Escalating tensions and multiple, ongoing conflicts around the world call for increased integration among the United States and Allies and Partners, according to defense leaders. To meet that goal, the U.S. Army is working to ensure force readiness and deterrence by leveraging land power capabilities supporting all domains.
“We’ve been fighting on land for 6,000 years, at sea for 4,000, in the air for about 100, cyber and space for a couple of decades. But the joint force — the land force — is part of that, and none of us can do it alone,” U.S. Army Gen. James Mingus, the U.S. Army’s vice chief of staff, said in a July 2025 talk hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He noted that while allied military forces have historically worked together, each one had its own area of dominance. Today those capabilities are becoming more integrated as forces rely on one another. In 2017, the Army established its first of three multidomain task forces and plans to build up to two more of the units by 2028, according to Defense News magazine. The units are equipped with long-range precision fires designed to strike targets from a distance while evolving with the rapidly changing nature of war, Mingus said.
“The very essence of maneuver is fires and movement combined. We fire so we can move, and we move so we can put more effective fires on the adversary,” he said. “Put those together as a joint force, land helping maritime, air helping land, maritime helping. None of us are going to be able to do this by ourselves in the future.”
The importance of land power in the Indo-Pacific has at times been underappreciated, according to an analysis published by the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, “Assessing the Effectiveness of U.S. Army Campaigning in the Indo-Pacific.” Emerging threats from China’s People’s Liberation Army have caused the U.S. to enhance land power’s integration in the joint force as well as with Allies and Partners. In 2019, the Operation Pathways exercise evolved to incorporate capabilities across domains and with a dozen countries in the region. “Iterative agreements between U.S. Army Pacific and Partner nations about land and resource access, information sharing, logistical support, and security assistance further strengthen coalitions by integrating partners more closely into the overall U.S. deterrence strategy,” according to the Army War College analysis. “The agreements assure Allies and Partners and deny the People’s Liberation Army potentially easy military wins in the complex strategic environment of the Indo-Pacific.”
“Never more than now, the importance of land power is coming to the fore in the Indo-Pacific, not just for the United States but for our Allies and Partners as well,” U.S. Army Gen. Ronald Clark, commanding general, U.S. Army Pacific, said during a June 2025 strategic land power talk hosted by CSIS. “If you think about the region as it pertains to just the geography, 36 countries, 80% of them have an army chief of staff who is also the chief of defense. It’s a region that’s characterized by a lot of water but … land is where sovereignty reigns.”