U.S. Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric M. Smith speaks with Defense Writers Group journalists at the Fairmount Washington Hotel in Washington, D.C., Jan. 15, 2024. (Kelsey Dornfeld/U.S. Marine Corps)
The commandant of the Marine Corps warned this week that a plan to move thousands of troops from Okinawa to Guam would position forces too far away to deter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific, according to media reports.
Gen. Eric Smith, at a Defense Writers Group meeting Wednesday in Washington, D.C., said the plan “puts us going the wrong way,” according to reports from news websites military.com and Task & Purpose.
“Guam puts us on the other side of the International Date Line, but it puts us a long way from the crisis theater, from the priority theater,” Smith said, according to the reports.
“Every time you give China a foot, they take a mile. They only understand one thing, which is a credible deterrent force. And that credible deterrent force has to be present to win, which — to me — means being [in] the first island chain,” he said, according to military.com.
The chain includes the Kuril Islands north of Hokkaido; Japan itself; the Ryukyu Islands, which include Okinawa; Taiwan; and the Philippines.
A full transcript of Smith’s remarks was not available Thursday. However, U.S. Marine Corps Headquarters spokeswoman Capt. Brenda McCarthy confirmed the accuracy of Smith’s comments in an email Thursday to Stars and Stripes.
More than 4,000 Marines are expected to move from Okinawa under the Defense Policy Review Initiative, a 2012 agreement between the U.S. and Japan to reduce the military presence on Okinawa, which hosts nearly 30,000 of the 55,000 U.S. troops stationed in Japan.
About 100 logistics support troops from III Marine Expeditionary Force began moving from Okinawa to Guam last year, according to a Dec. 14 joint statement by the Marine Corps and Japan’s Ministry of Defense.
Camp Blaz on Guam is expected to house 1,300 members of III MEF and another 3,700 Marines as a rotational force. The base is still under construction.
Smith told reporters Wednesday that he is not sure the plan “is in the best strategic interest of America.”
“We’re committed to coming down to about 10,000 on Okinawa and getting ourselves to Guam,” he said, according to military.com. “But Guam is a challenge. I mean, Apra Harbor [at Naval Base Guam] still has to be refurbished; [it] has to be redone to allow for big decks to get in there.”
The service “supports the tenets outlined in the DPRI agreement and the plan for the movement of units from Japan to Guam or Hawaii starting in 2024,” McCarthy wrote in a separate email Wednesday. “The Marine Corps will continue to explore options for the best location for the future force in the region.”
The Pentagon identified China as an aggressive presence in the East and South China seas and a global “pacing challenge” in its 2022 National Defense Strategy.
The Marines’ Force Design plan calls for the service to better defend the small islands east of Taiwan and to counter China.
