On Dec. 10, a medium-range ballistic missile was tracked by a new U.S. radar as it streaked toward the Pacific island of Guam, home to America’s Andersen Air Force Base and 26,000 U.S. troops.
The island’s Aegis missile defense system was immediately trained on the target, and a Standard Missile-3 interceptor blasted the incoming threat out of the sky high above the Earth.
It was only a test, in fact, the first such test of the ability of a land-based version of the Aegis system, originally designed for ships, to shoot down missiles from Guam, a 30-mile-long island roughly three times the size of Washington, D.C., with a population of 170,000 Americans and foreign workers.
The island also holds the dubious distinction of being the only sovereign U.S. territory in range of China’s DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile, nicknamed the “Guam Express,” which can carry both nuclear and conventional warheads.
“Today’s flight test is a critical milestone in the defense of Guam and the region,” Rear Adm. Greg Huffman, commander of Joint Task Force-Micronesia, was quoted as saying in a statement from the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. “It confirmed our ability to detect, track, and engage a target missile in flight, increasing our readiness to defend against evolving adversary threats.”
The rush to test and deploy missile defenses to Guam, which would be squarely in the crosshairs in the event of war, comes as, over the past year, China has engaged in a series of increasingly brazen and provocative acts that appear to be a rehearsal for a military blockade of Taiwan. Beijing considers the island a rogue province, which Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed to take by force if necessary.
In the latest apparent attempt to intimidate Taiwan, China deployed 90 ships along what’s known as the first island chain — waters off the coast of China that stretches from Japan in the north, to the west of Taiwan, and south to the Philippines — as if to show they could wall off Taiwan from its allies.
“Over the summer, I saw the most rehearsal and the most joint exercises from the People’s Republic of China that I’d ever seen,” Adm. Samuel Paparo, the top U.S. commander in the Indo-Pacific said at a Brookings Institution event last month. “With the widest geography, the jointest operations for air, missile, maritime power that I’d seen over an entire career of being an observer.”
The Defense Department has identified China as its “pacing challenge,” meaning it’s the country the United States must keep pace with or preferably surpass in military capability if it wants to deter Xi.
The U.S. is in a “long-term strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said in a recent speech before the Royal United Services Institute in London.
“Competition does not mean conflict, because no one should desire the global devastation that such a war would bring,” she said. “That’s why we seek to prevent conflict by deterring PRC aggression … and key to deterrence is being able to win if called to fight.”
But defense hawks in Congress say those are empty words, considering the Pentagon budget is capped at $850 billion by a debt ceiling deal negotiated in summer 2023 between President Joe Biden and then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican ousted from that top role after nine months.
Citing the threat from China, North Korea, and other possible U.S. adversaries, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), who is expected to take over as chairman of the Armed Services Committee in January 2025, led a successful effort during the panel’s work to bust the cap by adding $25 billion to the Pentagon’s top line.
Wicker’s amendment cleared the Senate committee but was dropped from the final compromise version of the National Defense Authorization Act negotiated in December, while Biden is set to cede the White House to President-elect Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2025.
“The failure to include a top-line increase is a tremendous loss for our national defense,” Wicker said in a statement. “Many senior flag officers, defense strategists, and other experts continue to note that this is the most dangerous moment since World War II. Not only does this NDAA thwart the bipartisan will of the Senate, but it signifies a profound missed opportunity to strengthen President-elect Trump’s hand when he takes office.”
While $850 billion is a hefty sum to spend on defense, it fails to send the message to China’s president that the U.S. is serious about pursuing peace through strength, former Rep. Mike Gallagher argues. Before he left Congress, the Wisconsin Republican chaired the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
“The fundamental geopolitical problem in the world today is that Xi Jinping does not fear us, thus he continues to ratchet up the pressure on Taiwan, do brazen things like compromising our telecom infrastructure,” Gallagher said in an interview on Fox News conducted from the Reagan Defense Forum earlier this month. “Because he does not fear us, he believes his path to immortality is by taking Taiwan. We must convince him of the opposite — that the easiest way for his regime to join the ash heap of history is if he attempts something that stupid.”
Gallagher is counting on to Trump rebuild the military in the same way President Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s.
“I think we need to restore a culture that’s ruthlessly focused on warfighting excellence and lethality in our own military,” Gallagher said. “Put differently, in order to prevent World War III, we need to put the Pentagon on a war footing and the secretary of defense needs to fire anybody who’s unwilling or unable to work at a wartime pace.”
Time is growing short, but how short is unclear.
“There’s a lot of speculation about when Mr. Xi will decide to do one thing or another,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said during a visit to Japan this month. “I would just say, from my vantage point, at this point in time, I don’t think an attack is either imminent or unavoidable.”
Xi has ordered his military to be ready to launch an operation to subjugate Taiwan by 2027, but the date, publicly announced a few years ago, is increasingly irrelevant, says Paparo, the U.S. commander who would be in charge of fighting a war with China.
“You know, it was never a sell-by date,” Paparo said. “It was never a date where the PRC had declared, ‘We’re going on this date.’ I am responsible for being ready every single day, but as you can see, the closer we get to it, the less relevant that date is and the more we must be ready today, tomorrow, next month, next year, and onward.”
In the meantime, the U.S. military needs more ships, more drones, more munitions, and more missile defenses, especially for Guam, which could be Beijing’s first target if war were to come.
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At the Brookings event, Paparo expressed concern that, as a result of the U.S. shipping more sophisticated armaments to Ukraine, the weapons he needs, such as the finite number of Patriot missile defense systems, may soon be in short supply.
“Inherently, it imposes costs on the readiness of America to respond in the Indo-Pacific region, which is the most stressing theater for the quantity and quality of munitions, because the PRC is the most capable potential adversary in the world,” Paparo said. “With some of the Patriots that have employed, some of the air-to-air missiles that have been employed, it’s now eating into [U.S.] stocks, you know, and to say otherwise would be dishonest.”
