U.S. moves Guam defense front and center

The U.S. strategy for the defense of Guam is coming into sharper focus with a combination of fast-moving Army and Air Force exercises and as lawmakers push the Pentagon for details of a 360-degree air and missile defense against cruise, ballistic and hypersonic threats faced by the key U.S. territory.

Soldiers with the 82nd Airborne Division, 1st Special Forces Group out of Washington state and Japan Ground Self-Defense Force parachuted into Guam on Friday.

The 82nd soldiers flew more than 8,000 miles from Joint Base Charleston in South Carolina, completed a midair refueling and in-flight rigging for the airborne assault during Forager 21, the primary training exercise in support of the larger Defender Pacific.

Maj. Joe Fritze, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, said in an Army release that “getting out of North Carolina to anywhere in the world in 18 hours for a direct delivery is something we need to stay proficient on.”

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command “has their eyes on us right now. It’s important to demonstrate our capabilities,” he added.

More than 35 Air Force aircraft — including an unprecedented 25 F-22 Raptor stealth fighters from Hawaii and Alaska — along with approximately 800 airmen, are practicing what’s known as “Agile Combat Employment,” or ACE — the ability to move aircraft rapidly to a network of a smaller airfields, as part of exercise Pacific Iron 21 on Guam and Tinian Island.

“We have opponents who believe that they can stop us through saturation (missile) attacks. We have opponents who think they can interrupt our command and control, and so we have to be able to develop (capabilities) and exercise at scale — and that’s what we’re doing,” Lt. Gen. Jon Thomas, deputy commander of Pacific Air Forces, said Saturday during a virtual media roundtable from Guam.

He added, “U.S. forces can and will be resilient despite attempts to counter our advantages.”

Gen. Charles Flynn, commander of U.S. Army Pacific at Fort Shafter, said at the news conference, “We are demonstrating our commitment here to the defense of Guam, to the defense of the nation.”

The joint Army and Air Force training is focused on multidomain operations — the ability to link services and platforms across sea, air, land, space and cyberspace to overwhelming effect.

The United States doesn’t have that capability yet, but it is rapidly moving in that direction. The joint exercises involved “effects from space” — satellites — Thomas said.

U.S. Army Pacific’s Forager 21, ending this week, involves about 4,000 personnel on Guam and movement of Stryker armored vehicles, Avenger air defense systems and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, by land, sea and air.

Island-hopping operations are the new marching orders to deter China’s rapid military rise, which is concentrated in the South and East China seas.

Adm. Phil Davidson, former head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command on Oahu, told Congress in March that Guam needs fixed, 360-degree air and missile defense that would be capable of meeting cruise and ballistic missile threats from bombers and other platforms.

“Guam is a target today,” Davidson said. “It needs to be defended, and it needs to be prepared for the threats that will come in the future, because it is clear to me that Guam is not just a place that we believe that we could fight from, as we have for many decades. We are going to have to fight for it in order to be able to do that.”

Riki Ellison, chairman of the nonprofit Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, said Friday that “we are losing vital time while we delay in allocating and appropriating the requisite resources to defend Guam.”

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency was previously tasked with identifying an architecture for a missile defense system for Guam, but has not yet issued the required report, Ellison noted on his group’s website. Some members of Congress are now seeking movement on the issue.

“Within the Indo-Pacific, the president of the United States must have credible options should China attempt to alter the status quo with Taiwan by force,” Ellison said.

The U.S. military’s ability to defend Guam “is both a strategic and operational imperative,” Ellison said. “By defending Guam we protect and preserve our military access and, more importantly, the livelihoods of nearly 170,000 U.S. citizens.”