Is the US Military’s Most Important Island in the Pacific Ready for War?
16th April 2026
As America’s westernmost territory, the island of Guam is the logistical heart of any large-scale military build-up in the western Pacific. It has long runways, a deepwater port, huge fuel storage and weapons depots, and it’s about 2,000 miles closer to China than it is to Hawaii. The island is also U.S. soil, so the military does not need permission from a foreign government to operate there.
Those factors make Guam a prime target for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) if a conflict were to break out between the U.S. and China. The PLA has hundreds of missiles it would almost certainly fire at Guam in a shooting war. That would disrupt the military’s logistics machine, on top of endangering 170,000 U.S. citizens who live there.
While the military is building a new missile defense system to protect Guam, it’s not clear when that system will be fully operational. And, as the war with Iran has shown, even a robust missile defense system can’t stop everything. So how can the military keep both the troops and civilians on its most important island safe in an all-out war?
Probably not.