Last week members of the world’s most elite military units gathered in Honolulu for an inaugural conference on special operations forces — or SOF — in the Pacific region.

The Indo-Pacific Irregular Warfare Symposium, organized by the Global SOF Foundation, brought participants from 26 countries to the Hilton Hawaiian Village’s Tapa Tower from Tuesday through Thursday. The Global SOF Foundation has for the past decade held conferences around the globe, but this was its first focused on the Pacific.

The U.S. military’s elite forces have been deploying to war zones in the Middle East and Africa since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, hunting terrorists and advising local fighting forces. As the wars dragged on and the U.S. military faced scrutiny of large deployments of U.S. troops into fight, the Pentagon turned to smaller, secretive special operations units.

But after two decades of sprawling counterterrorism operations, the Pentagon increasingly sees China as its biggest challenge — and the Pacific as its most important theater of operations. On Thursday, Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of the Hawaii-­based U.S. Indo-­Pacific Command, told attendees at the conference, “I think INDOPACOM is underinvested in SOF, and I think SOF is underinvested (in the Pacific).”

“It’s not a repudiation of anybody before me. It’s not a repudiation of anybody before you,” Paparo told the elite troops. “I think there were good reasons for where SOF was invested, but the time is now to get the SOF enterprise focused in the Indo-Pacific, to the extent that we can. I think it’s a time to invest in SOF.”

The U.S. military’s special operations community in many ways was deeply shaped in its early days by conflict in the region, with the elite Merril’s Marauders who fought the Japanese in Burma and the Green Berets and Navy SEALs who fought in Vietnam and secretly in Cambodia and Laos. But in more recent years they’ve been focused on Islamist terror groups like Al-Qaida and Islamic State, as well as their regional allies.

While that lead to most of their resources focused in places in the Middle East and Africa, it also included smaller Pacific operations that garnered much less international attention.

After 9/11, U.S. forces were on the ground working alongside the Philippine military helping it fight jihadist militants, including those with ties to Al-Qaida. That conflict came to a head in the 2017 battle for the city of Marawi on the Philippine island of Mindanao against militants that claimed allegiance to the self-proclaimed Islamic State caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

In the fight to retake Marawi, Philippine forces backed by American SOF units killed 978 militants and captured 12 at a cost to Philippine forces of 168 killed and more than 1,400 wounded. The bloody battle also killed 87 civilians and displaced more than a million people as Marawi was nearly leveled.

But since Marawi the Philippine government has sought peace with many rebel factions and has focused its attention on threats coming from outside its borders, namely Chinese military forces and vessels operating in waters the Philippines claims.

Increasing tensions

Tensions in the Pacific have led to increasing confrontations in the South China Sea. Beijing has claimed the entire critical waterway as its exclusive maritime territory over the objections of neighboring countries, and used increasingly aggressive tactics to assert its claims.

In 2016 an international court ruling in favor of the Philippines found that China’s claims had “no legal basis,” but the Chinese military has doubled down and built bases on disputed islands and reefs, and has frequently harassed and attacked Philippine fishermen and maritime workers.

Much of this has been done by the so-called “maritime militia,” ostensibly civilian Chinese vessels like fishing boats and research vessels that stake out territory and conduct surveillance in support of Chinese forces. Analysts call their use “grayzone” operations, which can attack or disrupt an opponent short of it actually being an act of war.

Several speakers at the conference also called out the Chinese government’s alleged use of organized crime networks across the Pacific to pursue its goals. Law enforcement organizations in Southeast Asian and Pacific island nations have investigated members of Chinese triad gangs, once a major target of of Chinese law enforcement, that some say seem to be working on behalf of Chinese officials or at the least with their tacit knowledge.

“Intelligence support in the gray zone can no longer be passive and reactive,” Theresa Whelan, the Pentagon’s director of defense intelligence for sensitive activities and special programs, told the crowd Wednesday. “It must have the platforms and the authorities in place beforehand to actively disrupt and degrade adversarial activities at the point of detection. Intelligence activities need to be increasingly focused on the premise of detect, deter, disrupt and degrade.”

Though special operations forces are associated in the public imagination with “direct action” missions — swooping in to kill or capture their enemies or rescuing hostages — Paparo said their talents can be put to use in grayzone operations.

“People tend to think about SOF and they’re taken with the romanticism of direct action,” said Paparo. But he argued their talents in working with local people and learning with different cultures, working in small groups and learning specialized skills, are vital in the Pacific. He argued that more exchanges and joint training across the region are vital.

“The more cultural experiences that we can exchange, the more access to geography that we can exchange, the more access to information that we can exchange, the better off we are,” said Paparo. “Our shared experiences among allies and partners are absolutely indispensable to the effectiveness of special operations.”

Seeking closer ties

Throughout the conference, between presentations on stage, attendees held closed-door meetings to talk more in depth about those relationships — some of which have changed significantly over the years.

Among the speakers at an off-the-record panel was Maj. Gen. Djon Afriandi, commander of the Indonesian army’s elite Kopassus forces. Indonesia’s controversial President-elect Prabowo Subianto, a former Kopassus officer who most recently served as Indonesia’s defense minister, was also invited to deliver a keynote address but did not attend.

Until relatively recently Prabowo was banned from the United States for alleged atrocities committed while leading Kopassus troops putting down rebellions across Indonesia. The U.S. military cut ties with the Indonesian military in 1999 over conduct during its fight against separatists in what was then the Indonesian province of East Timor — today known as the country of Timor-Leste. Military personnel from Timor- Leste also attended the conference.

The U.S. reestablished ties with the Indonesian military soon after 9/11 over mutual concerns about terrorism but did not reestablish ties with Kopassus until 2020, after U.S. officials insisted they had reformed and removed war criminals from their ranks. However, the Indonesian military continues to face allegations of serious human rights abuses in its fight against pro-independence rebels in West Papua. The Indonesian government has restricted foreign media from covering the conflict and tightly controlled information that comes out of the province.

Indonesia, which has 270.6 million people spread across 17,508 islands, is one of the world’s most populated countries. China has also sought closer ties with Indonesia through investment deals and tried to build military ties of its own with the archipelago nation, whose islands span strategic real estate in both the Pacific and Indian oceans.

China has invested in ports and other infrastructure in Indonesia. However, Indonesia also has a maritime dispute of its own with China over what it calls the Natuna Islands and which China calls the Nansha Islands. During a standoff in 2020, China declared that it had “sovereign rights and jurisdiction over relevant waters near the Nansha Islands.”

Paparo told attendees that the U.S. seeks to protect the sovereignty of countries across the region, comparing the U.S. approach with China’s by noting remarks in 2010 by senior Chinese diplomat Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations when he answered concerns about China’s treatment of neighboring countries by saying, “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”

Paparo said strong alliances protect smaller countries and that “when those alliances and partnerships fray, that’s when our adversaries were able to pick us off one by one. And it begins with picking one by one off by offering a little reward, and then little by little, a little bit of exploitation comes off and the phrase ‘We’re a big country, you’re a small country, and that’s a fact’ becomes a fact.”

Preventing conflict

While many of the speakers talked tough on China, they also stressed that the outbreak of a major Pacific conflict would be disastrous. Rear Adm. Jeromy Williams, commander of Oahu-­based Special Operations Command Pacific, said his troops are “working tirelessly every day in order to prevent conflict in the region, not provoke it. And that war is not inevitable.”

“The dangers of a conflict with China could see a crash of their GDP by up to 25%, while U.S. GDP could fall 10% — that could lead to a massive economic global crisis,” said Williams. “We’ve got nearly 200,000 American citizens between China and Taiwan, and hundreds of thousands of other partners and allies whose citizens are also there. So a noncombat evacuation in the area would be cataclysmically more challenging and difficult than Afghanistan, Ukraine, Sudan all combined.”

But though military leaders are increasingly thinking about major powers like China and Russia, Gen. Bryan Fenton, top officer for U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., said terrorism and smaller wars remain a major concern, and warned that “while the (Islamic State) caliphate may be contained somewhat, the ideology still runs far and wide and is unconstrained.”

A sprawling web of civil conflicts, drug wars and border disputes around the globe have continued, with violence fueling historic mass migration and instability.

“We’ve seen instability globally on the rise,” said Fenton, noting recent flare-ups in violence, including places like Sudan and Haiti, that required deployments of special operations troops to evacuate diplomats and other American citizens. Fenton told attendees, “It’s resulted in an over 150% increase in the last three years of responding to crisis for our special ops forces, and we’ve done that alongside many of the partners in this very room. That’s very different from the previous decade.”