Expert Q&A: Guam ‘No Safer Today’ Despite US Efforts

EXPERT Q&A — The U.S. has been pursuing a new integrated missile defense system for Guam, a U.S. territory in the Western Pacific that plays a critical role in U.S. force projection in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. military has long deployed air defense capabilities in Guam, including a U.S. Army Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery. It is also working to install a version of the Aegis defense system on the island; in December, the Department of Defense announced a successful intercept of a medium-range ballistic missile in a test of the Aegis Guam System, integrated with a new AN/TPY-6 radar and Vertical Launching System.

The Cipher Brief turned to Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery (Ret.), who served for 32 years in the U.S. Navy as a nuclear-trained surface warfare officer, for a conversation about the development of Guam defenses. Despite the recent successful missile test, Montgomery is fiercely critical of the steps taken so far, arguing that various aspects of the Guam defense plan amount to costly mistakes. “With a few minor exceptions, Guam is no safer today than it was four years ago,” Montgomery said. “But we have spent a lot of money and wasted critical time.”Montgomery spoke with Cipher Brief Writer Ethan Masucol. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can watch their full discussion on The Cipher Brief YouTube channel.

Masucol: What is the importance of Guam? Why does it matter?

RADM Montgomery (Ret.): Guam is a strategic location for the U.S. military in terms of its ability to operationally project forces throughout the Western Pacific. It lies on the edge of the second island chain, when you think of the first island chain and then the second as distances away from China into the Western Pacific.

So, we’ve put a lot of investment in there. We have a submarine base there with anywhere from four to six permanently home-ported submarines in a maintenance facility and weapons reload facility — very critical for the Navy. The Air Force has Anderson Air Force Base, which has an enormous airfield that is bomber-capable; it can host multiple squadrons of fighters, bombers, refuelers. It’s where we’re going to eventually reassert air control into the Western Pacific in a conflict with China, if that were to occur. It also has big stowage facilities. So again, a critical spot.

Then third, in hindsight now probably not a great move, we’re moving some of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Forces from Okinawa to Guam. This was done more than a decade ago, as a decision to reduce the pressure of forward stationing and forward deploying U.S. Marines in Okinawa, which was a politically challenging thing. The Japanese paid a lot for the development, billions of dollars of Japanese money. So even though we may not want to do it today, it’s probably something that’s going to happen.

So in summary, you have critical Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps forces forward postured in Guam. And I would add one more thing: it’s highly likely that were we to command and control some kind of conflict in the Western Pacific, Indo-Pacom would probably need to come forward from Hawaii, and Guam is certainly one of the most likely locations for that. So strategically, operationally, even tactically, a very meaningful location for U.S. forces.

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Masucol: Which means Guam needs a strong, capable defense system. Can you go through the components of this defense system and your issues with them?

RADM Montgomery (Ret.): First I’m going to try to help the Department of Defense define what they’re doing here. It needs to be defended against all threats, and those threats include intermediate-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, hypersonic maneuvering missiles. They can be launched from ships, submarines, aircraft, and even ground launched from China. That’s a pretty extensive battery of incoming things. They can be at a very high altitude, at a low altitude. They can be on a straight flight, on a maneuvering flight. The vast majority will come directly from China, but some could maneuver around the backside of Guam.

So you’re going to need a very capable, high-capacity integrated air missile defense system to protect Guam from this litany of forces. And I’m not even counting the very limited issue we have with defeating Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles from Korea, which was the traditional defense-of-Guam mission before 2020, and for which we had put the THAAD, the US Army’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System, on Guam 15 years ago.

I’m going to gently say that the last four years, the Biden administration took the exact wrong approach to defending Guam. And with a few minor exceptions, Guam is no safer today than it was four years ago. But we have spent a lot of money and wasted critical time.

Instead of anchoring the defense in an Aegis-based system, truly anchoring it in something called Aegis Ashore, [they didn’t.] It’s something we’ve put in Poland and Romania for ballistic missile defense. We all know that Aegis handles every weapon, every threat I mentioned – inter-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, high-speed maneuvering cruise missiles that come around the backside, it handles. Hypersonics, it handles. It was the obvious solution.

Now, why didn’t they do it? First, a bit of intransigence – the Navy saying, We don’t want to do it. We don’t like doing stuff ashore. Despite the fact that at any one time, 70% of the Navy is assigned to shore duty and 85% of the Navy is actually physically ashore, we don’t want these 60 people, which is what it would have been, in an Aegis ashore.

And by the way, they would tell me, You don’t get it, sailors don’t like these assignments. So the Navy took a pass. The Navy wants nothing to do with it.

The other problem is the Army wants everything to do with it. So the Army is launching all kinds of ideas. They’re using their officers at JIAMDO, the Joint Integrated Air Missile Defense Organization inside the Joint Staff, and they convinced CAPE, the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation Office at the Department of Defense, to ignore the actual professionals at the Missile Defense Agency saying, Hey, we probably need Aegis Ashore here, and went with their own system. A new idea anchored in how the Army fights, which is fantastic, except the kick-ass missile defense service is known as the Navy, which actually has things ready to go right now for these threats. The Army is not. The Army does a few things well in missile defense, but let’s be clear, missile defense is not the primary focus of the Army. It is a rear water. In the Navy, integrated air missile defense is the sine qua non. We have to have it.

The Army came up with this idea of a dispersed missile defense. They said, We’ve got to disperse because the Chinese are going to attack Guam and take this system out. And just so we understand each other, Guam’s not big. We built a dispersed missile defense architecture relying on untested and unintegrated efforts. This has led to the squandering of the three and a half years of effort.

And then the other crazy thing is, when the Army decides to do something, there’s nothing wrong with this, but they have a different concept. We tend to make things compact and low personnel-manning because ships are like that. So, our idea of an Aegis Ashore with 60 or 80 people versus their idea, with distributed four or five radar panels, distributed trucks, driving missiles around, distributed C2 (command and control), you end up with literally a thousand people. And then you have to have military construction, and a commissary, and an elementary school and all these other things, because you’re bringing in a ton of army personnel to do this.

The final thing I’ll mention is that in the end, [despite] the whole idea that we would disperse ourselves, there still was only one C2 node. So when the Chinese figure out what that was and if they were fortunate enough to hit it, you still had a single point of failure. I’ll just gently say we didn’t achieve the dispersal. We did achieve not getting it done, and we spent a bit of dough. We did a test recently but many of the things involved in the test are leaving the island. So, I’ll just say this was abject failure.

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Masucol: Is the disconnect between making it a dispersed defense system and the small size of the territory that you’re trying to defend?

RADM Montgomery (Ret.): Do I think you need to have point defense weapon systems spread out at the submarine base, at the air base? You bet. But the command and control, the big radar that could have controlled this could have been in one Aegis Ashore site, probably somewhere near Anderson, the air base. I didn’t do the environmental studies, I haven’t participated in a sighting thing, of course. I’m not sure how far MDA, Missile Defense Agency, got down that road before they were outmaneuvered by the rest of OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense).

It’s easy to blame MDA because they have the name Missile Defense Agency. But in this case, I think that’s unfair. I think a large part of the blame for this belongs in other OSD and Joint Staff entities. And I don’t even blame the services. I blame the Navy for saying no, but I get it. The Army’s told, here’s a mission. The Army’s mission focused. They went out and tried to do it. I’m just saying Guam is not a maneuver space. Poland is a maneuver space. Guam’s a little smaller. I think that’s how we got in this jam.

Masucol: And then moving forward, how would you recommend we get out of this jam? Or are we too far down the hole?

RADM Montgomery (Ret.): We’re not going to go like Superman and reverse time, spin the earth backwards. We’ve lost three and a half years. No time machine here. However, we can be smart going forward. First of all, put the professionals in charge — the Missile Defense Agency. Tell them what you need, even if it includes cruise missile defense, which is not something they normally do. You need to come up with a defense architecture for the cruise, hypersonic and ballistic missile defense at Guam. What systems would you want? I think what they would say is an Aegis Ashore, the THAAD system that’s already there, some good Army air defense systems — initially Patriot and NASAMS, a Norwegian-U.S. system, both of which have performed well in combat in Ukraine. And then over time, there’s a replacement army system called IFPC (Indirect Fire Protection Capability). Maybe two or three years from now that IFPC could come in.

Bottom line is, use systems we know work — Aegis, THAAD, Patriot — integrate them with initially Link-16, which is a known joint interoperable link system. Over time, if you want to bring in a different Army system, that’s great, but again, over time. Bring in these other Army systems as they come to fruition. We can have something up and running reasonably in 2027, 2028, if we start now.

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