Cratering Effects: Chinese Missile Threats to Us Air Bases in the Indo-pacific

Grieco, Kelly A.; Slingbaum, Hunter; Walker, Jonathan M. (2024-12-12). Cratering Effects: Chinese Missile Threats to Us Air Bases in the Indo-pacific. Security & Strategy (Report). Washington, DC: Stimson Center. p. 68.

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Abstract: During the last thirty years — dating back to the 1991 Gulf War — U.S. overseas air bases were largely safe havens from enemy attacks. These sanctuaries enabled the rapid projection of American airpower to deter adversaries and reassure allies and partners in times of crisis. That sanctuary age has now ended, and nowhere more than in the Indo-Pacific.

China has invested heavily in building a large and sophisticated arsenal of ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles that can reach U.S. bases across the region. In the view of Chinese military strategists, the weak points of American airpower projection are the forward air bases — especially the runways — which are vulnerable to missile attacks. Unfortunately, Chinese strategists are correct. By denying the United States the use of runways and taxiways in the region, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could gain air superiority without ever defeating America’s arsenal of advanced fighters and bombers.

This sobering reality has drawn congressional attention. In May 2024, for example, 13 members of Congress sent a letter to the secretaries of the Air Force and Navy, warning that Chinese missile threats “significantly weaken our ability to respond in a conflict” and calling on the Pentagon to urgently build hardened aircraft shelters, underground bunkers, and other facilities to improve the resilience of U.S. bases in the Indo-Pacific.1 These ideas may have merit, but even with hardening, U.S. air bases still have an Achilles’ heel — the runways themselves.

Accordingly, this report models repeated Chinese missile attacks on U.S. military runways and taxiways in Japan, Northern Marianas, and other Pacific islands, employing conservative assumptions and relying on open-source data to estimate the PLA Rocket Force’s (PLARF’s) order- of-battle and missile capabilities as well as U.S. basing access, runway repair times, and missile defense capabilities. It finds that Chinese missiles attacks could indeed close these runways and taxiways in the critical first days — and even weeks — of a war between the United States and China.

These attacks could prevent the U.S. Air Force from conducting fighter operations for about the first 12 days of a conflict from U.S. air bases in Japan and nearly two days from U.S. bases in Guam and other Pacific locations at the outset of war. In practice, however, China could disrupt U.S. combat operations for much longer by denying the United States the use of runways to conduct aerial refueling operations. This study shows that Chinese missiles could close runways to aerial refueling tankers and other large aircraft for over a month at U.S. bases in Japan and over half a week at U.S. military bases in the region.

Without aerial refueling from tankers, many U.S. aircraft — including fifth-generation fighter jets — lack the internal fuel capacity to close the distance to targets in the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea and return to existing U.S. bases in the region. These runway closures could also push back U.S. bombers to bases in Australia, Hawaii, or Alaska at the outset of a conflict, adding hours to the flight times and substantially reducing the number of bomber sorties that the United States could generate each day.

Addressing this threat to U.S. air bases is arguably the most critical and daunting task facing the U.S. Air Force today. The Air Force finds itself in danger of operating much less effectively than previously assessed, if at all, at the start of a military conflict when the Joint Force would expect it to quickly set up a combat air patrol or sink Chinese ships in the Taiwan Strait. Worse, Chinese military planners might calculate that they have a window of over 30 days — when American airpower would be largely sidelined — to accomplish a fait accompli. If Beijing concludes that it can win a quick and easy military victory, its actions could become very hard to deter.

Unfortunately, there are no easy ways to counter the threat from Chinese missile strikes on U.S. air bases in Japan, Guam, and other Pacific Island locations. Even if the United States employed a mix of countermeasures — dispersing aircraft and personnel to reserve bases and civilian airfields, improving rapid runway repair capabilities, and building a more robust missile defense architecture in the region — runways in Japan, Guam, and elsewhere would remain closed to tanker operations for at least the first several days of any conflict.

To restore its ability to project airpower early in a war, the United States will need to outthink — not outspend — the PLA. Instead of doubling down on old paradigms, the Air Force ought to embrace new operational concepts and capabilities for employing airpower at the start of a conflict, as follows:

The United States should leverage this age of precision weapons en masse to strategic and operational advantage, shifting the bulk of the burden for contesting control of the air early in a war to its allies and partners. U.S. allies and partners should implement strategies of air denial and build their air forces around large numbers of drones and missiles of all types to ensure that they can keep the skies contested and blunt Chinese attacks early in a war without massive support from American fighters and bombers. The U.S. Air Force should support allied- and partner-led air denial operations within the First Island Chain.2 This inside air force — forward-postured air units tasked, trained, and equipped to operate in contested airspace — should be built around large numbers of attritable3, mobile, and runway-independent platforms rather than traditional fighters and bombers. U.S. bombers, as well as cargo aircraft armed with palletized munitions, should play a secondary role in blunting Chinese attacks, but they should not be a substitute for an active inside air force. The U.S. Air Force should prioritize logistics and sustainment to ensure this inside air force remains in the fight. Doing so requires more investment in prepositioned stockpiles and infrastructure improvements, including upgrades to civilian airfields in the Pacific; hardened fuel-storage facilities; and dispersed storage facilities containing weapons, munitions, and equipment, including runway repair kits. Above all, American political and military leaders — as well as the American public — should be under no illusions: there will be no refuge or rest from the long reach of Chinese missiles for U.S. air bases in a war. U.S. decision-makers should ask themselves the hard questions: whether — and when — paying that high price in materiel and human lives will be in the United States’ national interest.