Guam, the Final Frontier?

Andersen Air Force Base

Guam Naval Base, Apra Harbor

Guam is part of the Mariana Island chain, close to the Philippines but about 5,800 miles from San Francisco. This island was ceded to the United States from Spain in 1898 following the latter’s defeat in the Spanish-American War. With a tiny population (just over 160,000) and a footprint of 271 square miles, Guam is a US territory, its citizens are all US citizens… and you’d think it couldn’t be that important to US priorities. It’s been part of the US effort to have a proximate land-based military platform, primarily of value to counter North Korea’s increasingly aggressive posture against the United States. While we have key regional allies – notably South Korea and Japan – our mutually protective relationships are based on treaty alliances. Guam, in contrast, is US soil.

Guam is part of a much bigger story, most recently the escalation of violent rhetoric between the United States and its most obvious foes. Literally, serious threats without the power of diffusion that we had doing the most dangerous times during the Cold War; even during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, American President John F Kennedy was on the red phone with Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. Top leaders in the People’s Republic of China, saber-rattling over annexing Taiwan, wouldn’t even answer phone calls from top US officials. See also my April 7th Foreign Policy – Reagan/Kennedy Internationalism vs Trump/DeSantis Isolationism blog, a reality which seems to apply in significant part a Congress seemingly unaware of the real threats facing us.

We don’t have the largest navy anymore; China’s is significantly larger, and because it is focused on the Asia, it is concentrated and not spread around the world as is the case with seven American Navel Fleets. Our ships are older, many needing replacement. We are no longer able to move enough troops into littoral combat to make old world beach assaults. Russian, Chinese and perhaps even North Korean advances on hypersonic missiles, which are exceptionally difficult to intercept, seem to be ahead of our capabilities. And interestingly, our strength in aircraft carriers has to be countered with massive investment in each such ship plus the exceptional cost of the aircraft each carries. Sink one carrier, and almost $100 billion disappears.

Which brings me back to Guam, our closest US territorial military platform in the region. There is a major Air Force Base and a major Navy Base there, pictured above. As reported in recently leaked classified government documents, the United States is nowhere near ready to support a Taiwanese defense against a Chinese attack. Guam’s strategic presence would be an essential part of any American military defensive effort intended to counter China… in addition to the earlier emphasis against North Korea. As the April 29th The Economist points out, Guam “is also where a future American war with China may begin. This westernmost speck of America, just 30 miles (48km) long and with a population of about 170,000, helps it project power across the vast Pacific. As tension over Taiwan worsens, war games often predict early and sustained Chinese missile strikes on Guam, and perhaps the use of nuclear weapons against it.

“Startlingly, for such a vital military complex, Guam is only thinly defended. Its thaad missile-defence battery is not always switched on. It is in any case intended to parry only a limited attack from North Korea, not an onslaught from China. Andersen has no Patriot ground-to-air missiles, though they are deployed at American bases in South Korea and Japan. Warships with Aegis air-defence systems offer extra protection, but they may not always be nearby. To judge from the ubiquitous metal traps on fences around Guam’s bases, commanders seem more worried about the brown tree snake, an invasive species, than a surprise Chinese strike…

“China makes no secret that Guam is in its cross-hairs. The df-26 missile, with a range of 4,000km, is commonly called the ‘Guam killer’. In 2020 a Chinese propaganda video depicted an h-6k bomber attacking an undisclosed air base: the satellite image was unmistakably of Andersen. To survive within China’s ‘weapons engagement zone’, the American air force is developing ‘agile combat employment’. This involves scattering aircraft to deny China an easy shot, and networking them with distant ‘sensors’ and ‘shooters’ to give battle. It practised such tactics at the Cope North exercise with Japan and Australia on Guam and nearby islands in February. At the end of each day, though, the jets were all parked together in neat rows in the open. The base has no hardened shelters for aircraft, and its fuel is stored in closely packed tanks above ground.

“The vulnerability of Guam is belatedly getting attention in Washington, not least because successive heads of Indo-Pacific Command (indopacom) in Hawaii, in charge of any future war with China, keep pleading for better protection. At last, a plan is emerging. The Pentagon has requested $1.5bn to start beefing up the island’s air defences in the 2024 fiscal year (which starts in October 2023), much of it for the Missile Defence Agency (mda), which focuses mainly on missile threats against the American homeland, and the rest to the army. indopacom is pushing for $147m more.”

American voters are notoriously slow to prioritize foreign policy considerations. The GOP’s approach is to withdraw from the world, but unfortunately, we are profoundly economically dependent on international markets. There is this distorted myth that the United States should be completely able to take care of its own supply chain requirements… internally. Not even a remote possibility. We are more focused on federal deficits – the direct result of opting to tax the rich at rates well below other developed nations – than on defending the homeland from threats foreign and domestic. Until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, forcing us into WWII, there were significant American factions aimed at keeping us out of “Europe’s War,” with strong pro-Nazi sentiments openly parading down American streets. That sort of myopia seems to continue into the present day, even as we have hostile nations publicly declaring that they are out get us.

I’m Peter Dekom, and even as genuine foreign military threats hover all around us, already taking advantage of our equivocation by saturating our social media with their automated election toxicity, Americans just do not seem to understand how the biggest conflicts in human history began… with precisely the same “do got get involved, do not spend money” policies.