“Rehabilitation of World War II-era airfields has provided Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) a rapidly executable avenue to enhance infrastructure in the region,” a spokesperson said.
Though the statement mentioned a “sense of urgency” enabling PACAF to “enhance … warfighting capability and improve deterrent posture alongside Allies and partners,” it did not mention China directly.
But Washington’s plans for what officials have described as “an extensive” facility on Tinian comes amid a serious military pivot to the Pacific in recent years – and as China builds its own new bases in the region, including in disputed waters.
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“The most comprehensive and serious challenge to US national security is the [People’s Republic of China’s] coercive and increasingly aggressive endeavour to refashion the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to suit its interests and authoritarian preferences,” the Department of Defence’s 2022 planning document, called the National Defence Strategy, reads.
Tinian’s old military airfield “has extensive pavement underneath the overgrown jungle. We’ll be clearing that jungle out between now and summertime,” air force General Kenneth Wilsbach recently told Japanese outlet Nikkei Asia.
Meanwhile, military projects for “fuel and airfield development” at the island’s nearby civilian airport are already under way, according to the PACAF spokesman.
If little known now, the airfield at Tinian was perhaps the most important – and the busiest – in the world in 1945, as its six hastily built runways played host to US B-29 bombers carrying out missions against Japan, some 2,300 km (1,500 miles) away.
Including, on August 6 and August 9 of that year, the planes that dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” as the weapons were known, killed some 200,000 people.
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In the last three years, money annually allocated to Indo-Pacific military construction costs has doubled, from US$1.8 billion in 2020 to just shy of US$3.6 billion in 2023, according to a recent report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS).
On Tinian, initial work started near the civilian airport in February 2022, before extending towards the World War II airfield on the north of the island.
Within two years, tarmac rehabilitation and the construction of fuel tanks are set to be completed, at a budget of at least US$162 million, part of contingency plans in the event “access to Andersen Air Force Base or other western Pacific locations is limited or denied,” according to air force financial documents reviewed by AFP.
Across multiple projects at Tinian, the total cost is unclear, “due to differing timelines and requirements, and the fact that not all work is being executed by the US air force,” the PACAF spokesperson said.
“A lot of our strategy there is taking many of the World War II airfields that frankly are overgrown by the jungle, and there’s still concrete or asphalt underneath,” Wilsbach said in a September speech.
“We’re not making super bases anywhere. We’re looking for a place to get some fuel and some weapons, maybe get a bite to eat and take a nap and then get airborne again.”
Satellite images already show the extent of the work under way, including a new tarmac built just north of the civilian airport.