Fortress Guam - The Margin

Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a two-part investigation. Read the first story, “The Pesticide Papers,” here. CHamoru is the officially adopted spelling in Guam. This project was produced in collaboration with The Margin and The War Horse.

Life felt peaceful when Robert Underwood was a child on Guam. 

The small island in the western Pacific had survived three brutal years under Japanese occupation during World War II. But in the early 1950s, village life had a rhythm to it. Half the island’s population was still Indigenous CHamoru people, who trace their roots on the island back thousands of years. The U.S. military, which had been growing its presence on the island since American forces retook it from Japan in 1944, was there, too. But military folks had separate lives.

“They lived behind the fence. They shopped behind the fence,” Underwood said. “I grew up at a time when CHamoru was the language of the neighborhood.”

By the time Underwood—who would later serve as Guam’s delegate to Congress and as president of the University of Guam—graduated high school in 1965, things were changing. During his junior year at Tumon Junior-Senior High School—named for the district where it was located—the school became John F. Kennedy High School after the president’s assassination. The change reflected Guam’s growing connection to events unfolding thousands of miles away on the U.S. mainland.

In the two decades after World War II, Guam’s population nearly quadrupled from prewar levels, driven in part by military personnel and Filipino construction workers who came to expand the island’s bases. In 1965, B-52 bombers began taking off from Guam on missions over Vietnam, and the island became a critical stop for refueling military ships and treating and transporting wounded service members evacuated from the war.

Guam has remained a military hub ever since, acting as a staging and refueling stop during wars in the Middle East. Thousands of service members and their families are permanently stationed there, and slowly but steadily, military activity became the primary force shaping the island.

“Whatever the military saw as threats became the guiding principle for life on Guam,” Underwood, who is now with the Pacific Center for Island Security, said.

Today, that threat is China—and the Pentagon is relying on Guam more than ever as a centerpiece of its Pacific strategy. The island is located 3,500 miles west of Hawaii, in range of Chinese missiles. Defense analysts say building up the island’s defensive—and increasingly, offensive—capabilities is critical preparation for a potential conflict. More than 5,000 Marines are expected to rotate to the island in the coming years, and last fall, the military signed off on constructing a new multilayered 360-degree missile defense system, spread across 16 sites on the island.

But activists and local leaders say Guam’s strained resources can’t support the surge in military activity without sustaining irreparable damage to the island’s fragile ecosystem. And while the military has promised to be mindful of local concerns, environmental advocates argue that decades of the Defense Department taking ancestral CHamoru land for its own use and leaving them with toxic Superfund sites have shown the Pentagon can’t be trusted to expand its presence there in a responsible way. 

This article is the second in a two-part series, published by The War Horse and The Margin, examining how the U.S. military buildup on Guam is impacting the island’s environment, public health, Indigenous CHamoru communities, and military personnel. In part one, we investigated the military’s legacy of toxic contamination on Guam. In this article, we examine the environmental impacts on the island as the military looks to counter China.

The Supreme Court in October will consider whether the Air Force complied with federal environmental law in a case centered on open-air detonation of munitions on Guam’s beaches. Through public records requests, The War Horse and The Margin have obtained previously unreleased letters and reports related to the Air Force’s open detonation practice in Guam and its relationship with environmental regulators.

Monaeka Flores—whose community organization, Prutehi Guåhan, is suing the Air Force in the case—says the case deals with only one of many environmental concerns related to the military.

Guam is a U.S. territory, which means that its residents are American citizens but can’t vote for president, and its delegate to Congress cannot vote on the House floor. While billions of dollars in military funding flow to the island, Guam has struggled to maintain its power and water infrastructure. Roads and bridges, already strained by severe typhoons the island endures regularly, have been further damaged by heavy military trucks. The island faces a severe shortage of doctors and nurses. Although nearly 15% of Guam’s local population has served in the military—Guam has the highest enlistment rate per capita in the United States—veterans sometimes have to fly seven hours one-way to Hawaii to access care with the Department of Veterans Affairs. Local leaders have little leverage over the US military.

“Guam is politically always—not a junior partner, if a partner at all,” Underwood said. “It’s like you’re just somebody who gets the memo."

A Growing Military Footprint on Guam

The torpedo that sank the USS Juneau was fired by a Japanese submarine. 

It hit toward the back of the ship, throwing an enormous plume of water and debris high into the sky as the ship’s stern began to slip beneath the water. Not long after, the Juneau came to rest on the ocean floor, 200 nautical miles off Guam’s coast. 

The Juneau, an amphibious transport dock, had entered service in 1969, moving military equipment and forces during Vietnam and Desert Storm before retiring from the fleet in 2008. Her sinking came this summer during Operation Valiant Shield, a joint training exercise in the Pacific Ocean involving U.S., Japanese, and other allied forces.

The military touted the ship’s sinking—a SINKEX, in military parlance—as a valuable training exercise that brought together air, sea, and submarine assets to practice coordinated live-fire exercises in real-world conditions.

“This SINKEX provided an outstanding opportunity for our joint team to integrate capabilities across domains, honing the lethal precision and coordination essential for high-end maritime operations in the Pacific theater,” said Navy Rear Adm. Eric Anduze, then-commander of Carrier Strike Group 5, which took part in the exercise.

But for environmental advocates, the sinking was another instance of a military decision that quite literally shaped the landscape of their home without care for the long-term impact.

“They drop thousands of pounds of bombs and then they just let it sink,” Flores said. “And then they leave it there in the ocean.”

U.S. Pacific Command said the Juneau was fully cleaned before the sinking, its toxic chemicals and petroleum residues removed, and that the site of the exercise was selected to minimize impacts to marine life. But Flores and others remain skeptical. And in any case, a massive joint military exercise like Operation Valiant Shield would be effectively impossible to stop—like so much of the military activity in the region.

“It’s so overwhelming,” Flores said. “You can feel so hopeless sometimes.” 

The military has long shaped Guam, from its ecology and economy to the emotions of its inhabitants. Just hours after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, warplanes took off from Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands and began bombing Guam. Although the U.S. had been in control of the small Pacific island for more than 40 years after taking Guam from Spain in the Spanish-American War, it had done little to fortify its remote territory. The only military forces there at the dawn of America’s involvement in World War II were small Marine and naval units of just a few hundred people and a local CHamoru guard force. They were quickly overpowered by Japanese forces, which held the island for nearly three years.

After the U.S. military retook Guam in 1944, it was determined to never let anything similar happen again. Towards the war’s end, the Navy constructed massive airfields and supply depots, literally paving the way to a permanent militarization of the island.

Today, about a quarter of Guam is controlled by the military. Andersen Air Force Base and the Marine Corps’ Camp Blaz sit at the northern end of the island; Naval Base Guam is in the southwest. In between are scattered munitions and fuel storage facilities, communications stations, and military family housing. 

“The reason that Guam was important in the 1600s for the Spanish was the same reason it was important for the United States when they got it from Spain in 1898, the same reason we fought so hard during the Marianas campaign to recapture Guam and support the strategic bombing effort in 1944, and it’s the reason that we really kind of prioritize it today,” said Carlton Haelig, a defense researcher at the Center for a New American Security. 

“It is a logistics and forward deployment hub to project power from American territory deep into the Western Pacific,” he said.

That is increasingly true as military strategists look to China and the possibility that Beijing could move against Taiwan, the self-governing island it claims as its territory, potentially this decade. A conflict over Taiwan could draw in the United States, which has long provided the island with defensive weapons and maintained a strong relationship with Taipei. Taiwan is also an important trading partner with the U.S., which is committed to maintaining stability and open commerce across the Taiwan Strait. 

In 2006, the Defense Department agreed to move 8,000 Marines from Okinawa, Japan, to Guam. The original impetus for the relocation was not particularly strategic—in 1995, three American service members kidnapped and raped a 12-year-old girl in Okinawa, unleashing a wave of popular anger, rooted in decades of protests over the American military presence, and pushing the Japanese government to demand a reduction in the U.S. footprint there. 

But the Pentagon quickly realized that Guam offered benefits as China built up its military.

“It means that there will be Marines that are based on U.S. sovereign territory,” Haelig said. “We don’t have to do the political negotiations with allies and partners to put active fighting forces on their territory.”

But the Pentagon was unprepared for the local reaction when the military unveiled its plan to relocate Marines in 2009. Outrage on Guam was instantaneous. Locals worried about a potential rise in crime, echoing the frustration of Okinawa residents. They argued that the military buildup would limit access to culturally important sites, tax the island’s drinking water supply, strain its power grid and roads, and destroy already-fragile habitats for endangered species. 

The military released an 8,000-page environmental impact statement for the plan, initially asking the public to submit comments on the plan within 45 days. After pushback, it extended the timeline to 90 days.

“You would literally have to read more than 100 pages per day in order to really read the entire document by the end of the comment period,” Victoria Leon Guerrero, an instructor at the University of Guam, told KUAM News at the time.

But locals rose to the challenge. After the environmental assessment drew more than 10,000 comments, the Navy, which oversees the Marine Corps, altered course. It paused its plans to dredge a local harbor to accommodate nuclear aircraft carriers, delayed the timeline for the buildup, and reduced the number of Marines planned for relocation from 8,000 to 5,000.

The Navy also acknowledged it had to do more to support the island beyond its base fences. Robert Work, then undersecretary of the Navy, offered a framework for military development on the island called “One Guam,” which included taking local concerns seriously and investing in infrastructure to support civilian life on the island while minimizing the military’s strain on local resources. Work also promised to return more land to Guam over the course of the proposed military buildup than it currently controlled.

“I am hopeful we can resolve the issues we are facing,” Work wrote in a letter to the governor of Guam outlining the military’s promises to the island. “The Department is committed to improving life for the people of Guam and the military personnel who will call Guam home."

Exploding Munitions in a Fragile Ecosystem

The last time Maxx Phillips was in Ritidian, a stunning wildlife preserve at the northern tip of Guam, she took a long hike through the limestone forest. The thing she noticed most was the silence.

Guam’s limestone forests were once filled with the chattering and chirping of the Mariana fruit bat, Guam kingfisher, and Mariana crow. But during Phillips’ hike, the air was so still that she whipped around when she suddenly heard the fluttering of wings.

“I was like, ‘A bird!’ I turned around, and it was a moth,” she said. “The fact that in my entire five-hour hike through Ritidian, that’s what I heard is just insane.”

Guam has one of the most unique ecosystems in the world. For thousands of years, birds, bats, and other creatures lived on an isolated island paradise, evolving without natural predators, making a home in Guam’s rare limestone forests. Enormous hermit crabs weighing up to 9 pounds crack open coconuts with their giant claws. The tiny Guam tree snail, with its translucent-looking striped shell, feeds on decaying island plants. Historically, a dozen different bird species lived in Guam’s forests.

Today, just two remain.

Development, much of it driven by the military, has thrown the island’s once-balanced ecosystem off-kilter. So has the brown tree snake, which likely hitched a ride as a stowaway on a ship during the postwar buildup and has wreaked havoc on native bat and bird populations ever since.

The military has spent millions of dollars to suppress brown tree snakes on the island. But the snakes remain. For Phillips, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, that failure is emblematic of the military’s broader relationship with Guam.

In October, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a suit filed by Monaeka Flores’ group, Prutehi Guåhan, against the U.S. Air Force over the service’s environmental review responsibilities as it seeks to continue its practice of exploding World War II-era munitions on a beach in Guam.

Tarague Beach sits directly above the island’s primary aquifer, a geographic wonder that has attracted people to the area for thousands of years. The beach is significant in CHamoru culture as one of the areas of earliest settlement. Flores learned to swim in its warm, turquoise waters, near where her great-grandfather once raised livestock. 

“It’s a place that’s very near and dear to me,” Flores said.

The Air Force acquired the land by eminent domain after World War II, Flores said. Today, her family needs permission to visit the area. 

The Air Force maintains its open-detonation practice is safe. But the service has resisted conducting a comprehensive human health and environmental review or evaluating alternative technologies for munitions disposal, despite requests from environmental regulators in 2022 and 2024. In its case, Prutehi Guåhan argues that this puts the Air Force in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act. The Air Force argues a different law, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, means it doesn’t need to conduct those reviews.

The dispute began in 2021 when the Air Force applied for a new open-detonation permit after its previous one expired. It also asked to restart open burning after two decades of inactivity—without any environmental review or considering alternatives—of munitions containing toxic metals and compounds, many of which are known to cause cancer. 

The lead attorney for Prutehi Guåhan, David Henkin, said the law requires the Air Force to see if there is “a better way.” 

Unpublished letters and reports released under Guam’s public records act to The War Horse and The Margin revealed environmental regulators have serious concerns about the Air Force’s claims. In 2022, for instance, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency advised Guam EPA that the Air Force had no way to demonstrate it wasn’t polluting the surrounding environment as the service tried to avoid a Human Health and Ecological Risk Assessment. The EPA recommended Guam EPA require the Air Force to install a groundwater monitoring system on base.

“This issue is extremely important because [Andersen Air Force Base] sits on a sole source aquifer,” the EPA’s letter said. 

A National Academy of Sciences study in 2019 had found there were alternative technologies to demilitarize nearly all of the munitions in U.S. military stockpiles, with a few limited exceptions. 

“The Air Force is completely ignoring that the facts have changed,” Henkin said. “Maybe back in 1982, when they started doing open detonation, that was the only way to dispose of their expired munitions. But that is no longer the case.”

In 2022, the U.S. EPA issued a memo reminding facilities with open burn permits that they were required to evaluate—“and re-evaluate”—whether safer alternatives existed. In 2024, the agency began the process of revising the standards around open burning and open detonation. According to the EPA, that process is expected to be finalized by the end of the year.

In May—more than four years after Guam EPA requested it—the Air Force completed a report evaluating alternatives to open detonation. The report, obtained by The War Horse and The Margin under Guam’s public records law, determined that open detonation was the only method to safely and effectively treat “any significant portion” of the munitions waste.

In comments on the report, Guam EPA challenged the Air Force’s reasoning, arguing that federal law does not require an alternative technology to handle some minimum amount of waste before it can be considered viable. 

“The metrics for assessing if [open detonation] may be used as a treatment method ... [are] whether there are any alternative treatment methods that are (1) safe and (2) available,” the agency wrote. 

The report also concluded that no suitable locations existed for alternative treatment systems. When Guam EPA asked how the Air Force had reached that conclusion, the service declined to provide further details, citing “defense critical infrastructure security information.”

The Air Force also said it lacked the resources to properly operate alternative technologies because of their “complexity.”

Guam EPA rejected that explanation, pointing to the billions of dollars the Pentagon is spending on Guam. 

“This is not regarded as acceptable rationale,” the agency wrote.

Protecting What Remains

In 2024, more than a dozen years after the U.S. signed an official agreement with Japan to relocate Marines from Okinawa to Guam, the first contingent arrived on the island: 105 logistics support specialists from 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force.

The Marine Corps officially activated Camp Blaz in 2020, the first new Marine base in more than 70 years. The main part of the 4,000-acre base, which cost about $9 billion to build, sits next to Andersen Air Force Base in northwest Guam; its new urban training complex is on the eastern side of the island. Construction meant razing more than a thousand acres of the island’s remaining limestone forests, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, and disinterring ancestral CHamoru graves. A massive new live-fire training range near the Guam National Wildlife Refuge at Ritidian can force the refuge to close and restrict access to nearby waters when the range is in use.

The live-fire range—and Camp Blaz’s development more broadly—is the subject of a separate ongoing lawsuit filed in 2023 by the Center for Biological Diversity and Prutehi Guåhan, Flores’ group, against the Navy and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

That suit alleges that—despite promises made before the military buildup—the Navy failed to fulfill environmental commitments that included controlling the brown tree snake population, restoring and managing habitats for the Guam kingfisher, and installing fencing to keep out deer and feral pigs.

“There’s just this litany of things that the military, in their own document, promised to do—which arguably was not enough anyway—and they failed to meet not even the bare minimum,” said Phillips, an attorney on the case.

The lawsuit also alleges that nearly 500 acres of the Marine Corps’ live-fire range is the same land the Air Force had previously set aside as protected habitat to satisfy environmental commitments for a separate project—effectively allowing one military project to consume land another had promised to protect.

In December, the U.S. District Court of Guam ruled that the Navy could not limit discovery to administrative records such as environmental reviews and had to produce additional evidence for the plaintiffs to examine. 

Nearly 10 months later, Phillips said the Navy had not produced the required documents.

Guam in the Crosshairs

Earlier this summer, Marines from 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force gathered at the new live-fire range at Camp Blaz for a test of the Corps’ latest missile defense system.

They tilted a blue launcher towards the heavens and fired. The missiles streaked over the coastal waters of Guam, leaving long white contrails behind before meeting their target high above the ocean.

It was the first test on Guam of the Marine Corps’ new medium-range intercept capability missile defense system. It will probably not be the last.

A decade ago, China unveiled a ballistic missile capable of traveling more than 2,500 miles. It was soon nicknamed the “Guam Express.” Guam sits less than 2,000 miles from Shanghai. 

“If there’s conflict over Taiwan, then China has the capability of attacking Guam, which nobody had before,” Underwood said. 

That threat has driven the military’s newest ambitions on the island: an enhanced integrated air and missile defense system, which networks interceptors and advanced radars across 16 sites on Guam to provide 360-degree protection from ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles. Whether such a system will prove effective is an open question. According to accounting from the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, the hit rate on ballistic interception tests is just over 80%. In 2024, a Congressional research report stated that ballistic missile defense systems are “neither intended for or capable of defending the homeland against the ballistic missiles of peer competitors Russia and China."

The Missile Defense Agency’s environmental assessment found that the project would clear some of Guam’s remaining limestone forest at nine locations, threatening several endangered species. The agency proposed measures to reduce that harm, including setting aside other land as protected habitat and installing fencing to shield bats and birds from predators—the same kinds of mitigation measures the Navy is accused of failing to carry out elsewhere on Guam. Even with those measures, the Missile Defense Agency concluded that the project would cause “major, long term, and significant” impacts to endangered species habitat. 

It approved the project anyway.

“We recognize Guam’s unique and sensitive natural environment and the importance of protecting the island’s biological and cultural resources,” a spokesperson from U.S. Pacific Command told The War Horse and The Margin.

The spokesperson noted that the Missile Defense Agency and the Army consulted with local and federal partners to develop environmental mitigation measures.

“As implementation moves forward, we will continue coordinating with regulatory agencies and local partners to meet applicable environmental requirements while balancing the responsibility to defend Guam and its residents, both civilian and military, against evolving air and missile threats,” the spokesperson said.

“It often feels very much like they’re checking a box,” said Zeno Camacho Deleon Guerrero Jr., a Saipan resident who works with Our Common Wealth 670, an environmental group based in the Northern Mariana Islands north of Guam. 

The group argues that the military’s environmental review should have considered impacts across the broader region. 

“If you can strike Guam, you can strike Saipan, Tinian, and Rota,” he said. “As a military [command], they’re called Joint Region Marianas, right? So from the military’s perspective, we are organized as one whole unit.”

Military officials and political leaders in the Northern Mariana Islands have also explored ways to expand the U.S. military footprint as the Pentagon increases its presence across the Pacific. 

This summer, the Army brought its new Dark Eagle hypersonic missile system to Tinian, placing China within range. The Defense Department is also planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in military construction across the islands in the coming years, though the Navy recently scaled back plans for live-fire training in the Northern Marianas after local opposition.

Theresa ‘Isa’ Arriola, another member of Our Common Wealth 670, warned that tying the local economy too closely to the military could put the Northern Marianas on the same path as Guam. 

“Military investment does not secure local prosperity,” she wrote in a report this summer.

On Guam, that dependence is already reshaping the local economy, said Nate Tilton, a doctoral researcher and co-founder of UC Berkeley’s Critical Pacific Islands Studies Collective who studies veterans’ experiences on Guam. 

“Things have skyrocketed,” Tilton said.

In addition to the 5,000 Marines slated to rotate through Guam, the new missile defense system is expected to bring an additional 2,300 military and support personnel and their families over the next decade. Hundreds of foreign construction workers are also expected to arrive each year. 

That comes on top of a construction boom surrounding Camp Blaz. This spring, more than 6,000 foreign construction workers—equivalent to 3.5% of Guam’s population—were working on the island to build military facilities and related infrastructure.

Tilton said the influx of people is worsening the island’s already-strained hospitals. Housing has also become harder for local residents to afford.

The military is looking to acquire 2,400 housing units in the coming years, further tightening Guam’s already limited housing stock. Service members who do not live in military housing receive housing allowances that often exceed what local residents can afford, adding pressure to a rental market already strained by temporary construction workers. 

That pressure is spilling into home prices as well.

“When they start looking for a place of their own, that’s where things start to become a bigger issue,” Tilton said. “You have people who are like, ‘Oh man, I bought a house [for] like $150,000 back in 2020, 2021.’ Now those same houses are $300,000 to $550,000.”

Housing is only one part of the squeeze. While much of the missile defense system will be installed on Defense Department property, the Pentagon has requested funding to acquire more than 100 additional acres “at various locations on the island”—that request is currently tied up in congressional debates over the National Defense Authorization Act. 

Residents have also expressed concerns about radiation and debris falling on homes during testing. In 2024, the Missile Defense Agency sent letters to 250 households asking residents to temporarily leave their property during testing for safety reasons, and at two of the missile defense system sites, the zones for explosive safety areas extend past military-owned property.

“Even though some of them might be on existing military property, they also have kind of a safety area around them, which would affect people on their own land,” Underwood said. “So it’s not exactly sufficient to just say, how much land are they taking?”

The rapid expansion is also straining the military infrastructure meant to support it. Investigators from the Government Accountability Office visited Guam to assess preparations for the missile defense system. In their report, GAO described some Army facilities supporting missile defense as “austere.” 

While investigators withheld certain details because of classification concerns, they reported that soldiers lacked indoor storage space for missile launcher components and spare batteries, forcing equipment to remain outside where it was exposed to corrosion. Investigators also observed an Army truck parked outside leaking fluid into the grass.

“You’re always kind of trying to track what is it that they want to do?” Underwood said. “Because as they go through the process of digging up the island, they’re always going to disrupt the environmental quality."

‘We’re Not Disposable’

When Floyd Baldwin needs gas, he heads to the Navy base. Baldwin first came to Guam for a one-year Marine Corps assignment. He liked the island enough to extend his stay and eventually married a local woman. After leaving the Marines, the couple moved to Texas. But island life beckoned. Over the past two decades, Guam has been a full-time home.

As prices have risen on the island, Baldwin said his military benefits have helped. Gas on base can save him nearly a dollar a gallon.  

“I’m very grateful that I have on-base privileges,” he said.

For Baldwin, the military is simply part of life on Guam. But he is less certain about the island’s growing role in missile defense.

“Supposedly they’re going to be able to shoot these missiles out of the sky. Well, I know for sure that you don’t get all the missiles. If they send 50, at least five or six of them get through,” he said. “Most people try really hard to not think about it."

That unease reflects a broader concern on Guam: that the same military buildup intended to protect the island may also make it a more inviting target.

“Military activities in Guam become more of a target and less of a force for defense,” Underwood said. “Like cannon fodder.”

“Guam is not just a strategic hub on the map, it is the tip of the nation’s spear in the Pacific and home to American citizens and service members that we are charged to protect,” a U.S. Pacific Command spokesperson said. “Defending the American homeland is our highest priority, and Guam is part of that homeland. The Department of War will continue to prioritize the resources, capabilities, and posture necessary to defend Guam and preserve regional stability across the Pacific.”

Adding to local concerns is a provision in this year’s proposed National Defense Authorization Act that would allow the Pentagon to deploy micronuclear reactors to the region—a particularly sensitive issue in the Pacific Islands, where U.S. nuclear weapons testing left lasting health and environmental damage. Islanders suffered burns and radiation sickness, and their descendants have had higher rates of birth defects and cancers.

The military has not publicly detailed how the reactors would be used, nor confirmed the military will actually bring them to Guam. But Underwood and others worry they’ll be used to help power the missile defense system.

“We’re planning for a war against an enemy that we consider our number one geopolitical rival, and we know that they are targeting Guam with missiles,” said Alan Kuperman, a University of Texas professor who studies military strategy and nuclear technology. “So is that the place you want to put a microreactor that can’t withstand a missile impact, and that will very likely disperse radioactivity in the event of such an attack?” 

Carlton Haelig believes a direct Chinese attack is unlikely. But he agreed that the island’s importance to the U.S. military raises its value as a target.

“It’s obviously closer to the conflict. It’s obviously a higher-priority target for China,” Haelig said. “Increasing the U.S. military presence there, making it more and more important to the US deterrence and warfighting posture in the region, it certainly increases the likelihood that there would be significant damage—not just to the military infrastructure there, but collateral damage to the civilian lives that are there as well.”

This spring, Navy Adm. Sam Paparo, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told Congress that the military is planning to place not only defensive missiles on Guam, but offensive weapons as well, according to a report obtained by The Washington Times. The missile defense system itself, he said, would “provide the basis for a future offensive capability.”

For local advocates, that is the deeper fear: that the military will continue to value Guam for what it offers strategically, rather than the living, breathing home of people and animals and plants that have been there for thousands of years.

“It feels like our island is being set up to be a dead zone, a sacrifice zone for never-ending war,” Flores said. 

But she said she will keep fighting.

“CHamoru people and the people of Guam, we’re not disposable.”

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