In a long-standing ritual meant to showcase America’s “ability to generate combat air power at a moment’s notice,” five long-range B-52 Stratofortress bombers took part last month in a parade of aircraft at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, for what’s known as an “elephant walk.”
The hulking, nuclear-capable Cold War-era bombers were lined up on the runway, nose to tail, with nine other aircraft, including six KC-135 refueling planes and an RQ-4 Global Hawk drone.
Within a few days, the five B-52s departed Guam en route to their home, Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. It wasn’t just the end of their scheduled deployment, it also marked the end, after 16 years, of what the United States has dubbed its “Continuous Bomber Presence Mission” on the Pacific island, strategically located 2,100 miles from North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, and 4,000 miles from China’s capital, Beijing.
It may have seemed like a curious time to withdraw the planes and end their deterrence mission given that the other symbol of America’s ready firepower in the Pacific, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, was laid up pierside in Guam at the time, with 20% of its crew down with COVID-19.
But as America’s adversaries develop a new generation of missiles, including hypersonic weapons that can travel five to 10 times the speed of sound, staging heavy bombers on what would be a stationary, fat target no longer has the appeal it did when the continuous bomber presence concept was implemented in 2004.
In August 2017, North Korea threatened to send four missiles into the waters near Guam, a threat that the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, ultimately did not carry out.
But the following month, North Korea tested a version of its intermediate-range Hwasong-12, which flew 2,300 miles over the Japanese island of Hokkaido in just over 17 minutes, meaning it could hit Guam in less than 15 minutes.
At the same time, China’s new DF-26 ballistic missile, dubbed the “Guam Killer” by some analysts, not only has the range to hit Guam but can change course mid-flight to target a moving aircraft carrier accurately.
Clearly, an adjustment in tactics was warranted.
“In line with the National Defense Strategy, the United States has transitioned to an approach that enables strategic bombers to operate forward in the Indo-Pacific region from a broader array of overseas locations, when required, and with greater operational resilience while these bombers are permanently based in the United States,” said Maj. Kate Atanasoff, a spokeswoman for U.S. Strategic Command.
That 2018 strategy document calls for U.S. forces to be “strategically predictable, but operationally unpredictable” — in other words, to stop being so obvious about where U.S. planes, ships, and troops are being deployed on any given day.
“U.S. strategic bombers will continue to operate in the Indo-Pacific, to include Guam, at the timing and tempo of our choosing,” Atanasoff said in an email to the Washington Examiner.
In order to drive home that point, one week after the exodus of B-52s from Guam, a U.S. Air Force B-1B bomber flew from Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, to Japan to team up with six U.S. F-16s and 15 Japanese fighter jets in a display of what the U.S. calls “dynamic force employment.”
But the end of the forward-deployed bombers in the Pacific is the harbinger of a complete rethinking of how best to defend the U.S. from its enemies in an age where a microscopic Chinese virus, not a hypersonic Chinese missile, disabled a U.S. aircraft carrier and disrupted the fabric of everyday life.
“Terror has indeed arrived on our shores, and it has nothing to do with al Qaeda or ISIS or Iranian-backed militias,” writes military historian Andrew Bacevich. “As it happens, all these years in which the national security state has been preoccupied with projecting hard power abroad have left us naked and vulnerable right here at home.”
With the creation of the U.S. Space Force and the U.S. Cyber Command, the Pentagon is becoming far more concerned about protecting communication and navigation satellites as well as terrestrial infrastructure, which support a vast array of essential services — from banking to telecommunications to power supplies to internet access.
“Protecting the United States from a large-scale cyber attack on the nation’s critical infrastructure will become an extremely high priority, since it could harm the American people, economy, health care system, and way of life at least as much (if not more than) COVID-19 already has,” write retired Lt. Gen. David Barno and his partner, Nora Bensahel, in an essay on five ways the U.S. military will change after the pandemic.
“Protecting the United States from a large-scale cyber attack on the nation’s critical infrastructure will become an extremely high priority, since it could harm the American people, economy, heath care system, and way of life at least as much (if not more than) COVID-19 already has,” they add.
“Forward defense has long been the cornerstone of U.S. defense strategy, but it will become less important as the focus grows on countering catastrophic threats against the homeland. … The United States will continue to defend its most vital interests overseas: keeping NATO alive, protecting Eastern Europe from Russia, supporting Israel, and deterring conflict in Asia. But U.S. forces across the Middle East, Afghanistan, Africa, and even in some parts of the Pacific are likely to be drawn down if not withdrawn completely.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
