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A New Pacific Arsenal to Counter ChinaSkip to Comments
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Royal Australian Air
Force Base Darwin
CHINA
TAIWAN
Okinawa
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Fort Magsaysay
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ALASKA
HAWAII
SINGAPORE



A NEW PACIFIC ARSENAL TO COUNTER CHINA

With missiles, submarines and alliances, the Biden administration has built a
presence in the region to rein in Beijing’s expansionist goals.

By John Ismay, Edward Wong and Pablo Robles April 26, 2024

U.S. officials have long seen their country as a Pacific power, with troops and
arsenals at a handful of bases in the region since just after World War II.

U.S. military or partner bases

But the Biden administration says that is no longer good enough to foil what it
sees as the greatest threat to the democratic island of Taiwan — a Chinese
invasion that could succeed within days.

The United States is sending the most advanced Tomahawk cruise missiles to Japan
and has established a new kind of Marine Corps regiment on Okinawa that is
designed to fight from small islands and destroy ships at sea.

The Pentagon has gained access to multiple airfields and naval bases in the
Philippines, lessening the need for aircraft carriers that could be targeted by
China’s long-range missiles and submarines in a time of war.

The Australian government hosts U.S. Marines in the north of the country, and
one of three sites in the east will soon be the new home for advanced
American-made attack submarines. The United States also has a new security
agreement with Papua New Guinea.

Potential submarine bases

Xi Jinping, China’s leader, and other officials in Beijing have watched the U.S.
moves with alarm. They call it an encirclement of their nation and say the
United States is trying to constrain its main economic and military rival.

Since the start of his administration, President Biden has undertaken a strategy
to expand American military access to bases in allied nations across the
Asia-Pacific region and to deploy a range of new weapons systems there. He has
also said the U.S. military would defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion.

On Wednesday, Mr. Biden signed a $95 billion supplemental military aid and
spending bill that Congress had just passed and that includes $8.1 billion to
counter China in the region. And Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken traveled
to Shanghai and Beijing this week for meetings with Mr. Xi and other officials
in which he raised China’s military activity in the Taiwan Strait and the South
China Sea, calling it “destabilizing.”

Mr. Xi told Mr. Blinken on Friday that the United States should not play a
“zero-sum game” or “create small blocs.” He said that “while each side can have
its friends and partners, it should not target, oppose or harm the other,”
according to an official Chinese summary of the meeting.

Earlier in April, the leaders of the Philippines and Japan met with Mr. Biden at
the White House for the first such summit among the three countries. They
announced enhanced defense cooperation, including naval training and exercises,
planned jointly and with other partners. Last year, the Biden administration
forged a new three-way defense pact with Japan and South Korea.



President Biden held a trilateral meeting earlier this month with the leaders of
Japan and the Philippines at the White House.

Yuri Gripas for The New York Times

“In 2023, we drove the most transformative year for U.S. force posture in the
Indo-Pacific region in a generation,” Ely S. Ratner, the assistant secretary of
defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said in a statement following an
interview.

The main change, he said, is having American forces distributed in smaller, more
mobile units across a wide arc of the region rather than being concentrated at
large bases in northeast Asia. That is largely intended to counter China’s
efforts to build up forces that can target aircraft carriers or U.S. military
outposts on Okinawa or Guam.

These land forces, including a retrained and refitted U.S. Marine littoral
regiment in Okinawa, will now have the ability to attack warships at sea.

For the first time, Japan’s military will receive up to 400 of their own
Tomahawk cruise missiles — the newest versions of which can attack ships at sea
as well as targets on land from over 1,150 miles away.

The Pentagon has also gained access rights for its troops at four additional
bases in the Philippines that could eventually host U.S. warplanes and advanced
mobile missile launchers, if Washington and Manila agree that offensive weaponry
can be placed there.

The United States has bilateral mutual defense agreements with several allied
nations in the region so that an attack on the assets of one nation could
trigger a response from the other. Bolstering the U.S. troop presence on the
soil of allied countries strengthens that notion of mutual defense.

In addition, the United States continues to send weapons and Green Beret
trainers to Taiwan, a de facto independent island and the biggest flashpoint
between the United States and China. Mr. Xi has said his nation must eventually
take control of Taiwan, by force if necessary.

“We’ve deepened our alliances and partnerships abroad in ways that would have
been unthinkable just a few years ago,” Kurt Campbell, the new deputy secretary
of state, told reporters last year, when he was the top Asia policy official in
the White House.


WHAT DETERS CHINA?

Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, said in an interview in Taipei that the
strengthened alliances and evolving military force postures were critical to
deterring China.

“We are very happy to see that many countries in this region are coming to the
realization that they also have to be prepared for further expansions of the
P.R.C.,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China.

To some Chinese military strategists, the U.S. efforts are aimed at keeping
China’s naval forces behind the “first island chain” — islands close to mainland
Asia that run from Okinawa in Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines.

U.S. military assets along these islands could prevent Chinese warships from
getting into the open Pacific waters farther east if conflict were to break out.

Leaders in China’s People’s Liberation Army also talk of establishing military
dominance of the “second island chain” — which is farther out in the Pacific and
includes Guam, Palau and West Papua.

Seoul

SOUTH

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Tokyo

JAPAN

CHINA

Taipei

TAIWAN

Hong Kong

First Island Chain

Pacific

Ocean

Second Island Chain

Manila

South

China Sea

GUAM

philippines

MALAYSIA

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JAPAN

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First

Island

Chain

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philippines

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Seoul

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Taipei

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Hong Kong

First Island Chain

Pacific

Ocean

Paracel

Islands

Manila

South

China Sea

GUAM

philippines

Second Island Chain

Spratly

Islands

MALAYSIA

INDONESIA

But several conservative critics of the administration’s policies argue that the
United States should be keeping major arms for its own use and that it is not
producing new ships and weapons systems quickly enough to deter China, which is
rapidly growing its military.

Some American commanders acknowledge the United States needs to speed up ship
production but say the Pentagon’s warfighting abilities in the region still
outmatch China’s — and can improve quickly with the right political and budget
commitments in Washington.

“We have actually grown our combat capability here in the Pacific over the last
years,” Adm. Samuel J. Paparo Jr., the incoming commander of the U.S.
Indo-Pacific Command, said in an interview. “But our trajectory is still not a
trajectory that matches our adversary. Our adversaries are building more
capability and they’re building more warships — per year — than we are.”

Mr. Paparo said new American warships were still more capable than the ones
China is building, and the U.S. military’s “total weight of fires” continued to
outmatch that of the People’s Liberation Army, for now.



Warplanes on the flight deck of U.S.S. Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier, during
a joint U.S. and Japanese military exercise in the Philippine Sea in January.

Richard A. Brooks/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a Cold War-era arms control
agreement between Washington and Moscow, prohibited land-based cruise or
ballistic missiles with ranges between 311 miles and 3,420 miles. But after the
Trump administration withdrew from the pact, the United States was able to
develop and field a large number of small, mobile launchers for previously
banned missiles around Asia.

Even with the deployment of new systems, the United States would still rely on
its legacy assets in the region in the event of war: its bases in Guam, Japan
and South Korea, and the troops and arms there.

All of the senior U.S. officials interviewed for this story say war with China
is neither desirable nor inevitable — a view expressed publicly by Defense
Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III. But they also insist that a military buildup and
bolstering alliances, along with diplomatic talks with China, are important
elements of deterring potential future aggression by Beijing.

Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, told Mr. Blinken on Friday in Beijing that
“the negative factors in the relationship are still increasing and building, and
the relationship is facing all kinds of disruptions.” He warned the United
States “not to interfere in China’s internal affairs, not to hold China’s
development back, and not to step on China’s red lines and on China’s
sovereignty, security and development interests.”


JAPAN

U.S. military or

partner bases

Tokyo

Okinawa

The new deterrent effort is twofold for American forces: increasing patrolling
activities at sea and the capabilities of its troop levels ashore.

To the former, the Pentagon has announced that U.S. Navy warships will
participate in more drills with their Japanese counterparts in the western
Ryukyu Islands near Taiwan and with Filipino ships in the South China Sea, where
the Chinese coast guard has harassed ships and installations controlled by the
Philippines.



A swarm of Chinese militia and Coast Guard vessels chased a Philippine Coast
Guard ship in the South China Sea last year.

Jes Aznar for The New York Times

To the latter, Marine Corps and Army units already in the Pacific have recently
fielded medium- and long-range missiles mated to small, mobile trucks that would
have been prohibited under the former treaty.

These trucks can be quickly lifted by Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft or larger cargo
planes to new locations, or they can simply drive away to evade a Chinese
counterattack. A new flotilla of U.S. Army watercraft being sent to the region
could also be used to reposition troops and launchers from island to island.

In an interview last year with The New York Times, Gen. David H. Berger, then
the Marine Corps’ top general, said the service had begun analyzing strategic
choke points between islands where Chinese forces were likely to transit
throughout the Pacific. He said the service had identified sites where Marine
assault forces like the new Okinawa-based littoral regiment could launch attacks
on Beijing’s warships using these new weapons.


PHILIPPINES

Luzon

Partner bases

Manila

The Pentagon announced in February last year a new military base-sharing
agreement with Manila, giving U.S. forces access to four sites in the
Philippines for use in humanitarian missions, adding to the five sites
previously opened to the Pentagon in 2014. Most of them are air bases with
runways long enough to host heavy cargo planes.

Plotting their locations on a map shows the sites’ strategic value should the
United States be called upon to defend their oldest treaty ally in the region,
if the Philippines eventually agrees to allow the U.S. military to put combat
troops and mobile missile systems there.

One, on the northern tip of Luzon Island, would give missile-launching trucks
the ability to attack Chinese ships across the strait separating Philippines
from Taiwan, while another site about 700 miles to the southwest would allow the
U.S. to strike bases that China has built in the Spratly Islands nearby.

In 2023, the United States committed $100 million for “infrastructure
investments” at the nine bases, with more funds expected this year.


AUSTRALIA

Darwin

Potential

submarine

bases

Canberra

The Pentagon has forged closer military ties with Australia and Papua New
Guinea, extending America’s bulwark against potential attempts by the Chinese
military at establishing dominance along the “second island chain.”

The Obama administration moved a number of littoral combat ships to Singapore
and deployed a rotating force of Marines to Darwin, on Australia’s north coast,
giving the Pentagon more assets that could respond as needed in the region.

Last year, the Biden administration greatly elevated its commitment to
Australia, which is one of America’s most important non-NATO allies.



The U.S.S. North Carolina, a Virginia-class submarine, docking in Perth,
Australia last year.

Tony Mcdonough/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A new multibillion dollar agreement called AUKUS — for Australia, the United
Kingdom and the United States — will permanently transfer some of the U.S.
Navy’s newest Virginia-class attack subs to Canberra. The location of the new
bases for those subs has not been announced, but the first group of Australian
sailors who will crew them graduated from nuclear power training in America in
January.

These stealthy submarines, which can fire torpedoes and Tomahawk missiles, will
potentially add to the number of threats Beijing faces in case of a regional
war.

Just north of Australia, an agreement in August gave U.S. forces more access to
Papua New Guinea for humanitarian missions and committed American tax dollars to
update military facilities there.

To Admiral Paparo, this growing network of partnerships and security agreements
across thousands of miles of the Pacific is a direct result of what he calls
China’s “revanchist, revisionist and expansionist agenda” in the region that has
directly threatened its neighbors.

“I do believe that the U.S. and our allies and partners are playing a stronger
hand and that we would prevail in any fight that arose in the Western Pacific,”
the admiral said.

“It’s a hand that I would not trade with our would-be adversaries, and yet we’re
also never satisfied with the strength of that hand and always looking to
improve it.”



Sources: Congressional Research Service; United States Department of Defense

Additional work by Scott Reinhard, Martín González Gómez and Agnes Chang.


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