By Mar-Vic Cagurangan
The draft environmental impact statement for the Guam missile defense system will be released in October. If you happen to own a piece of property near any of the candidate sites, prepare to negotiate.
While the Missile Defense Agency vows to keep its footprint within the military-owned properties, the installations of the mobile components of the missile defense architecture will require the clearing of surrounding areas.
“We may have to establish land agreements with certain landowners around the defense properties,” said John Bier, MDA’s program director.
The MDA doesn’t intend to touch private properties, but the affected landowners will be asked to abandon any development plans. Bier said the MDA will set up mutual agreements “to keep someone from, say, building a 20-story building right next to a site where we may have a radar on.”
The MDA will arrange a compensation plan, but the amount to be offered has yet to be set.
The agency has tagged 20 potential sites on island to host the integrated air and missile defense architecture, which will include multiple components such as a sensor, command and control and interceptors, among others. “All the sites are on DOD land and those are final sites,” Bier said.
The Guam missile defense architecture is the centerpiece of the Indo-Pacific Command’s $10.4 billion budget proposal for fiscal 2025. The project is a major component of the command’s Pacific Deterrence Initiative. It is touted to provide 360-degree protection for Guam against a potential attack from China.
“We will come back in the November timeframe to do a series of open houses,” Bier said. “The draft environmental impact statement will show our final conclusion on which of those 20 sites we're going to use and what assets will be on each of those sites.”
The Guam missile defense architecture is targeted for completion in 2027. Multiple contracts for different components of the $1 billion project have been awarded. “We have development contracts for the architecture or production of already existing hardware that is in the field today with the services,” Bier said.
While awaiting the completion of the missile defense infrastructure, the MDA is set to launch a flight test in December, the first in a series of target-tracking exercises that will continue over 10 years. The proposed tests, the MDA said, aim to validate the interoperability of multiple sensors and interceptor systems from the MDA, Army and Navy that could become part of a missile defense system developed for Guam.
The system to be tested this year will be a temporary setup for initial assessment, said Mark Wright, communications director for MDA. “This is just a test that will be taken down later. In the future, when those permanent missile systems arrive, (the test equipment) will be the exact kind of systems.”
Based on the proposed actions detailed in the EIS for the flight tests, the target would be air-launched from a C-17 or similar aircraft at an altitude greater than 20,000 feet, at least 800 nautical miles east of Guam in the western Pacific Ocean. The interceptor would launch from Northwest Field on Andersen Air Force Base.
Bier said the flight tests will also require mutual agreements with residents who own properties around the test sites. Each test cycle, which begins in December, will run for four days. The agency will offer to lease adjacent properties for the duration of the flight tests. Property owners “will be asked to keep off their lands between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. for those four days until the flight test is over,” the MDA official said. “We will notify landowners. We don’t want them to have to find it in a 378-page document.”
For the next 10 years, sending out notifications to property owners would be a routine procedure, Bier said. “Every time the Department of Defense wants to do a test, we'll come back and describe the test and then have consultation with Fish and Wildlife, with the (State Historic Preservation Office),” he added.
The MDA’s proposed activities on Guam are, as expected, facing protests from local activists. The military’s land use has always been a thorny issue between the military and the local community.
“It’s land theft,” Guam activist Moneaka Flores said, protesting the MDA’s proposed land locks. “To think that the people are going to be restricted from their homes or private properties for up to four days twice a year for 10 years.”
She also raised concerns over the flight test debris that will drop into the ocean. “There’s no plan for remediation,” Flores said. “Our island is constantly being set up to endure the burdens of militarization, building us up to be a site for war once again. This does not keep us safe.”
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