China Could Wipe Out Every U.S. Base In Asia In The Opening Hours Of A War
Summary and Key Points: America’s network of major bases across Asia — its biggest bet for deterring China — now sits within range of Beijing’s vast missile, drone, and hypersonic arsenal, which dwarfs anything Iran fielded in the recent war.
-Key sites like Guam remain lightly hardened, and analysts, including Hudson’s “Concrete Sky” report, warn that shelters are too few.
-With a massive defense budget request on the table, the urgent question is whether Washington can harden its Pacific bases before China is ready to act.
One of America’s biggest defense investments, and one of the capabilities that the Pentagon believes is its greatest asset in any way with China, might actually be the US military’s greatest vulnerability. That’s a reference to the 30- 40 major named US military bases across Asia. Numerous smaller sites, logistics hubs, and shared facilities support these larger facilities. What’s more, these bases and support facilities house tens of thousands of active-duty military and War Department civilian personnel.
America has spent decades since the end of the Second World War building these key bases throughout the Indo-Pacific. Now, every one of them has gone from being force multipliers for the US military to major strategic liabilities.
That’s entirely because of China’s commitment to its anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategy. This strategy insists upon denying the US military forward bases from where the Americans can launch attacks against Chinese forces that could either be attacking Taiwan or another US ally, like Japan or the Philippines.
Washington got a taste of how easily US military bases in a contested region can go from strategic assets to vulnerabilities in the recent Iran War. The US had established more than a dozen key US military facilities around the Islamic Republic of Iran. The moment hostilities started, though, the Iranians used their potent ballistic missile and drone capabilities to flatten those facilities.
Now, there is real concern in Washington that they will not be allowed to reconstitute the bases in any meaningful way. Due to political issues arising over the Iran War, there is even more worry about the local governments not welcoming the Americans back to their countries.
After all, the US bases in the Arab states made those Arab nations target priorities for Iranian missiles and drones.
Those attacks caused massive damage to the region’s economies.
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