The US Pacific Command is recasting the posture of its military forces in the western Pacific and Asia with the new pivot point to be a robust base on the island of Guam. The operative watchword has already become "flexibility."
"Look at a map," said the command's leader, Admiral William Fallon, as he flew toward Guam after a week-long trek through Southeast Asia.
He pointed to the relatively short distances from Guam to South Korea, the Taiwan Strait across which China and Taiwan confront one another, and Southeast Asia, the frontier of terror in Asia.
US officers often talk about the "tyranny of distance" in the Pacific Command's area of operations, which runs from the west coast of North America to the east coast of Africa. Guam, when it is fully operational, will provide a base for land, naval and air forces that is closer to targets than to forces on the US mainland or Hawaii. Guam was a major air base during the war in Vietnam.
A genuine advantage, Fallon said, was that "Guam is American territory."
The island does not have the political restrictions, such as those in South Korea, that could impede US military moves in an emergency. South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, who has repeatedly taken an anti-American stance, has suggested that US forces could not be deployed from South Korea without his government's approval.
In an interview on his airplane and in congressional testimony last week, the admiral emphasized the vital role that Japan would continue to play in US strategy.
"The US-Japan alliance remains the most important pact in the Pacific," he said.
Even so, depending on what sort of government is in power in Tokyo, there could be political complications in deploying forces elsewhere from Japan.
The disadvantage to Guam is the rundown state of the island's infrastructure, meaning roads, the electrical system, the water supply, piers and airfield runways.
"I want that infrastructure fixed," Fallon said.
One runway at Andersen Air Force Base has already been torn up prior to rebuilding it. Guam is vulnerable to typhoons and should have its power lines buried, Fallon said.
Fallon said he saw the island as primarily a staging area through which troops, ships, and planes would surge toward contingencies in Asia. The island's maintenance and repair capacity would be refurbished and expanded so that aircraft carriers, for instance, could be serviced without having to return to home ports on the West Coast.
What all this will cost and whether Congress will provide sufficient funds has yet to be determined.
About 7,000 Marines, including the headquarters of the III Marine Expeditionary Force, would go to Guam from Okinawa, where friction between Marines and Okinawans has been constant. Three fast-attack submarines are based at Guam now and two more will be assigned there. Squadrons of B-1 bombers are rotated through Guam from the US for several months at a time.
On realigning US forces in Japan, US and Japanese officials have been putting the finishing touches on an agreement due to be completed by the end of this month. It was to include a new US army headquarters alongside a Japanese Ground Defense Force headquarters at Camp Zama, southwest of Tokyo, and a similar arrangement for air force units at Yokota Air Base, west of Tokyo.
Japan has already agreed that the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier George Washington will replace the Kitty Hawk, driven by conventional steam turbines, in Yokosuka in 2008. Kitty Hawk is to be retired because of its age.
Throughout the discussion of his vision for positioning forces in the Asia-Pacific region, Fallon emphasized "flexibility."
"We need to have forces ready to react," he said. "We must have built-in flexibility" to meet emergencies, including disaster relief and other humanitarian operations.
He underscored that when he flew by helicopter from Clark Field north of Manila in the Philippines to the amphibious assault ship Essex at sea to thank the Marines and sailors aboard for their efforts in trying to rescue victims of the giant mudslide on the island of Leyte.
"You responded magnificently with great speed, agility, demonstrating flexibility in shifting your priority focus," he told sailors and Marines assembled on the flight deck.
They had started an exercise in the Philippines before taking on the relief work.
In congressional testimony, Fallon expanded on that theme: "Forward-deployed forces, ready for immediate employment, send an unambiguous signal of undiminished US commitment to the Asia-Pacific area. Agile and responsive global forces also act to deter aggression."
Richard Halloran is a writer based in Hawaii.
Chinese agents often target Taiwanese officials who are motivated by financial gain rather than ideology, while people who are found guilty of spying face lenient punishments in Taiwan, a researcher said on Tuesday. While the law says that foreign agents can be sentenced to death, people who are convicted of spying for Beijing often serve less than nine months in prison because Taiwan does not formally recognize China as a foreign nation, Institute for National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said. Many officials and military personnel sell information to China believing it to be of little value, unaware that
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
“Si ambulat loquitur tetrissitatque sicut anas, anas est” is, in customary international law, the three-part test of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation. And it is essential to Taiwan’s existence. Apocryphally, it can be traced as far back as Suetonius (蘇埃托尼烏斯) in late first-century Rome. Alas, Suetonius was only talking about ducks (anas). But this self-evident principle was codified as a four-part test at the Montevideo Convention in 1934, to which the United States is a party. Article One: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government;
The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
RSS