Major Airfield Expansion On Wake Island Seen By Satellite As U.S. Preps For Pacific Fight

[Get Ya Wig Split]

Major Airfield Expansion On Wake Island Seen By Satellite As U.S. Preps For Pacific Fight
America's remote island outpost in the Pacific is an essential fallback point for pushing airpower west during a major conflict.​

​

America's remote outpost deep in the Pacific, situated roughly between Japan and Hawaii, Wake Island serves as a reserve airfield should American airpower have to fallback from the far reaches of Western Pacific during a peer state conflict. It also provides a reverse utility, working as a staging ground in a crisis for air combat missions heading west, into Russia's and especially China's highly-defended anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) bubbles that emanate far from their shores. With the ongoing 'pivot towards the Pacific' and with adversary A2/AD capabilities creeping farther east, Wake Island is more important than it has been in decades, possibly since World War II.

The restricted access island—which is one of the most remote on Earth—is an unincorporated territory of the United States that is also claimed by the Marshall Islands. The vast majority of the atoll is taken up by a 9,800-foot runway—long enough to accommodate anything in the Pentagon's inventory—and the airfield infrastructure and staging areas that surround it. Although it supports some missile defense tests with launchpads scattered around its southernmost tip, it is best known for being an emergency divert point for aircraft crossing the Pacific and as a stopping point for U.S. military aircraft moving from the U.S. to Asia.

New satellite imagery that The War Zone obtained from Planet Labs dated June 25th, 2020 shows that substantial improvements to the base have occurred recently. Based on archival satellite imagery, the major expansions to the airfield began early this year and are still underway today.

The new satellite image is posted below and you can see a full-resolution version of here. It shows the large eastern apron area's big expansion, as well as an enlarged secondary apron area on the west end on the runway. The runway itself has been completely rebuilt.

The 6/25/2020 image shows the large apron expansion on the eastern side of the airfield, as well as a ton of activity and construction in the support area to the north.

The Pentagon has been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the secretive strategic stronghold in recent years. These expenditures have included the apron and runway improvements, as well as a large solar farm that can be seen in the western area of the island in the recent satellite photo. It's more likely than not that even more investment into the island's infrastructure will be made in the near term as rising tensions with China, North Korea, and Russia have reinvigorated the strategic importance of the remote base.

Beyond its clear logistical utility, acting as a major hub where there isn't another for thousands of miles, it sits outside the range of China's and North Korea's medium-range ballistic missiles, and largely at the end, if not entirely out of range, of their intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs). Guam, which is situated about 1,500 miles further west, is well within the range of these weapons.

During the opening stages of a major conflict with China, America's bases that are within range of these missiles would be overwhelmed by them, at the very least knocking bases like Kadena in Okinawa out of commission for a substantial period of time. These strikes would likely be layered with cruise missile attacks, making them harder to defend against and upping the odds that Beijing could neuter American airpower throughout the region in the opening exchanges of a conflict.

Guam, which hosts a key U.S. naval base and the sprawling Andersen Air Force Base, would be targeted as well, although at greater range. This island has a THAAD missile battery that has been in place for years to fend-off ballistic missile attacks specifically, but the sheer numbers a foe like China can fire at the island makes defending it a highly dubious exercise. Rebuffing more limited attacks from a foe like North Korea is far more relevant to the island's defenses. Other airfields in the Marianas Island Chain, or within the MRBM and IRBM range in general, are even more vulnerable.

USS Theodore Roosevelt operating off Wake Island.

So, you can see how Wake Island quickly becomes a key fallback position during what could be an incredibly violent and fast-moving conflict, at least at first. The island itself can be quickly fortified with its own air defenses and those based on forward-deployed U.S. Navy surface combatants sailing between the Chinese mainland and the island. Wake Island is also thought to be within the outer engagement umbrella of the ground-based midcourse defense (GMD) interceptors based in Fort Greely, Alaska, which are designed to counter low-volumes of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) threats.

The idea of making Wake Island becoming a hub of airpower activity that looks to overcome the 'tyranny of distance' that is so closely associated with conflict in the Pacific Theater is already being trialed. Just last year, B-2 Spirits used the airfield for the first time as a forward re-arming and refueling point (FARP), with their sorties beginning at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, not Guam. This would be the likely arrangement if U.S. installations to the east were threatened or destroyed during a conflict.

B-2 Spirit operating from Wake Island.

Heavy bomber sorties against an enemy such as China will be absolutely essential to slowly degrade its A2/AD bubble so that less capable and shorter-ranged assets can push close enough towards that country's shores to be useful at all. This will be a very high-stakes and laborious process during the early days and possibly weeks of a conflict. Bombers will also be critical when it comes to taking on China's growing fleet of advanced warships that will stand between U.S. territory and targets in and around the Chinese mainland.

As a conflict carries on, stealthy B-2 bombers and penetrating tactical airpower will be essential to making major progress in an air war against China via their ability to make the necessary volume of direct attacks required to prosecute such a conflict. There is an absurd notion that standoff weapons alone can win a war against a peer state, even a relatively limited one. This is impossible as we are talking about target sets that number in the tens of thousands or more.

There will not be enough highly expensive standoff weapons, such as cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons, to come even near to satisfying these requirements. As such, those standoff weapons will be used to break down the enemy's defenses and to strike strategic sensors and nerve centers, in order to blind the enemy and negate force-multiplying capabilities and some key kinetic ones, as well. In effect, this will open the door to broader follow-on strikes made by platforms that can get close enough to their targets to be employed en masse.

A Navy MH-60S flies along Wake Island's narrow coast, with one of its historical gun emplacements visible.

Of course, even with Wake Island, any operation like this will rely very heavily on America's rapidly aging aerial refueling tanker fleet. This includes refueling the bombers, yes, but especially when it comes to short-ranged tactical airpower once they can get close enough to their targets to be relevant in a peer state conflict in the Pacific at all.

Remember, an F-35A has a combat radius of around 650 miles, and this is generous compared to most fighter designs. This means a tanker will be at risk within 650 miles of the aircraft's target area when making a direct attack. It is roughly 3,000 miles from Wake Island to Chinese shores. So, you can see just how heavily the tanker fleet will be taxed to sustain even a limited tanker bridge for tactical aircraft to be useful along the leading edge of such a conflict. We have talked about these issues in depth many times before, which you can read about here, here, and here.

F-22s over Wake Island—America's massive investment in short-range tactical airpower is ill-suited for the Pacific Theater, making Wake Island an absolutely key component of the 'tanker bridge' that will be required to shuttle fighters like the F-22 over thousands of miles to the front lines of a peer state conflict in Asia.

This brings us back to just how important Wake Island is. America's tankers and fighters would be pushed back to Hawaii, positioned 2,300 miles from Wake Island, or even Alaska, if it were not for the island outpost, at least initially, during a major conflict. Midway, which sits 1,200 miles to the east of Wake Island, is another option, but it has limited capacity and a shorter runway. So, the idea is that Wake Island would be packed with aircraft moving to and fro across the Pacific during such a major crisis, at least until the enemy's A2/AD bubble can be degraded significantly and austere airfields farther east can be developed and activated. Even then, those forward bases would have limited capacity for prolonged operations and would be more vulnerable to enemy attacks.

With all this in mind, the upgrades to Wake Island are absolutely necessary and couldn't have come soon enough.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...n-by-satellite-as-u-s-preps-for-pacific-fight

@F-22Raptor @Hamartia Antidote @Vanguard One @Oldman1 @Viet @gambit

@Beast @Han Patriot @eldarlmari

 

[Yaseen1]

u.s will lead world to ww3 as planned by israel leading to nuclear war and eliminating huge population from world

 

[Get Ya Wig Split]

The US Military Is Pouring Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars Into Tiny Wake Island
The historic World War II site is on the front lines again as part of an expanded U.S. missile defense system.

The following report was contributed by our partners at the Honolulu Civil Beat.

Kristin Downey - Amid mounting tensions in the Pacific, the U.S. government is investing a lot of money on infrastructure at an isolated atoll, Wake Island, best known as the site of a heroic World War II battle.

Little information is publicly available about Wake, a secretive military base on a cluster of three small islands far out into the Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and Japan. Wake is operated by the U.S. Air Force through Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, and is located within the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument.

Wake Island is linked together in history with Pearl Harbor because both were hit by successful Japanese surprise attacks during a 24-hour period in December 1941.

Now Wake is at the forefront of a new military buildup in the North Pacific. A review of federal contracting information and defense industry press releases confirm that the United States government has committed hundreds of millions of dollars for work at Wake in the past few years.

Lt. Col. Rebecca Corbin, commander of the Alaska-based 611th Civil Engineering Squadron, acknowledged in an email that a military buildup is underway at Wake.

“The increased activity in recent times is not an illusion,” she wrote. “There are indeed a lot of changes happening on that small atoll.”

The Pacific Air Force Regional Support Center is “pouring a lot of investment into the infrastructure and the contracted support to that location,” she wrote, including a new contract that will manage airfield operations, accommodations for workers and public works projects.

The spending includes more than $200 million for facilities operations in the past seven years to an Alaska-based firm called Chugach Federal Solutions for what was labeled “Phase-In Wake Island,” according to USASpending.gov, a federal website that tracks government spending. In September, another Alaska-based corporation announced it had received a $470 million, 12-year contract for airfield support at three military bases, including Wake Island.

In February, a firm called Aecom was awarded an $87 million contract for work at Wake Island.

None of these companies responded to requests for comment.

In the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2017, the U.S. committed $11.7 million for construction of a test support facility at Wake, at the same time it committed $86 million for a ballistic missile defense site at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, about 700 miles from Wake. The contract on Wake appears to have been awarded to a construction company based on Guam to construct a metal building that would provide work space for 60 deployed personnel during Missile Defense Agency test events.

That same year, the federal government also committed $27 million for an upgraded electrical distribution system, according to a press release.

The work on both projects was expected to be completed by early 2019.

In Washington on Monday, Navy Vice Adm. Jon Hill delivered a public presentation on the effectiveness of a March 25 missile defense test over the Pacific, where an intercontinental ballistic missile was launched from Kwajalein, tracked by what Hill called “two powerful radars,” including one at Wake Island. Two ground-based interceptors in California were launched soon after, and both successfully collided with the ICBM target and destroyed it, Hill said.

Hill?s presentation at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, posted on a Defense Department website, suggests that Wake is being revitalized as a center of military operations in the Pacific as part of what is called a “layered missile defense system.”

Hill said it was important for the U.S. to beef up its missile defense capabilities because of what he called “near-peer competitors” who are designing and fielding advanced missiles that are harder to track.

The U.S. is facing a number of new challenges in the Pacific, including continuing tensions with North Korea and increasingly militarism from China and an ongoing trade war. China has established numerous military installations on islands in the South China Sea, including airfields, missile, radar and helicopter infrastructure.

Other countries are bulking up their military presence as well. Japan opened bases at home in March for surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles, according to the Japan Times.

Corbin said in the email that U.S. buildup has been going on for awhile.

“Huge projects have been underway in the last two to three years,” she said, including the removal of scrap metal and tons of solid waste material.

She said that the U.S. government has committed $120 million for infrastructure there, as well as repairing a taxiway and aircraft parking ramp for $87 million. A solar power system was also constructed, she said.

“Wake Island has always been a geographically important location for military activities, including refueling,” she wrote. “The re-investments done of late are not to increase activity or capacity but rather replace aged infrastructure. After waiting years for investment dollars, the advocacy and planning of the Pacific Air Forces Regional Support Center is finally paying off.”

Location, Location, Location

Wake Island is in many ways an odd place to have such strategic importance.

A tiny 5-square-mile coral atoll that was uninhabited for centuries, Wake has no water supply, with residents relying on rain water and reverse osmosis, and is only marginally habitable. It was formally claimed by the United States in 1899, and when global air travel began, Pan American Airways established an outpost at Wake Island in the 1930s as a mid-Pacific refueling station for trans-Pacific air traffic. A small hotel operated there for the convenience of air travelers.

The importance of the island grew as the Japanese became more militarily aggressive in Asia. The U.S. military buildup at Wake Island in the late 1930s came in response to the belief that the Japanese were fortifying their island possessions, including the Northern Mariana and Marshall Islands, and that the U.S. needed to play catch up by establishing bases of its own.

But the U.S. moved too slowly and Americans were caught unprepared when the Japanese struck the same day at Guam, Midway, Pearl Harbor and Wake Island.

There were about 500 servicemen and 1,200 civilian contractors working at Wake Island on Dec. 8, 1941, just across the international date line from Hawaii on Dec. 7. They fought off the Japanese attack for about three weeks but finally surrendered on Dec. 23.

“It was a desperate fight against overwhelming odds,” said Daniel Martinez, the National Park Service chief historian at Pearl Harbor National Memorial. “They held off attempts to invade. It fell just before Christmas … There was incredible bravery among the pilots and their success in the defense of Wake Island is legendary.”

Most of the surviving Americans were sent to prisoner of war camps in Asia, while some were enslaved. Some 98 civilian contract workers were kept alive on the island until 1943, when they were summarily executed.

The remains of the Americans who had lost their lives were eventually returned to the United States for burial at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.

After the war, Wake Island once again retreated into solitude and isolation. It was used as a fueling stop by American forces during the Vietnam War, and in 2006, it was hit by a fierce typhoon that caused major damage to the surviving infrastructure on the island.

In 2009, the United States once again underscored its ownership and military control of Wake Island when President George W. Bush issued a proclamation creating the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. The measure was promoted as an effort to preserve and protect marine life. But the proclamation also made clear that the Secretary of Defense would continue to manage Wake Island, although in consultation with the Secretary of the Interior and Secretary of Commerce.

In 2014, President Barack Obama expanded the boundaries of the monument out to 200 nautical miles, increasing the protected area to 490,000 square miles.

A Hard Place To Visit

Few outsiders are permitted to visit Wake Island.

“It?s always been a closed community,” said Carl Baker, executive director of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum, a military affairs think tank, who visited Wake Island briefly during the Vietnam War. “There are no real inhabitants there.”

“Wake has been kept much more isolated” than Midway Island, where tour groups are permitted to visit, Baker said. “They maintain strict control on who goes in there.”

He said the real significance of Wake is its runway because it provides a unique place in the Pacific where jets can be diverted to land safely if they develop mechanical problems in the air.

But he said that U.S. interest in the Pacific has increased in the past three years as China has developed its own military presence in the area.

“Wake is tightly guarded from the public eye,” said historian Bonita Gilbert, author of the 2012 book “Building for War: The Epic Saga of the Civilian Contractors and Marines of Wake Island in World War II.”

When she visited in 2011, Gilbert said severe and unrepaired damage from Typhoon Ioke in 2006 had left housing on the island uninhabitable. But in the past few years, much has been done to upgrade infrastructure and facilities.

“Operations have escalated in the past six years with missile tests and displays by North Korea and Russia in 2013 and 2014, and China’s new ICBM on display in the parade last week,” Gilbert wrote in an email.

Robert Lodge, president of McKay Lodge, an Ohio-based conservation laboratory, said he was hired in 2010 to survey deteriorating historic relics left behind from World War II. Wake Island is a national historic landmark.

“I had a feeling our project was a facade, a fake exercise because of a mandate to do environmental work,” he said in a telephone interview. “Just go out and do a survey and that takes care of the obligation.”

He said he observed a number of contractors hard at work, with trucks busily hauling materials to a place somewhere on the island where other visitors did not go.

“When I was there something secretive was going on,” he said, which he said he was told involved installing missiles on the site, though he could not see the work underway.

When he was there, Lodge described grim living conditions with few recreational amenities available.

“Night rat hunting is a big island sport, and a necessity,” he wrote.

Living conditions on Wake Island appear to have improved recently.

Recent job postings by Chugach, an Alaska-based company that has provided installation support services at Wake Island, told job applicants they will work at Wake Island, “a critical component of the Ballistic Missile Defense System.”

The ads offer applicants “free room and board” and “excellent leisure facilities.”

“Apply today for the unique opportunity to work and live in a tropical paradise,” the ad reads. “Imagine spending your leisure time beachcombing, lounging in the crystal blue lagoon, diving, and hooking into world-class shore fishing.”

https://www.kitv.com/story/41204820...-of-millions-of-dollars-into-tiny-wake-island

 

[arjunk]

This is what you need to stand a chance against China. Not deleting tiktok, fake maps, and an unproffesional army.

 

[Get Ya Wig Split]

u.s will lead world to ww3 as planned by israel leading to nuclear war and eliminating huge population from world

https://twitter.com/x/status/1279690599956746241

Freedom!

 

[Jobless Jack]

True, a war will help trump to stay in office . He needs to stay in office to avoid jail!

 

[Ali_Baba]

Given how "shallow" the water is in the centre of the atoll, I am suprised the Americans have not simply concreted it over and expanded its space. The Americans seem to have restricted themselve to the available land, versus what China is doing, which building atoll bases from scratch!

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Given how "shallow" the water is in the centre of the atoll, I am suprised the Americans have not simply concreted it over and expanded its space. The Americans seem to have restricted themselve to the available land, versus what China is doing, which building atoll bases from scratch!

It's one of our many wildlife refuges
https://www.fws.gov/refuge/Wake_Atoll/about.html

We aren't going to concrete over coral reefs like China did.

 

[Vanguard One]

The US Military Is Pouring Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars Into Tiny Wake Island
The historic World War II site is on the front lines again as part of an expanded U.S. missile defense system.

The following report was contributed by our partners at the Honolulu Civil Beat.

Kristin Downey - Amid mounting tensions in the Pacific, the U.S. government is investing a lot of money on infrastructure at an isolated atoll, Wake Island, best known as the site of a heroic World War II battle.

Little information is publicly available about Wake, a secretive military base on a cluster of three small islands far out into the Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and Japan. Wake is operated by the U.S. Air Force through Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, and is located within the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument.

Wake Island is linked together in history with Pearl Harbor because both were hit by successful Japanese surprise attacks during a 24-hour period in December 1941.

Now Wake is at the forefront of a new military buildup in the North Pacific. A review of federal contracting information and defense industry press releases confirm that the United States government has committed hundreds of millions of dollars for work at Wake in the past few years.

Lt. Col. Rebecca Corbin, commander of the Alaska-based 611th Civil Engineering Squadron, acknowledged in an email that a military buildup is underway at Wake.

“The increased activity in recent times is not an illusion,” she wrote. “There are indeed a lot of changes happening on that small atoll.”

The Pacific Air Force Regional Support Center is “pouring a lot of investment into the infrastructure and the contracted support to that location,” she wrote, including a new contract that will manage airfield operations, accommodations for workers and public works projects.

The spending includes more than $200 million for facilities operations in the past seven years to an Alaska-based firm called Chugach Federal Solutions for what was labeled “Phase-In Wake Island,” according to USASpending.gov, a federal website that tracks government spending. In September, another Alaska-based corporation announced it had received a $470 million, 12-year contract for airfield support at three military bases, including Wake Island.

In February, a firm called Aecom was awarded an $87 million contract for work at Wake Island.

None of these companies responded to requests for comment.

In the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2017, the U.S. committed $11.7 million for construction of a test support facility at Wake, at the same time it committed $86 million for a ballistic missile defense site at Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, about 700 miles from Wake. The contract on Wake appears to have been awarded to a construction company based on Guam to construct a metal building that would provide work space for 60 deployed personnel during Missile Defense Agency test events.

That same year, the federal government also committed $27 million for an upgraded electrical distribution system, according to a press release.

The work on both projects was expected to be completed by early 2019.

In Washington on Monday, Navy Vice Adm. Jon Hill delivered a public presentation on the effectiveness of a March 25 missile defense test over the Pacific, where an intercontinental ballistic missile was launched from Kwajalein, tracked by what Hill called “two powerful radars,” including one at Wake Island. Two ground-based interceptors in California were launched soon after, and both successfully collided with the ICBM target and destroyed it, Hill said.

Hill?s presentation at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, posted on a Defense Department website, suggests that Wake is being revitalized as a center of military operations in the Pacific as part of what is called a “layered missile defense system.”

Hill said it was important for the U.S. to beef up its missile defense capabilities because of what he called “near-peer competitors” who are designing and fielding advanced missiles that are harder to track.

The U.S. is facing a number of new challenges in the Pacific, including continuing tensions with North Korea and increasingly militarism from China and an ongoing trade war. China has established numerous military installations on islands in the South China Sea, including airfields, missile, radar and helicopter infrastructure.

Other countries are bulking up their military presence as well. Japan opened bases at home in March for surface-to-air and anti-ship missiles, according to the Japan Times.

Corbin said in the email that U.S. buildup has been going on for awhile.

“Huge projects have been underway in the last two to three years,” she said, including the removal of scrap metal and tons of solid waste material.

She said that the U.S. government has committed $120 million for infrastructure there, as well as repairing a taxiway and aircraft parking ramp for $87 million. A solar power system was also constructed, she said.

“Wake Island has always been a geographically important location for military activities, including refueling,” she wrote. “The re-investments done of late are not to increase activity or capacity but rather replace aged infrastructure. After waiting years for investment dollars, the advocacy and planning of the Pacific Air Forces Regional Support Center is finally paying off.”

Location, Location, Location

Wake Island is in many ways an odd place to have such strategic importance.

A tiny 5-square-mile coral atoll that was uninhabited for centuries, Wake has no water supply, with residents relying on rain water and reverse osmosis, and is only marginally habitable. It was formally claimed by the United States in 1899, and when global air travel began, Pan American Airways established an outpost at Wake Island in the 1930s as a mid-Pacific refueling station for trans-Pacific air traffic. A small hotel operated there for the convenience of air travelers.

The importance of the island grew as the Japanese became more militarily aggressive in Asia. The U.S. military buildup at Wake Island in the late 1930s came in response to the belief that the Japanese were fortifying their island possessions, including the Northern Mariana and Marshall Islands, and that the U.S. needed to play catch up by establishing bases of its own.

But the U.S. moved too slowly and Americans were caught unprepared when the Japanese struck the same day at Guam, Midway, Pearl Harbor and Wake Island.

There were about 500 servicemen and 1,200 civilian contractors working at Wake Island on Dec. 8, 1941, just across the international date line from Hawaii on Dec. 7. They fought off the Japanese attack for about three weeks but finally surrendered on Dec. 23.

“It was a desperate fight against overwhelming odds,” said Daniel Martinez, the National Park Service chief historian at Pearl Harbor National Memorial. “They held off attempts to invade. It fell just before Christmas … There was incredible bravery among the pilots and their success in the defense of Wake Island is legendary.”

Most of the surviving Americans were sent to prisoner of war camps in Asia, while some were enslaved. Some 98 civilian contract workers were kept alive on the island until 1943, when they were summarily executed.

The remains of the Americans who had lost their lives were eventually returned to the United States for burial at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.

After the war, Wake Island once again retreated into solitude and isolation. It was used as a fueling stop by American forces during the Vietnam War, and in 2006, it was hit by a fierce typhoon that caused major damage to the surviving infrastructure on the island.

In 2009, the United States once again underscored its ownership and military control of Wake Island when President George W. Bush issued a proclamation creating the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. The measure was promoted as an effort to preserve and protect marine life. But the proclamation also made clear that the Secretary of Defense would continue to manage Wake Island, although in consultation with the Secretary of the Interior and Secretary of Commerce.

In 2014, President Barack Obama expanded the boundaries of the monument out to 200 nautical miles, increasing the protected area to 490,000 square miles.

A Hard Place To Visit

Few outsiders are permitted to visit Wake Island.

“It?s always been a closed community,” said Carl Baker, executive director of the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum, a military affairs think tank, who visited Wake Island briefly during the Vietnam War. “There are no real inhabitants there.”

“Wake has been kept much more isolated” than Midway Island, where tour groups are permitted to visit, Baker said. “They maintain strict control on who goes in there.”

He said the real significance of Wake is its runway because it provides a unique place in the Pacific where jets can be diverted to land safely if they develop mechanical problems in the air.

But he said that U.S. interest in the Pacific has increased in the past three years as China has developed its own military presence in the area.

“Wake is tightly guarded from the public eye,” said historian Bonita Gilbert, author of the 2012 book “Building for War: The Epic Saga of the Civilian Contractors and Marines of Wake Island in World War II.”

When she visited in 2011, Gilbert said severe and unrepaired damage from Typhoon Ioke in 2006 had left housing on the island uninhabitable. But in the past few years, much has been done to upgrade infrastructure and facilities.

“Operations have escalated in the past six years with missile tests and displays by North Korea and Russia in 2013 and 2014, and China’s new ICBM on display in the parade last week,” Gilbert wrote in an email.

Robert Lodge, president of McKay Lodge, an Ohio-based conservation laboratory, said he was hired in 2010 to survey deteriorating historic relics left behind from World War II. Wake Island is a national historic landmark.

“I had a feeling our project was a facade, a fake exercise because of a mandate to do environmental work,” he said in a telephone interview. “Just go out and do a survey and that takes care of the obligation.”

He said he observed a number of contractors hard at work, with trucks busily hauling materials to a place somewhere on the island where other visitors did not go.

“When I was there something secretive was going on,” he said, which he said he was told involved installing missiles on the site, though he could not see the work underway.

When he was there, Lodge described grim living conditions with few recreational amenities available.

“Night rat hunting is a big island sport, and a necessity,” he wrote.

Living conditions on Wake Island appear to have improved recently.

Recent job postings by Chugach, an Alaska-based company that has provided installation support services at Wake Island, told job applicants they will work at Wake Island, “a critical component of the Ballistic Missile Defense System.”

The ads offer applicants “free room and board” and “excellent leisure facilities.”

“Apply today for the unique opportunity to work and live in a tropical paradise,” the ad reads. “Imagine spending your leisure time beachcombing, lounging in the crystal blue lagoon, diving, and hooking into world-class shore fishing.”

https://www.kitv.com/story/41204820...-of-millions-of-dollars-into-tiny-wake-island

The world has woken up, Australia, India, Japan, and the USA are rebuilding their defenses, 2 US Aircraft battlegroups in the SCS, Japan moving missile batteries in the ECS, Australia spending $240 billion on the ADF, and India pumping money into the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, to upgrade the military bases.