China’s military capabilities, particularly its growing missile arsenal, have increased the need for the United States to reinforce its air bases across the Indo-Pacific, as a lack of hardened aircraft shelters could leave U.S. air power vulnerable to attack, a new study by the Hudson Institute think tank has warned.
“Airfields at home and abroad where U.S. forces operate are generally unhardened and highly vulnerable to small strikes,” Hudson’s Timothy Walton and Thomas Shugart from the Center for a New American Security wrote in their report released earlier this month.
For instance, China could “neutralize” U.S. military aircraft and fuel stores at U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Yamaguchi Prefecture — arguably the most important Marine Corps aviation facility in Japan — with “as few as 10 submunition-armed missiles,” they said.
Coming at a time when the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have demonstrated the vulnerability of airfields, Washington should make renewed efforts to shore up base defenses and enhance the overall resilience of its military infrastructure, the experts urged.
The study comes less than a month after the Pentagon warned in its latest report on China’s military power that the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force has become “increasingly capable” of conducting strikes against “regional air bases, logistics and port facilities, communications, and other ground-based infrastructure,” including on Guam — targets that PLA writings discuss as “adversary vulnerabilities.”
In their paper, Walton and Shugart noted that Beijing is also fielding sophisticated air defense networks that include “robust passive defenses, challenging sensors, and highly capable missiles and aircraft that can intercept U.S. planes.”
Even more concerning, they said, is that China’s aircraft, ground-based missile launchers, vessels and special forces can now attack U.S. aircraft and their supporting systems at airfields “globally,” including in the continental United States.
According to the report, since the early 2010s the U.S. military has added only two hardened air shelters, 41 unhardened individual aircraft shelters, one runway and one taxiway, and 17% more ramp area in airfields within 1,000 nautical miles (1,852 kilometers) of the Taiwan Strait, and outside of South Korea.
Including ramp area at allied and partner airfields outside Taiwan, combined U.S., allied and partner military airfield capacity within 1,000 nautical miles of the Taiwan Strait is roughly one-third of China’s, they wrote. Excluding the South Korean airfields, this ratio drops to a quarter, and without airfields in the Philippines, it falls further to 15%.
The authors acknowledge that while the Pentagon has consistently expressed concern regarding threats to airfields, it has devoted “relatively little attention” to countering them compared with its focus on developing modern aircraft.
Procuring just one fewer B-21 strategic bomber per year over five years, they say, could provide enough funding to build 100 hardened shelters in the continental U.S.
“The United States and its allies have adopted an approach that seems to largely assume the uncontested operation of its aircraft on the ground,” they wrote.
By contrast, China has been making substantial investments to defend, expand and fortify its air bases.
“China has spent decades hardening its airfields and preparing to generate sorties under attack,” the authors said, noting that since the early 2010s, the PLA has more than doubled the number of both hardened and unhardened aircraft shelters at military airfields to more than 3,000.
“This constitutes enough shelters to house and hide the vast majority of China’s combat aircraft,” they said, noting that Beijing has also added 20 runways, more than 40 runway-length taxiways and increased its ramp area nationwide by almost 75%.
This disparity in the number of aircraft shelters means that the PLA would need to fire far fewer “shots” to suppress or destroy U.S., allied and partner airfields than the converse.
“This imbalance ranges from approximately 25% if the U.S. employed military airfields in Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan to as great as 88% if it employed only military airfields in Japan,” according to the report.
Japan hosts some 36 military airfields, including U.S. air bases on its territory. The authors said that while these bases entered the 2010s with some degree of hardening, most of them go back to the Cold War-era and are in central and northern Japan.
“There appear to have been only two additional hardened shelters added over the last decade, with a very modest increase in the number of nonhardened individual shelters from less than 60 to almost 100,” they wrote. Three runways and 13% more ramp area were also added over the last decade.
Masashi Murano, a Japan defense expert at Hudson, said Tokyo is moving forward with plans to move Self-Defense Forces command centers underground, including for air bases in Naha, Tsuiki, Nyutabara, Komatsu, Hamamatsu, Iruma, Misawa and Chitose.
“Several of these are also being designed not only to be underground, but also to protect against electromagnetic pulse attacks,” he said, adding that the Defense Ministry plans to invest ¥87.4 billion ($552 million) for this purpose in fiscal 2025.
On the other hand, Murano said the Air Self-Defense Force has been looking at alternative ways to protect its fighters.
“The only hardened shelters capable of storing squadron-sized (20 to 40 aircraft) fighter fleets are at Chitose and Komatsu, and they do not appear to be expanded,” he said.
Instead, the service is acquiring dispersal pads and simple protective walls for fighters. The likely reason for this is not only the higher cost of a hardened shelter, Murano said.
“The Chinese already operate missiles equipped with bunker buster-type warheads, so the ASDF believes that a more maneuverable dispersion of the aircraft — such as the U.S. Air Force’s agile combat employment strategy — will be more suitable to enhance the survivability of their fighters than hardening physical protection.”
In addition, Murano said, the ASDF may think that even if the force started building those shelters now, they might no longer be ready in time.
Regardless, the authors of the Hudson report, argue that more investments in shelters and reinforcing the air base infrastructure would be the best way forward.
“What I am confident in is that most true hardened aircraft shelters should at least provide protection against submunitions,” Shugart told The Japan Times. “This means one missile would be required to destroy a single shelter plus the aircraft inside as opposed to having one missile destroying or damaging multiple unprotected aircraft using submunitions.”
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