiwan as “rehearsals” for an invasion.
At a May defense conference in Honolulu, Paparo described the U.S. Army’s firepower and logistics know-how as key to deterring and countering Chinese military aggression.
Beijing is developing military capabilities at a “breathtaking pace,” Clark said Friday.
U.S. Army Pacific continues to study China’s land forces to understand how they operate, where the “gaps and seams” are in their learning and operations and how to exploit those weaknesses, Clark said.
“We’re starting to see them operate in a joint environment,” he said. “It’s not joint integration at this point, but it’s joint operations, side by side between air, maritime and land domain forces — unlike anything we’ve seen before.”
The U.S. Army’s ability to see, understand and disrupt China’s ability to do that is very important, Clark said.
“We’re watching their behaviors and activities, not just in and around the Taiwan problem set, but really across the region,” he said. “We see them [acting] with increasing aggression, belligerence and coercion against some of our allies and partners inside the region, so our ability to be present, to give them an alternative, specifically in the security arena, is very, very important.”
Growing that presence and maintaining “positional advantage” depend on the Army’s role of sustaining the joint force in event of conflict, Clark said.
“In order to do that, we’ve established, with INDOPACOM, a number of joint theater distribution centers that are nascent at this point — but coming to fruition — that will allow us to essentially cheat the requirement for [strategic airlift].”
The Hawaii-based 8th Theater Sustainment Command is tasked with establishing the distribution centers, which the Army described in a news release last year as modular nodes capable of receiving and disbursing supplies and equipment.
Among the center locations are Japan, Guam, Australia, the Philippines and Singapore.
