The Association of the U.S. Army on Tuesday kicked off LANPAC 2022, a conference focused on armies and military land power around the Pacific. The event at the Sheraton Waikiki was the first in-­person iteration of the annual conference since 2019. It has been largely on pause as a result of the pandemic.

“The world has changed dramatically since 2019, when we did the last LANPAC,” said AUSA President and retired Gen. Robert Brown.

Soldiers from 25 countries wearing an assortment of uniforms and a mix of defense contractors converged on the hotel. Hundreds crowded into a ballroom to hear opening remarks from U.S. Army Pacific commander Gen. Charles Flynn as he kicked off the conference.

“While the news may focus on Europe, as tragic as Russia’s unprovoked war against the Ukraine is, it doesn’t change this fact: The geo-strategic weight of the world continues to concentrate here in Asia and across the Indo-Pacific,” said Flynn.

The first LANPAC conference was in Hawaii in 2013 with about 600 participants, and it has continued to grow. Planners said there are about 2,000 participants this year. For the first time this year, the event also includes programming for junior military leaders from around the region.

The Pentagon considers the Pacific its top-priority area of operations. Congress has been pouring millions of dollars into the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, which it created in the 2021 fiscal year as a means of chan­neling funding into U.S. Indo-­Pacific command specifically as a response to China’s rapid military growth.

The renewed focus has drawn 70 companies to the conference, including defense industry giants such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Raytheon.

“You see a lot of the industry partners are out here because they realize that with Pacific Deterence Initiative and the significance of INDO­PACOM area that there’s a lot of opportunity here,” said Jason Chung, the Hawaii Chamber of Commerce’s vice president for military affairs.

“It’s just a massive nexus, and that’s why it’s so great to kind of have this here,” said Chung. “For our partners and allies, (Hawaii) is the gateway basically to the United States, and it’s the gateway for the United States to the Pacific.”

For many of the attendees from around the region, it offers an opportunity to hold meetings that had been nearly impossible before COVID-19 vaccination became widely available.

“It’s really very good that we have this opportunity to meet face to face once again,” said commander of the Philippine Army Lt. Gen. Romeo Brawner. He told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that it’s fundamentally different to gather in person, noting that he has scheduled meetings with Flynn as well as officers from Canada, Mongolia, Brunei and others.

“It’s really different when you have this human touch,” said Brawner.

Military strategy in the Pacific has centered largely around navies and operations at sea. The Chinese navy has staked out disputed islands and reefs in the South China Sea — a critical maritime route through which more than a third of global trade transits — over its neighbors’ objections.

With so much focus on the sea, there has been a debate within military circles about what role the U.S. Army has to play in the Pacific.

“Even though there might be a lot of blue on that map, people have this unique tendency to live on land,” said Flynn.

The Army has stepped up its deployments around the region through its Pacific Pathways program, which sets up training exchanges between troops in the region. Flynn called the ties between regional armies “the glue that binds the regional security architecture together.”

The Army is working on plans for a Pacific regional training center with ranges in both Hawaii and Alaska to bring together troops from around the region to train. Flynn told reporters during a news conference that it would allow “us to train in the conditions and in the environment that we’re most likely to operate in the region.”

The conference comes as the U.S. military increasingly comes to focus on “great power competition” with China and Russia after the end of the long and costly war in Afghanistan. Some U.S. commanders have expressed a desire to move on from the legacy of the global war on terror in an effort to avoid “fighting the last war.”

But during a panel session at the conference, Brig. Gen. Frederick Choo of the Singapore army warned, “I think the specter of terrorism and piracy is not in our rearview mirror. Not yet.”

The region has a long history of terrorism and insurgency, often fueled in part by competition between more powerful countries. Flynn told the Star-Advertiser that the Army hasn’t forgotten counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations, pointing to the Army’s new Security Force Assistance Brigades, which act as advisers to militaries around the world.

But looming large over the conference was another threat: climate change and worsening natural disasters.

“Nearly 4 out of 5 natural disasters in the world happen (in the Indo-Pacific), from typhoons to eruptions to tsunamis,” said Flynn.

He added that it has the potential to create new conflicts, noting that as populations and economies grow, “competition intensifies, particularly over fresh water, minerals, food and those resources that run factories and industries to keep societies and countries stable.”

Choo said that the rapid growth of economies in Asia has been an economic miracle that has raised millions out of poverty, but that poses danger.

“In the drive towards economic growth over the past decades, there’s also the excesses contributing to climate change,” said Choo. “This is not a climate change conference, and climate change is not just a responsibility that’s for the military to bear, but I believe all of us have a part to play, and certainly the consequence will be for us to bear as militaries.”