From Balabac in the southern Philippines to Hokkaido in northern Japan, U.S. Army soldiers are expanding training with powerful long range weapons along the first island chain. Exercises with regional allies have become larger and more complex during the past half decade.

Freed from constraints dating to the Cold War, the Army has upgraded existing missiles and rocket artillery while developing systems capable of reaching farther. Those investments respond largely to the growing size and sophistication of China’s missile arsenal.

The U.S. military worries that China’s arsenal could deny American forces access to the Western Pacific during a conflict. Intensified training with Japan and the Philippines reflects shared concern about Beijing’s military capabilities.

The High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, known as HIMARS, has become a particularly visible part of those deployments and drills. HIMARS can attack targets on land and at sea with guided rockets reaching a few dozen miles or ballistic missiles reaching a few hundred miles.

Army HIMARS operated in Japan for the first time during a 2021 exercise in Hokkaido. The system reached Japan’s Southwest Islands in 2022 and appeared during this year’s Keen Sword on a Japanese island only 150 miles east of Taiwan.

HIMARS has a longer record in the Philippines, but American and Filipino troops have recently employed it in new locations and roles, including attacks against ships. Exercises in 2024 and 2025 placed HIMARS on Palawan facing the South China Sea and on Luzon’s northern coast facing Taiwan.

During April’s Balikatan exercise, American soldiers and airmen transported a HIMARS to Itbayat, the Philippines’ northernmost municipality, only 100 miles from Taiwan, for a dry fire exercise. Weeks later, an Army watercraft carried a launcher to Balabac Island for its first live fire exercise there.

That Balabac event demonstrated the system’s ability “to protect shipping going into the Sulu and Celebes Sea,” according to the Army. The movements also displayed how American forces can shift HIMARS around the Philippines by land, sea and air.

Gen. Ronald Clark, commander of U.S. Army Pacific, said moving forces into and across the first island chain demonstrates alliance integration while sending a message to rivals. “It’s really a joint success story,” Clark said at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington, D.C. this month.

Clark described soldiers loading HIMARS launchers onto aircraft in Washington state and flying them to the Philippines, where munitions drawn from stocks in Korea joined the operation. The force then conducted a live fire event following a HIMARS rapid infiltration operation, all visible to adversaries.

Improving capabilities through increasingly complex exercises can affect an adversary’s thinking, Clark said. The combination of operational maneuver, tactical effects and alliance cooperation creates a strategic impact that “gives them pause.”

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The Army has also introduced its Mid-Range Capability, a ground based missile system known as Typhon, into training along the first island chain. Typhon can fire SM-6 missiles at air and maritime targets a few hundred miles away and Tomahawk missiles at land targets up to 1,000 miles away.

Typhon first deployed overseas to the Philippines in 2024 and has remained there. In May this year, the system was fired in a test for the first time, striking a target in central Luzon from nearly 400 miles away.

The Army sent Typhon to Japan for the first time in August 2025 ahead of an exercise the following month, and it remained until November. It returned this summer for exercises in June and September before moving to a base on Okinawa for storage in October.

U.S. officials told Tokyo the deployment is not intended to become permanent, although it has no official end date. The Philippine deployment came at Manila’s request and “has maintained forward presence for now over 30 consecutive months,” Maj. Gen. Bernard Harrington said.

Harrington commands the recently established 7th Infantry Division/Multi-Domain Command-Pacific. The organization combines the 7th Infantry Division’s ground maneuver elements with long range fires and nonkinetic effects from the 1st Multi-Domain Task Force.

Image Credit: DoW

Typhon’s sustained presence in the Philippines has given soldiers more time to study protection, sustainment and connections between sensors and shooters. Harrington called persistent training alongside the Philippines and other partners “incredibly important for us.”

The widely publicized deployments also support less visible work on communications links and command and control networks. Those efforts are intended to give friendly forces a common picture of the battlefield and help them employ weapons effectively during combat.

China has watched the activity warily, regularly calling American exercises with Japan and the Philippines provocative and destabilizing. Chinese state media experts have also argued that small islands near Taiwan could restrict HIMARS mobility and concealment while making resupply efforts easier to detect and block.

American war games likewise emphasize the difficulty of resupplying small islands near Taiwan. Harrington said that challenge increases the need to disperse forces and pair expensive missiles with weapons carrying lower costs and signatures, including long range one way attack drones, unmanned surface vessels and long range launched effects.