Gen. Charles Flynn retired as Commander General of the United States Army Pacific last year.
For the past decade, Gen. Charles Flynn has thought about the threat of the Chinese communist regime every day.
Flynn retired as commander general of the United States Army Pacific in November 2024, and before that he served as assistant deputy chief of staff for operations and then deputy chief of staff for operations for the Army.
His experience in the Indo-Pacific began in 2014, when he assumed command of the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii.
A decade ago, few Americans were as concerned with the Chinese regime’s threat to the free world as they are today, and at that time, Flynn had just spent 14 years zeroed in on the Middle East.
“I knew everything about Kabul and Kandahar and Kunduz and Baghdad, but I really had not been paying any attention at all to China in the Indo-Pacific,” Flynn told “American Thought Leaders” host Jan Jekielek.
Ahead of the new assignment, his brother, now-retired Gen. Michael Flynn, invited him to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, which he led at the time, for an overview of the threats the United States faced in the Indo-Pacific.
“And it hit me as I was stuck in traffic on my drive back to Fort Bragg that I’ve got a lot of studying to do,” he said.
What Flynn began to learn that day still drives his mission.
“This century is going to be defined by the relationship between the United States and China,” he said.
“We’re 10 years from that window of modernization, organizational change, and the technology injects into the military in China. We cannot wait. Speed is our biggest problem right now. We have to have a greater sense of urgency to counter what the Chinese are doing in the region.”
Stake in the Pacific
With territories as far as Guam and treaty allies in the First Island Chain, the United States has security obligations as well as interests in the Indo-Pacific, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been aggressively expanding its influence.
When Flynn turned his focus on the Pacific in 2014, the CCP was ramping up construction of artificial islands in the contested Spratly Islands.
“We told them not to build islands. They built islands. We told them not to militarize and arm the islands. They militarized them. We told them not to position forces on those islands. They did that,” Flynn said.
“This is why I say that China has been on an incremental, insidious, and irresponsible path to create conditions where they gain regional hegemony because they have global aspirations.”
Flynn saw those islands as more than an indication of bad faith by the CCP, which claims that the construction is for non-military use despite satellite imagery evidence to the contrary.
“I’m a land guy, so I see these land features being made, and I see terrain being created. Why? To choke off the super highway through the South China Sea,” he said.
Beyond being militarily advantageous, disruption in the area has tremendous economic implications because the area is believed to be rich in energy and mineral resources, it is the site of fishing rights to 125 million people, and it is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, Flynn said.
For years, the United States has maintained that the Indo-Pacific is a priority theater, but Flynn and others have told The Epoch Times that allies don’t always feel that U.S. actions are backing up those words.
In 2022, Flynn was in a meeting with the chief of defense, the army chief, and the minister of defense of a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations the same day a $33 billion U.S. support package for Ukraine was approved. Those defense officials bluntly expressed their concerns that this would take U.S. attention away from the Indo-Pacific.
“They said: ‘Are you serious? … What is going to happen now? Are you going to be here?’” he said.
“And I think that that really struck me at that particular point, and I thought, boy, if we don’t signal and message our will to our treaty allies and partners in the region, we’re going to create a lack of confidence in the United States in the Indo-Pacific at a time when we can ill afford to have that.”
Flynn said he spent the remainder of his time as U.S. Army Pacific commander general trying to “pull together the Army leaders in the region.”
Now the Trump administration has issued a national security strategy that places the United States’ focus squarely on the Western Hemisphere. As for the Indo-Pacific, Flynn said he thinks the strategy correctly identifies the countries’ interests in protecting their sovereignty.
By Catherine Yang and Jan Jekielek
