The United States Air Force is quietly turning remote Pacific outposts into a web of launchpads designed to keep aircraft flying even if China fires first. Rather than relying on a handful of large, exposed hubs, planners are testing how to scatter forces across old wartime strips and tiny islands that once sat far from the front line but now lie squarely inside it.
This shift, built around Agile Combat Employment and a surge of multinational exercises, is reshaping how the service thinks about distance, survivability, and alliance politics in the western Pacific. The effort remains a work in progress, yet it already stretches from historic islands in Micronesia to complex command-and-control experiments that aim to hold this dispersed network together under fire.
From fortress bases to a dispersed Pacific web
For decades, American air power in Asia relied on a small set of major hubs, a model that made logistics simple but created inviting targets for precision missiles. Senior officers now treat that concentration as a liability in any fight with China, whose expanding missile forces and surveillance networks are designed to disable runways, fuel farms, and parked aircraft in a single coordinated blow. In response, the Air Force has embraced Agile Combat Employment, or ACE, which a 2022 Air University paper describes as a way to mitigate Chinese threats by spreading across many locations so an initial barrage cannot shut down operations.
The dispersal concept is no longer theoretical. Analysts tracking China’s so-called Pacific kill chain describe a contest in which Beijing tries to locate and strike U.S. assets before they can influence a crisis over Taiwan or elsewhere, while Washington works to blunt those missiles and complicate targeting. Recent assessments argue that the United States aims to reduce its vulnerability to Chinese missile strikes by spreading aircraft and support teams across a lattice of smaller fields that sit inside range but outside any single kill shot. The strategic bet is simple: if no base is indispensable, China must spend more missiles and more time hunting targets, buying U.S. and allied leaders room to maneuver.
Reviving World War II airfields and remote islands
The search for places to disperse forces has sent planners back to World War II maps and into remote island chains that once hosted heavy bombers. One focus is a historic airfield that launched the atomic bombings, which the Air Force now intends to reclaim as part of its ACE posture. Reporting on that effort notes that, according to Air University, the US Air Force has turned the site into a key node in the Second Island Chain, integrating it into exercises that test how quickly fighters and tankers can arrive, refuel, rearm, and depart before an adversary can fix their position. The same logic is guiding interest in other legacy runways that can be resurfaced faster than new bases can be built.
Beyond the better-known islands, the Air Force is also eyeing smaller locations that offer strategic depth and political complexity. Planners have looked at places such as Tinian, which already features in ACE drills, as well as historic battlefields like Peleliu and outposts such as Yap that sit astride key sea lanes. Even larger territories like Guam are being reconsidered not just as single, vulnerable hubs but as clusters of smaller operating sites spread across surrounding islands. Each candidate airstrip raises questions about host-nation consent, environmental impact, and the cost of hardening facilities that might only see sustained use in a crisis.
Exercises that stress-test the hub and spokes
Concepts on briefing slides only matter if they survive contact with logistics, weather, and allied politics, which is why the Air Force has wrapped ACE into a growing set of multinational drills. A centerpiece is REFORPAC, described as the Air Force’s largest Pacific contingency-response exercise, which brought an International team together under Pacific Air Forces to practice opening and sustaining austere airfields. From Airman Hannah Bench of the 35th Fighter Wing, MISAWA AIR BASE, Japan, the exercise was framed as a test of how quickly units could move from main hubs to improvised spokes and remain fully mission capable under simulated attack.
Resolute Force Pacific, often shortened to REFORPAC, has also grown more complex with Japanese participation. In one recent phase, U.S. and Japanese forces carried out a large-scale Rapid Airfield Damage Repair, or RADR, scenario that treated a bombed-out runway as a problem to be solved within hours, not days. Pacific Air Forces used that event to refine a hub and spoke in which aircraft cycle through small sites while engineers patch craters and restore minimum operating surfaces. Other REFORPAC sorties have kept a U.S. Air Force F-35 Lightning II from the 421st Fighter Squadron flying with Japanese Air Self-Defense Force partners under the Resolute Force Pacific banner, with planners highlighting that 35 aircraft and 202 personnel had to coordinate across multiple locations to prove the concept in practice.
Missile defense, command systems, and the limits of dispersal
Spreading aircraft across many islands does not make them invisible, and U.S. officials have been candid about that constraint. Analysts who briefed the Pentagon earlier this year argued that while dispersing forces can decrease vulnerability, dispersing forces under ACE cannot fully escape China’s space-based targeting and long-range reconnaissance. That reality has driven parallel work on missile defenses tailored to small, temporary sites. In public remarks highlighted in August, Air Force leaders described efforts to field mobile systems that can shield dispersed bases in a China fight, explaining that the Air Force is preparing a network of sensors and interceptors intended to absorb a large number of missile attacks and still launch aircraft in the Pacific.