Army Eyes AI, Commercial Tech to Strengthen Indo-Pacific Comms

Honolulu — Army leaders across the Indo-Pacific region emphasized the importance of addressing communications, infrastructure and logistics challenges as the service works to strengthen its presence across the theater, officials said at the 2025 AFCEA TechNet Indo-Pacific Conference.

Stretching from Japan to Alaska to Hawaii — and installations in between — leaders said strong partnerships, innovation in the commercial sector and technological redundancies are essential to closing distances across the world’s largest ocean.

Thomas Stall, commander of the 30th Signal Battalion, said providing strategic networks across the Pacific is a “very daunting task,” particularly given the region’s diverse climates, power requirements and vast ocean distances.

“My responsibility is to provide that strategic backbone for the warfighter so that they can continue to win the fight,” Stall said during a panel discussion. “My challenge, when I look at bandwidth, is not really the long-haul side of things, but the local architecture that we have here. … If my architecture here in Kwajalein really has trouble with the basic level of network, then imagine what it would be like if we started getting everybody ramped up on all these capabilities.”

Col Alexis Peake, I Corps G6, Army Pacific, cautioned that overreliance on technology can make a team particularly vulnerable when those systems fail.

“One of the biggest challenges with I Corps is how we maintain resilience, low latency and secure operations across multiple time zones, terrains and political boundaries — at scale, down to the echelon,” Peake said.

He said his team is leveraging “AI, ML and LLM-type capabilities,” but developing those in the cloud introduces risk “in competition, in crisis and conflict, when disconnected from those large pipes.”

Peake added that the political constraints of partner nations must also be considered and stressed the importance of validating commercial equipment before deploying it in the field to build warfighter trust and ensure reliability.

“As opposed to waiting for specific pathways, give me the kit now,” Peake said. “Integrate with us now because we’re happy to validate, test and ensure that whatever capabilities and capacities you provide, we can give you a thumbs up or thumbs down — or even pass it off to our partners to validate and test.”

Col. Bryon Brown, commander of the 1st Signal Brigade, said the “tyranny of distance” applies not only to communications but also to logistics and rapid deployment in the Indo-Pacific theater.

“Tyranny of distance is also looking at it through the lens of the warfighter,” Brown said. “If a crisis were to occur, the distance alone means I’m not getting replacement capabilities or kit for weeks — potentially months.”

“I go with what I’ve got,” he said.