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As I conclude nearly four decades of military and public service, including as lieutenant governor of Guam, a line from the 1986 Crowded House song “Don’t Dream It’s Over” keeps returning to me: “Trying to catch a deluge in a paper cup.”
For Guam — a U.S. territory and cornerstone of American power projection increasingly under threat from both North Korea and China — that metaphor appears increasingly, and disturbingly, apt. Among U.S. defense planners and senior policymakers, the commitment to defend this central node in the Second Island Chain is well understood and rarely questioned. By contrast, Guam remains poorly understood by much of the American public, including the basic fact that it is a U.S. territory whose 160,000 residents are American citizens. This disconnect is reinforced by a structural reality many readers may not fully appreciate: Residents of U.S. territories are American citizens, yet they cannot vote for president and they lack voting representation in Congress — circumstances that often result in territorial issues receiving less sustained national attention. When political visibility is limited, strategic urgency can be harder to sustain.
Indeed, deterrence rests not only on military capability, but on sustained national commitment — and sustaining that commitment is more difficult when the place being defended is poorly understood by the public on which it ultimately depends. Recent open-source analysis underscores this concern. While the United States has begun investing more heavily in recent years in Guam’s defenses, the pace and sophistication of modern long-range strike threats are advancing faster than the systems intended to counter them. These challenges are not abstract for those of us, such as me, who have served and lived here. They are immediate, tangible, and increasingly familiar across the national security community. In 2017, the U.S. territory’s Homeland Security Office of Civil Defense found itself compelled to issue a two-page sheet on how to survive a nuclear attack when, in the midst of heightened tensions, the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un openly threatened to strike Guam and surround the island territory with “enveloping fire.” Meanwhile, major war games and strategic assessments repeatedly reach the same conclusion: If conflict erupts between China and the United States in the Indo-Pacific, Guam will be targeted early and decisively.
I write this not from an office in Washington, but from Guam itself — a place whose strategic significance is not new, and where the last great Pacific war is remembered not as abstraction but as lived trauma. Seized by Imperial Japanese forces within days of Pearl Harbor, occupied for more than two years, and liberated in 1944 at significant cost, the island became a critical forward base for U.S. airpower, logistics, and command and control in the Western Pacific — a role that shaped the outcome of the Pacific war. For the people of Guam, occupation by Imperial Japan meant executions, beheadings, rape, forced labor, imprisonment, starvation, and torture. Members of my own family were imprisoned during the occupation and forced to witness executions on the beaches of their village — a stark reminder that for Guam war is not hypothetical. That memory endures across generations and continues to shape how risk is perceived on this island. When war games describe Guam being struck early in a future conflict, they are not describing a faraway land. They are describing the potential for existential harm in a place that has already experienced what it means to be subjugated by an expansionist regional power. That legacy continues to inform Guam’s understanding of vulnerability — not as theory, but as experience.
Strategic Location, Vulnerable Target
By virtue of its location, Guam holds enormous strategic and operational significance. The island anchors U.S. air, naval, logistics, and sustainment operations across the Western Pacific, enabling power projection into the Philippine Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and beyond. Andersen Air Force Base provides the United States with one of its few sovereign, geographically secure platforms west of Hawaii capable of sustaining long-range bomber operations, rapid force generation, and distributed air combat employment across the Western Pacific. Naval Base Guam, home to forward-deployed attack submarines and critical logistics infrastructure, underpins the U.S. military’s persistent undersea presence — a cornerstone of deterrence, intelligence collection, and sea-control operations in the Indo-Pacific. Together, these installations transform Guam from a remote territory into an operational hub essential to American power projection — one which supports long-range strike, undersea warfare, command and control, fuel storage, munitions, and the forward flow of forces from the continental United States into the Indo-Pacific theater.
From China’s perspective, Guam is not simply a target, it is a linchpin and a critical throughput node of U.S. military power in the region. The threat the People’s Liberation Army poses to Guam is no longer defined by a single weapon system. It is increasingly multi-domain, encompassing ballistic and cruise missiles; air-delivered standoff strike; sea-based precision fires; cyber operations; and the space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance architecture that enables long-range targeting. The DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile, often referred to as the “Guam killer,” is only one element of a broader strike complex that includes H-6K bombers, longer-range ballistic systems such as the DF-27, and future sea-based cruise missile deployments.
Equally consequential are the kill-chain enablers that make such strikes feasible. China’s rapid expansion of space-based sensors, cyber capabilities, and command-and-control resilience has significantly reduced the barriers to coordinating complex, long-range precisions attacks. Guam’s challenge is therefore not surviving a single strike, but withstanding a sustained, multi-domain campaign designed to degrade military and civilian systems simultaneously.
Suppressing or disabling Guam early would complicate U.S. sortie generation, disrupt reinforcement timelines, and increase the cost, complexity, and uncertainty of U.S. operations across multiple domains. This is why Guam features so prominently in war-gaming scenarios focused on the opening phase of major conflict. No U.S. territory of 212 square miles can independently repel a sustained saturation attack from a nuclear-armed peer competitor. Guam’s defense is — and should remain — a national obligation.
A crisis in the Taiwan Strait would likely involve missiles capable of reaching Guam in minutes, accompanied by cyber operations aimed at power, water, and communications systems. Ports and supply chains would be strained or disrupted, while hospitals would face demand far beyond peacetime capacity.
Guam’s ability to absorb this onslaught remains limited. Missile defense systems are still being fielded. The island’s only public hospital dates to the 1970s, supplemented by a Navy hospital and a private facility never designed for high-end conflict conditions. Civil defense siren coverage is incomplete. Food and fuel reserves are finite. There is no island-wide shelter system capable of protecting the civilian population. On Guam, resilience is not theoretical — it is exercised repeatedly under real conditions. Super typhoon Mawar in 2023 offered a sobering preview of how quickly resilience can erode on a small forward island. The storm disrupted power, water, fuel distribution, port operations, and medical services across Guam, affecting civilian communities and military installations alike. Recovery required substantial federal resources and months of coordinated effort. Having supported civil response operations during major typhoons, I have seen firsthand how infrastructure fragility can compound operational risk even absent adversarial action. A high-end conflict would compress those timelines dramatically while introducing deliberate targeting, making civil–military interdependence not a peripheral concern but a central determinant of endurance. After Mawar, damage to both civilian and military infrastructure underscored a reality well understood on the island: On Guam, what happens outside the fence line can directly affect what happens inside it and vice versa.
Some progress is real, and effort is visible. The ongoing development of the Guam Defense System; investments in fuel, power, and port resilience; expanded military construction; and recent congressional requirements for an independent assessment of missile defense effectiveness all reflect sustained attention. But the scale and speed of the threat continue to outpace the pace at which these measures are being fielded, integrated, and made resilient.
That imbalance makes recent congressional action particularly instructive. The Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act authorizes several important measures for Guam, including housing and utility allowances and retention bonuses for civilian employees, funding for elements of the Guam Defense System, and a requirement for an unclassified summary of an independent assessment of missile defense effectiveness. It also requires the Pentagon to notify Congress and the governor of Guam before any proposal to site a permanent nuclear reactor on the island moves forward.
These provisions matter. They reflect sustained advocacy and recognition of Guam’s role in national defense. At the same time, the final authorization act removed more than $1 billion in previously proposed funding for Guam, including submarine-related infrastructure at Polaris Point and maintenance capacity for Virginia-class submarines. These provisions appeared in earlier Senate language but did not survive conference negotiations.
The contrast is revealing. Guam is being resourced to support the force through civilian allowances, utilities, and partial defensive measures, while some of the most consequential deterrence and force-projection capabilities are deferred or set aside. The island remains a critical node, a host, and a target — without full clarity about its long-term strategic role. This tension is reinforced by recent strategy documents. The National Security Strategy places renewed emphasis on homeland defense and the Western Hemisphere. The 2026 National Defense Strategy — while focused heavily on homeland defense, industrial mobilization, and competition with China — contains no explicit reference to Guam, an omission notable in contrast to the 2022 National Defense Strategy, which identified Guam repeatedly as a critical node in U.S. force posture and deterrence architecture. Strategic documents do not merely describe priorities, they signal them.
Notably, while the 2026 National Defense Strategy refers repeatedly to the First Island Chain, it makes no explicit reference to the Second Island Chain. That absence does not imply diminished strategic importance. Rather, it suggests that deeper-layer posture may be treated as assumed rather than articulated — a framing that places even greater weight on execution. When foundational nodes are treated as assumed priorities rather than clearly articulated ones, their defense cannot rely on strategic inference alone — it should be demonstrated through fielded capability, resilience, and operational integration.
Closing this gap will require deliberate action — not only in force posture, but in infrastructure, civilian resilience, and operational integration.
Matching Urgency To Risk
First, missile defense on Guam should prioritize the rapid integration of proven, fieldable systems over continued architectural experimentation. Capabilities that can be networked, exercised, and made operational in the near term should take precedence over bespoke solutions that promise elegance but deliver effect too late to matter in a conflict defined by compressed timelines.
Second, deterrence on Guam should fully account for the civilian dimension of conflict. Hardened shelters, improved warning systems, continuity planning for power and water, and medical resilience are not peripheral concerns. They are central to endurance, recovery, and the credibility of sustained military operations in a contested environment.
Third, Guam’s air and port infrastructure should be treated as recoverable rather than brittle. Investments in rapid runway repair, dispersed fuel and munitions storage, redundant logistics nodes, and pre-positioned repair materials would reduce the operational payoff of early strikes and complicate an adversary’s targeting calculus.
Fourth, greater consideration should be given to leveraging the Guam National Guard as a foundational element of the island’s defensive architecture. As an integrated Army and Air National Guard force already present on the island, selectively realigning and re-tasking elements of the Guard over time to support air- and missile-defense-related missions and the protection of critical infrastructure could compress readiness timelines by building on forces that are already present, trained, and embedded in the community.
Guam needs neither alarmism nor reassurance divorced from execution. It needs urgency reflected in the pace, integration, and scale of preparation. In conflicts defined by speed and precision, delay carries its own strategic cost. Here, also, history can prove both resonant and instructive. In Dec. 1938, a board of U.S. Navy officers issued a report on the state of U.S. defenses in the Pacific. Chaired by Rear Adm. Arthur Hepburn, the report decried the fact that Guam was at “present practically defenseless against determined attack by any first-class power based in the Pacific,” and exhorted Congress to appropriate the funding needed to properly fortify the island territory. Unfortunately, it took over two years for funds to be appropriated and for construction to properly begin. By then, the situation was widely considered to be “beyond repair,” with the Navy’s chief of naval operations, Adm. Harold Stark, glumly observing that a simple influx of funding would no longer suffice at such a late stage — and that “dollars cannot buy yesterday.” For forward U.S. territories likely to be contested early in a major conflict, delay is not neutral — it compounds risk.
Crowded House never intended “Don’t Dream It’s Over” to inform national defense debates. Yet its metaphor endures. If a deluge is coming, a paper cup will not suffice.
Guam deserves defenses built for the storm it faces — not the one we hope arrives more slowly.
Michael W. Cruz, MC, MBA, is a former adjutant general of the Guam National Guard and former lieutenant governor of Guam. A surgeon and combat veteran, he served nearly four decades in the U.S. military. The views expressed are his own.
Image: Tech. Sgt. Michael Cossaboom via Wikimedia Commons
