The Air Force intends to use four airfields in the Pacific for more than 6,000 aerial operations per year, as part of its expanding operations in the region.
Calling it a “unique opportunity” to support new operational objectives, the Air Force plans to use Saipan International Airport, Tinian International Airport, Tinian North Field and Rota International Airport, all located in the Northern Mariana Islands, for thousands of training flights and aerial exercises per year. The operations are meant to support the service’s Agile Combat Employment, or ACE, strategy, which aims to disperse aerial operations over several locations to avoid creating one large target.
The plan was announced in a notice of intent published late in October. The notice calls for getting environmental impact statements on plans to stage aircraft on the three Pacific islands.
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According to the notice, the Air Force wants to carry out up to 1,200 fixed-wing and 320 rotary-wing aircraft operations each year per airfield, or more than 6,000 in total annually. To support that, the service would set up temporary infrastructure at each airfield, which would each be staffed by up to 1,000 people. The islands are relatively close to each other and a few dozen miles away from Guam, which has become central to U.S. military planning on potential littoral and island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific.
Per the Air Force, the plan would allow it to “test and employ tailorable force packages; exercise movement, sustainment, logistics, and command-and-control functions across multiple locations to replicate the complexity of distributed operations in contingency environments; and strengthen interoperability with Joint, allied, and partner forces within the Mariana Islands region.”
There is also an alternative proposal, which could see even more aircraft flights from the four airfields and would allow for “up to 1,400 fixed-wing operations and up to 384 rotary-wing operations per airfield annually.”
Draft environmental impact statements are expected next fall.
The Air Force has been working to revitalize the airfields at Tinian for the last several years, upgrading infrastructure or in the case of the island’s North Field, clearing “overgrown jungle” to make the installation usable again. The airfields have been used in recent years, as part of multinational exercises like Valiant Shield, but not on the scale proposed here.
The Air Force isn’t alone. Other branches have looked to old World War II-era bases in the Pacific as staging grounds for island operations. The Marine Corps has been rehabilitating a historic airfield on Peleliu. Additionally, the overall military has been expanding defenses and bases on Guam, which Air Force documents called “centralized operating installations.”
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