BY KEVIN POLICARPO
As tensions between China and Taiwan continue to grow, the United States is preparing for a major conflict. Among these preparations is improving the defenses of Guam, one of America’s overseas territories.
EVOLVING THREATS TO GUAM
Vice Admiral Jon Hill, Director of the Missile Defense Agency, has warned that Guam faces an “evolved threat” from China in the form of capable and advanced cruise and ballistic missiles, new hypersonic missiles, and potential space-based weaponry.
Senior Fellow at the East-West Center, Denny Roy, explained:
“Guam would be crucially important in a Taiwan contingency… It is close enough to anticipated flashpoints to be highly useful as a logistics hub, but far enough that some Chinese weapons systems would have difficulty striking it.”[1]
Guam is 11,600 kilometers from the U.S. mainland, 2,700 kilometers from Taiwan, and 4,751 kilometers from China.[2]
Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told VOA Mandarin that Guam is a key target for China as it has “a lot of military hardware concentrated in a small region — ‘a target-rich environment.’”[3]
Davis told VOA that there are concerns that China will annex Taiwan with force, possibly in the next decade. If the U.S. fails to protect Guam as a functioning forward base, defending Taiwan would become more difficult for the United States, and it would make China’s annexation of Taiwan more likely.[4]
The 2023 U.S. defense budget calls for $892 million to construct a land-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System to protect Guam.
In addition to the missile systems, Pacific Forum fellow Blake Herzinger states that the U.S. military should invest in cheaper and easier to defend measures. These include strong concrete aircraft shelters and enhancing the capability of Guam’s air defenses.
Herzinger states the following about Guam:
““The vulnerability of Guam, and the problem this would create for U.S. forces in the region, has been well known for at least a decade, but the U.S. government has only started taking serious action in the last year or so.”
He concluded that:
”Far beyond its value as a strategic outpost, most importantly, Guam is American territory. So, people living in Guam are as deserving of protection against aggression as any other American citizens in our country.”[5]
SPENDING MONEY FOR PROTECTING GUAM
President Joe Biden has requested nearly $900 million to protect Guam from potential missile threats from China, according to the Honolulu Civil Beat.
Included in this deal is $539 million from the Missile Defense Agency to establish multiple land-based radars.
The report cited Thomas Karako, Director of the Missile Defense Project stating that Guam is very central to U.S. power projection in the Pacific. He said that building up Guam’s missile defense is a key part of a broader strategy of deterring potential adversaries from attempting to attack…
“I think you see in Ukraine the cost of failing to do more soon enough,” Karako said, adding that Guam’s expanded missile defense system is expected to better defend against other types of missiles such as cruise missiles and hypersonic missiles.”[6]
BOOSTING DEFENSES OF GUAM’S AIR BASE
During the 2022 Space and Missile Defense Symposium, Vice Admiral Hill discussed an update to Guam’s defense system.
According to a report in the Eurasian Times, published by Eurasianet. Eurasianet is a news organization based at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute.
The report says Guam is developing new air and missile defense capabilities, which is part of a greater initiative to deter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region.
Guam is home to vital air and naval facilities, including Andersen Air Base. In the event of a potential conflict, the base would serve as a launch pad for U.S. operations against China.
With the threat of a massive missile strike if a war with China was to occur, Vice Admiral HIll made a case for the deployment of new defensive systems to Guam in May of 2022.
Currently, Guam has a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile battery (which is able to intercept ballistic missiles approaching their target from above) available for its defense. In addition to the THAAD battery, a testing unit equipped with the Israeli-designed Iron Dome system has been temporarily deployed to Guam for testing and evaluation purposes.
Vice Admiral Hill stated last year that plans were evolving toward a more innovative and distributed architecture, including protected underground facilities.
Initially, there had been a discussion of creating an Aegis Ashore missile defense system in Guam.[7]
The U.S. is also eyeing new and improved weapons.
British Aerospace Systems (BAE Systems) is developing a next-generation infrared seeker for the THAAD missile. The new THAAD seeker “… can locate and lock on to missiles traveling at a speed of 17,000 mph (27,300 kph), allowing the THAAD guidance system to direct interceptor missiles in the direction of the danger.”[8]
Another future addition is the Next Generation Interceptor (NGI), which will offer increased performance and capabilities to the U.S. Military.
GUAM: GROUND ZERO FOR WAR WITH CHINA?
On June 20th, 2022, the military publication Task & Purpose spoke with defense strategy and wargaming expert Stacie Pettyjohn, the director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington, D.C.
She stated that in most of the wargames involving China invading Taiwan that she has participated in, the team playing China attacked U.S. bases across the Pacific to prevent an immediate counterattack in the early stages of the battle.
“The opening big blow is in line with Chinese military doctrine – its counter-intervention strategy – in terms of seizing the offensive and also just trying to launch a knockout blow in the opening phases of a fight…”[9]
Among China’s arsenal of missiles are “… 300 DF-26 Intermediate-Range Ballistic missiles with an estimated range of nearly 2,500 miles, which are capable of striking Guam and U.S. Navy ships, according to the Defense Department’s latest report on Chinese military power.”[10]
In addition, in 2020 China’s air force released a video showing its H-6 bombers carrying out a simulated cruise missile strike on an airfield resembling Andersen AFB. Recognizing the potential damage a Chinese missile strike could have on Guam, the U.S. Defense Department has committed over $11 billion to military construction in Guam for the next five years.[11]
Pettyjohn has run multiple Pentagon-sponsored wargames at both the RAND Corporation and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) since 2014.
The team playing China in the Taiwan scenarios “… typically hits Guam with a massive barrage of ballistic and cruise missiles armed with submunitions to take out Andersen Air Force Base – and possibly the U.S. airfield on the island of Tinian that is being expanded – and then H-6 bombers fire their long-range cruise missiles to sink ships in Apra Harbor and attack fuel storage facilities, she said.
Then they launch follow-up attacks on Guam to prevent the U.S. military engineers from repairing damage to airfields and other installations…”[12]
“‘There are concerns about escalation and hitting U.S. territory,’ Pettyjohn told Task & Purpose. ‘Most of the red teams [enemy forces] recognize that, and many of them do typically assume that the United States will intervene on the side of Taiwan. The operational advantages of destroying key American bases and logistics nodes, in particular those on Guam, outweigh the risks.’”[13]
CHINA DENIES THREAT TO GUAM
The threat to Guam is rejected by the English language Chinese newspaper Global Times, which is operated by the People’s Daily:
“In the smear campaign against China using unfounded charges, Guam, lying at the hub of the ‘second island chain’ and regarded by the US military as the ‘heart of the Pacific,’ has become the latest hotspot issue for Washington to hype. According to US media reports, the Pentagon is vastly upgrading Guam’s air and missile defenses, the reason is its current defense capabilities are ‘insufficient to deal with a full-scale missile attack by China.’ In a bid to create a sense of urgency, Vice Admiral Jon Hill, head of the US Missile Defense Agency, presented a schedule, claiming that at least some additional defenses should be built in place by 2026.”[14]
The editorial went on to say:
“Guam, which the US seized from Spain through war in 1898, is now an overseas territory of the US, with bases for the US Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps on the island. Guam is nearly 10,000 kilometers away from the mainland of the US, and only about 2,700 kilometers away from Taiwan Island. The importance and vulnerability of this location are like two sides of a coin. The two features are even more prominent when the US is scheming to strengthen its strategic suppression of China.
Judging from the deployment that the US military advances, it wants Guam to become a spear for striking China, but at the same time it is worried that Guam will become an immovable target of the PLA, so it needs to speed up its efforts to build Guam into a shield. In reality, this does constitute a set of prominent contradictions. The more the US military wants to suppress the PLA, the stronger its sense of insecurity will be. It definitely cannot be resolved by continuously expanding armaments and preparing for war, but will only be strengthened.
China has no intention of fighting a war with the US, and it is even less likely that China would carry out an undeclared war by conducting a sneak attack like Japan did. Americans can rest assured on this. But if the US military really intervenes in Taiwan affairs by force, it is then taking the initiative to have an armed confrontation with China, and we will definitely fight back without hesitation. US military bases, including Guam, are naturally within the PLA’s firepower range. The Taiwan question is entirely China’s internal affairs. If such scenario happens, fundamentally speaking, the US military is conducting an act of aggression, and we are justified self-defense. This is the exact opposite of the nature of the attack on Pearl Harbor.”[15]
FOOTNOTES
[1] Xue, Xiaoshan, Experts: US Plans to Improve Missile Defense of Guam, Published 25 August 2022, voanews.com, https://www.voanews.com/a/experts-us-plans-to-improve-missile-defense-of-guam-/6716987.html
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Hofschneider, Anita, Biden Wants To Spend $892 Million To Protect Guam From China’s Missiles, Published March 29 2022, civilbeat.org, https://www.civilbeat.org/2022/03/biden-wants-to-spend-892-million-to-protect-guam-from-chinas-missiles/
[7] Tiwari, Sakshi, Amid Boiling US-China Tensions, Pentagon To Boost Defenses Of Its ‘Most Strategic’ Airbase At Guam, Published August 21 2022, eurasiantimes.com, https://eurasiantimes.com/guam-to-recieve-major-missile-defense-upgrade-as-chinese/
[8] Ibid.
[9] Schogol, Jeff, Why this tiny island in the Pacific may be ground zero in a war with China, Published June 20 2022, taskandpurpose.com, https://taskandpurpose.com/news/military-guam-china-war-taiwan/
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Global Times, Guam is not Pearl Harbor, and China is not Japan: Global Times editorial, Published August 24 2022, globaltimes.cn, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202208/1273806.shtml
[15] Ibid.