How the Pentagon is adapting its Pacific fuel strategy for island-hopping warfare

Log-in here if you’re already a subscriber

HEAR FROM THE AIR CURRENT

Leave this field empty if you're human:

As the Pentagon upgrades aging infrastructure across the Pacific theater to meet the rising threat from China, it is forced to tackle a daunting logistical challenge: securing the complex fuel supply chain needed to support expeditionary bases spread across far-flung islands.

A central pillar of the U.S. military’s strategy to confront threats from Chinese hypersonic missiles and other advanced weapons is deploying a force that is constantly in motion, enabled by the buildout of a vast network of airfields, ports and other operating locations across the region. Monumental resources are supporting the revitalization of abandoned World War II-era airfields and the procurement of aircraft better suited to this flexible, dispersed military presence, which aims to complicate an adversary’s ability to find and strike key assets or take significant capabilities offline with one successful strike.

Supporting this distributed force strategy, however, then becomes a challenge for the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). Two requests for information from the agency published last month seek contractors to build facilities capable of distributing more than 5.6 million barrels of jet fuel and marine diesel annually from two strategic locations — enough to fill over 7,000 Boeing-built KC-46A Pegasus aerial refueling tankers. 

The two massive fuel depots, to be located in Hawaii and Guam, will serve as hubs for a significantly expanded fuel distribution network that the Pentagon seeks to build across the Pacific as it appears to shift into a wartime footing in the Pacific for the first time in half a century.

Subscribe to continue reading...