 |
COMMENTARY Guam a focal point for U.S. military plans By Richard Halloran |
| |||
 |
|
||
The Air Force is surging ahead with plans to revitalize its bases on Guam from which to project power into the skies over the western Pacific and the islands and continent of Asia.
Bombers already are stationed regularly at Guam's Andersen Air Force Base on rotation from the U.S. Mainland, as are aerial tankers essential to long range operations.
A wing of 48 fighters is on the way. Perhaps most critical will be unmanned surveillance and intelligence aircraft known as Global Hawk that can remain on station for 24 hours at a range of 1,200 miles from base.
Reconstruction of runways from which bombing runs were flown over Vietnam 35 years ago has started. A new hangar has been built, and more are on the drawing board; they will be typhoon-proof, so that aircraft need not be flown out to escape the storms to which Guam is prone.
Housing for air and base crews and support facilities must be built. Altogether, says Gen. Paul Hester, who commands the Pacific Air Forces from its headquarters at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawai'i, executing Air Force plans alone will cost "well over $2 billion."
The Marine Corps, under a new U.S.-Japan agreement, will move 8,000 Marines — including the III Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters and a brigade of combat troops — from Okinawa to Guam. The Navy has based three attack submarines at Guam and is planning to send two more, but the repair and maintenance facilities must be refurbished.
To support this military buildup, Guam's electrical grid, its roads, and water and sewage systems need to be refurbished after years of neglect. Schools must be expanded. The bill for these plans will probably come close to $10 billion over 10 years.
Guam has become a focus for U.S. military planners for three reasons.
Guam was acquired from Spain in 1898 after the Spanish-American war. The island was captured by Japan early in World War II, then retaken in 1944. In the Vietnam War, Andersen was a huge base for B-52 bombers attacking the north in 14-hour flights during which American aviators flew into the fiercest anti-aircraft fire since World War II.
Some of those same B-52s, modernized with advanced sensors and armed with missiles that can be fired many miles from targets, are rotating through Guam, as are B-1 and B-2 bombers. Despite its age, Hester said, "the B-52 is a great truck." He said a wing of 48 F-15 fighters and their replacements, F-22 Raptors, would go to Guam on similar rotations.
Three of the Global Hawk surveillance aircraft, which look like small, blind Boeing 747 passenger planes, will be based at Andersen, with three more coming later. The Global Hawk, packed with radar, optical and infrared sensors, flies at 65,000 feet and can cover 40,000 square miles in 24 hours, relaying its findings quickly to operational commanders.
Beyond acquiring intelligence on troop and weapon movements, Hester said, Global Hawks will be able to track terrorists such as those infiltrating Indonesia and Malaysia through island chains after being trained in the southern Philippines.
Further, the reconnaissance aircraft could track ships in a maritime security regime, a U.S. effort to encourage Asian nations to account for merchant ships the way they track nearly every airplane. The objective is to detect illicit drug smugglers, human traffickers, pirates and terrorists.
"We must have the ability," Hester said of the ships, "to know who you are, where you are going and what cargo you're carrying."
Richard Halloran is a Honolulu-based journalist and former New York Times correspondent in Asia. His column appears weekly in Sunday's Focus section.
