By Solomon "Customs" Bridges
On a training range at Camp Higashi-Chitose, Japan, Col. Matthew Adamczyk stood before ranks of American, Australian and Japanese soldiers this week and closed out Orient Shield 26, an exercise the U.S. Army and Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force have run together since 1985. Soldiers presented arms, gifts changed hands, and — days earlier — U.S. Army HIMARS crews fired live rounds to cap the training. It is the kind of ceremony that repeats every year and rarely makes front pages, which is exactly the point: the value is in the repetition, not the spectacle.
The same logic was on display 6,000 miles away in Auckland, New Zealand, where the New Zealand Army and U.S. Army Pacific co-hosted the 50th annual Indo-Pacific Armies Management Seminar, drawing senior officers from more than 25 nations under the banner "The Sum is Greater Than the Parts." It is an unglamorous title for an unglamorous gathering — briefings, working groups, handshakes — but fifty consecutive years of it says something about how allied militaries actually build trust: slowly, on a schedule, regardless of who is in the headlines that week.
Elsewhere the pattern held. In Majuro, officials from the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the United States met Sept. 16 to coordinate cybersecurity support. In Peru, 24 nations wrapped the 67th iteration of UNITAS after two weeks of joint operations in jungle terrain and choppy Pacific water. In India, U.S. and Indian companies rehearsed a combined air assault ahead of Exercise Yudh Abhyas.
None of these events will move markets or dominate a news cycle. But together they are the scaffolding of American Indo-Pacific strategy — a strategy built less on any single deployment than on the accumulated weight of exercises nobody outside the region is watching.
— Solomon Bridges, International. Nothing happens 'over there' anymore.
— Compiled from U.S. Army and U.S. Central Command reporting via DVIDS.
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