(Editor's Note: The first name of Lt. Gen. Keith Walker has been corrected.)
The Asia-Pacific region looms large in the Army's latest look at the national security challenges of 2020 and beyond, according to the three-star general overseeing the effort.
Lt. Gen. Keith Walker, deputy commanding general of futures and director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, said a Unified Quest 2012 "Alternative Futures" symposium conducted this week put a new emphasis on the Pacific compared to last year's effort.
That new emphasis could drive the service to focus more on "early entry and anti-access" challenges as well as the difficulty of operating over vast distances, he told reporters today.
"Compared to last year, I would not have thought about the Pacific emphasis that all the groups talked about here," Walker said.
It is "incumbent" on Army officials examining the potential structure, design and mix of the service's 2020 force to look at various Pacific scenarios to see "what might we be asked to do that's different" from predictions in previous Army assessments, he said. This week's event was part of a continuous effort to develop new concepts and capabilities to shape the Army's future force.
The Army will likely uncover capability gaps as it focuses more on the Pacific, Walker said.
"I'm sure there are some gaps that we'll find as we go through this process because the Pacific is farther away," he said. "The Pacific Ocean is kind of big and it's a different ballgame than where we've been operating in the last 10 years or so."
The results of the symposium -- which examined the spectrum of challenges the Army might face around the world in the future -- have yet to be fully assessed and, to date, have not informed an ongoing force-mix study, Walker said.
But the results will impact the modeling in future studies, he added, citing key areas such as how to handle cyberthreats, challenges tied to smaller failed states, operating in new coalitions and "requirements to do an early entry, anti-access" operation. Walker did not name any potential adversary, but defense officials often use the term "anti-access" to refer to weapons being developed by China.
DOD's latest annual report to Congress on the Chinese military warns that China is "pursuing a variety of air, sea, undersea, space counterspace, information warfare systems and operational concepts" to achieve anti-access and area-denial capabilities. The Air Force and Navy are developing an AirSea Battle concept to address that challenge. Walker praised the Navy and Air Force, but said only the Army can provide "sustained land power."
"When you look at the major Pacific players, they are large land masses with large populations," he said.
But the Army also has key military-to-military ties with many of the countries in the region, a point service Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno made recently during the Association of the United States Army's annual symposium. The Army could contribute further to continued stability in the Pacific, he said Oct. 11.
"As I remind my staff, there's lots of water in Asia, but also lots of people and lots of armies, and that's our business," Odierno said, noting the "breadth and depth of our relationships in the Pacific span the full range of tools of national power."
And Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently said the future of U.S. national security in this century would be determined largely in the Asia-Pacific region, where the American military must maintain its presence despite China's development of new weapons that threaten U.S. power-projection capabilities.
Citing the Pentagon's efforts to slash security spending by hundreds of billions of dollars in the next decade, Walker said the Army of the future would be smaller, but he made no prediction about how small. Army officials said they would preserve the capability to conduct counterinsurgency operations.
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