Inside the US military’s modern ‘island hopping’ campaign to take on China
History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
BY JEFF SCHOGOL | PUBLISHED JUN 16, 2022 9:00 AM
In a war against China, tiny islands could become strategic strong points for the U.S. military’s advance across the Pacific Ocean for the first time since World War II.
The Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations concept, for example, calls for putting small numbers of forces on “a series of austere, temporary locations ashore or inshore,” an August 2021 Marine Corps story explaining the concept says. The story includes a diagram showing how Marines would move from ships onto islands using MV-22B Ospreys and CH-53 heavy-lift helicopters.
Once again, U.S. troops could be called upon to land on East Asian islands if a war with China broke out, Task & Purpose has learned.
But there are also several key differences between the island-hopping campaign from 1942 and 1945 and how the U.S. military would respond to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which is often cited as the likeliest scenario that would spark a war between the United States and China.
Rather than invading and clearing islands such as Saipan and Tinian, U.S. troops would likely set up airfields and air defense systems on them and then defend those islands against Chinese air and missile attacks, said Dean Cheng, a China expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C.
https://taskandpurpose.com/analysis/military-china-taiwan-world-war-ii-pacific/
