Eighth Army's commander, Lt. Gen. Joseph Hilbert, speaks during a panel at the Land Forces Pacific symposium in Waikiki Beach, Hawaii, May 13, 2026. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)
WAIKIKI BEACH, Hawaii — Top U.S. military leaders are touting plans to build a regional sustainment hub in South Korea that would include partnering with that nation’s advanced manufacturing base.
The hub would cancel the “tyranny of distance” U.S. forces contend with in the vast Indo-Pacific as it moves parts, equipment and weapons from the U.S. mainland, Hawaii and Guam to sustain forward-based troops and operations.
“If you don’t have to cross the Pacific, and you can just come to the peninsula or we can go forward, that is strategic flexibility available to the joint force,” Lt. Gen. Joseph Hilbert, commander of the South Korea-based Eighth Army, said Wednesday during a panel at the Land Forces Pacific, or LANPAC, symposium on Waikiki Beach held by the Association of the United States Army.
“We have positional advantage on the peninsula,” he said. “We sit in the first island chain.”
The first island chain includes the land masses closest to China’s coastline, such as Taiwan, Okinawa and the Philippines. The chain is a natural barrier to any of Beijing’s naval ambitions, and denying China control of them would be paramount in any armed conflict.
During a speech at LANPAC on Tuesday, U.S. Forces Korea commander Gen. Xavier Brunson described America’s defense industrial base as innovative and “robust.”
“However, here in the Indo-Pacific, a robust domestic base is a hollow shell if we cannot project that power across the tyranny of distance,” he said. “We cannot win if our supply lines are 5,000 miles long.
“We’re the ones who manage the enterprise-level systems that keep the joint force fueled, armed and operational in this theater,” he said. “Sustainment is not the tail. It’s the teeth. It’s the teeth of our deterrence.”
Brunson, who took command of USFK in December 2024, said the idea for a regional hub arose from a conversation he had with U.S. Army Pacific commander Gen. Ronald Clark about freeze-dried plasma.
Freeze-dried plasma has a roughly two-year shelf life and must be maintained in a very particular manner — usually in the continental U.S. But what if USFK kept a supply of it on the Korean Peninsula and trained people in its care and storage?, Brunson said.
“If my boss ever needs it, he can ask me for it, not find out how I get it to him,” Brunson said.
From there, he said, the pair of generals began brainstorming about what other supplies could be maintained in a forward hub.
“The idea of the regional sustainment hub is to look at the classes of supply, to include repair and sustainment, to include additive manufacturing, and bring that to a place so that my boss [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command chief Adm. Samuel Paparo] now has different apertures of sustainment, he said.
Last month, Brunson informed the House Armed Services Committee that the regional hub was partially operational and that he wanted to leverage the South Korean industrial base to support maintenance, repair and overhaul of U.S. vessels, among other things.
“South Korean shipyards successfully completed overhauls of the U.S. Navy’s transport ships Wally Schira and Cesar Chavez, with two additional vessels already on the maintenance waiting list,” he told the conference audience Tuesday.
Congress needs to approve “special repair authority” for South Korean firms to repair certain U.S. vessels, aircraft or weapons systems, he said.
