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In 2021, Rear Adm. (ret.) Mark Montgomery wrote “Fully Fund the Guam Defense System,” where he argued that the U.S. government was failing to prioritize Guam’s defense, leaving the United States vulnerable to Chinese aggression in the Pacific. After the Missile Defense Agency conducted its first interception test in Guam last month, we asked Mark to revisit his article.Read more below.Image: Army (Photo by Capt. Adan Cazarez)In your 2021 article, “Fully Fund the Guam Defense System,” you argued that Guam is a crucial symbol of America’s strong defense posture toward China in the Indo-Pacific. In what ways does this strength, symbolic or literal, act as a deterrent to the Chinese invasion of Taiwan? Besides increasing the island’s missile defense capability, what are other tactics the United States can employ, specific to Guam, that might serve as a successful deterrent to a possible invasion?It is important to remind everyone what has happened in the past four years since this article was first written — the Biden administration took the exact wrong approach to defending Guam and, with a few minor exceptions, Guam is no safer today than it was four years ago. Instead of anchoring the defense of Guam in an Aegis-based system, such as Aegis Ashore in Romania and Poland, the Department of Defense — at the insistence of its Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation and the Joint Staff’s Joint Integrated Air and Missile Defense Organization, and contrary to recommendations from the actual subject-matter experts at the Missile Defense Agency — decided to invent a new “dispersed” missile defense architecture relying on untested and unintegrated efforts. This decision has subsequently led to the squandering of three years of effort and billions of dollars. Had the department followed the advice of the Missile Defense Agency (and this author), they could have