China Threatens to Sink Guam and Kadena, U.S. Deploys Hundreds of Planes On SCS

Anticipating war with China the U.S Air Force is fanning out across the pacific. For years the u.s air force concentrated its warplanes at just two bases in the western pacific. For fighters, Cadena air force base in Japan's Okinawa prefecture and for bombers and big support planes Guam's Anderson air force base.

Beijing eyed these mega bases and devised a simple strategy for suppressing us airpower in the region. Build a couple of thousand non-nuclear ballistic missiles and in wartime. Lob them at the bases until their runways, aprons, hangars, fuel tanks and warehouses are nothing but craters.

After years of buildup the chinese rocket force possesses around 1 300 ground-launched missiles with sufficient range to hit Cadenna and Anderson from Mainland China. The air force won't say exactly which bases are part of its plan but it's possible to make educated guesses. American territories and small island countries offer the most dependable facilities, arguably the most important bases in the philippines are accessible only at the whim of that country's mercurial president.

The emerging map of the usaf's expanding base network also reveals where the service has potential airfield gaps, most glaringly in the philippine sea east of Taiwan. In that gap the U.S Navy's pacific fleet might lend its sister service a helping hand and deploy some of its 10 aircraft carriers and big deck assault ships.

The air force maintains a master list of what general Kenneth Wilsbach the head of pacific air forces described as every single piece of concrete in the pacific region.

We have a plan for all of those airfields and some of them meet the criteria and they are therefore part of what we call clusters wilsbach told air force magazine last year. some of the bases are main hubs in the network, others are spokes.

Aircraft, fuel, weapons and supplies not to mention people would move through the hubs to the smaller spoke bases. The more often people and stuff move the safer they're from chinese rockets, that's the theory.

An alphabet soup of concepts underpins the new base network the practice of breaking up 20 plane fighter squadrons and dispersing small detachments of jets to outlying bases is called agile combat employment or ace. Bomber squadrons are practicing their own dispersal as part of the new bomber task force operation or BTF.

The air force plans to reinforce the most austere airfields with pre-packed sets of equipment under the so-called deployable airbase system or dabs. To move munitions along the base network, the flying branch has developed a procedure it calls tactical ferry or tac ferry, whereby a fighter such as an F-15E load up with more bombs than it could ever use in combat and delivers them to whichever small airfield it's going to be flying from, in essence saving the weapons for later.

Palau Micronesia and the Marianas all small island countries in the mid-pacific are keen to host american forces, that adds at least another half-dozen airstrips to the USAF's list. The air force already periodically stages bombers at darwin in australia add that to the list 2. 

Less certain are the airstrips that lie closest to China and the likeliest war zone Taiwan. They're all in the Philippines, clark air base and thidu island are two good examples. Before the election of volatile strongman Rodrigo Duterte in 2016 the usaf probably could count on philippine bases during a clash with china.

But Duterte has courted china and criticized the united states. His administration isn't a dependable u.s ally when detert leaves office in 2022 u.s philippine relations could change and the ace-based network could grow.