China Will Exploit Guam’s Struggle To Recover From Typhoon Mawar

For military strategists, Guam’s slow recovery from Typhoon Mawar is a real concern.

The remote island, host to several critical military facilities, is a linchpin for U.S. security in the Western Pacific. As a potential target for Chinese societal influencing, cyber-attack or military assault, Guam is doing of poor job of demonstrating it can support the island’s 170,000 U.S. citizens during a crisis.

While Guam held up relatively well, absorbing a Category 4 typhoon with few casualties or many major structural failures, the island is still struggling.

The recovery is underway. Guam’s port and airfields are open, but, two weeks after the storm, things are still not normal. Conditions are bad enough that the U.S. Air Force and Navy announced a pause on permanent changes of station assignments until at least the end of June.

Tempers are getting short. Over half of Guam’s electrical customers are languishing without power and about half the population still lacks water. With patchy internet connectivity, the island has been reduced to something of a cash-only enterprise, as local shops are unable to process credit and debit cards.

It’s getting embarrassing. Guam’s halting performance stands in stark contrast to Florida’s relatively rapid recovery after a 2022 hit by Hurricane Ian, a stronger, Category 5 storm. In an assessment of the post-Ian recovery effort, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reported that Florida’s communication lifelines were stabilized within two days of landfall. Energy lifelines were stabilized within nine days, and food, water and shelter lifelines were stabilized after 19 days.

After Hurricane Ian, Florida needed only two weeks to restored power to all 2.6 million accounts that were able to safely receive power. Key causeways and bridges received temporary repairs and reopened to traffic within a similar timeframe.

As a critical military camp, Guam’s resiliency is a matter of national security. And when locals begin grumbling about “climate colonialism’ and start wondering if they are being treated differently than citizens in the continental United States, the island’s resiliency is a national security vulnerability that China will invariably exploit.

Guam’s Recovery Efforts Must Get Speedier

Despite successes and some great post-hurricane performance by the U.S. Coast Guard and others, too many of Guam’s basic post-storm recovery efforts got off to a slow start. Six days after the hurricane, villages had yet to get access to heavy equipment, chainsaws and fuel. In some cases, islanders had to wait six hours for gas.

Both Federal and island responders have been slow to get off the mark. After Hurricane Ian, FEMA opened the first Florida Disaster Recovery Center six days after landfall. Guam’s first Disaster Recover Center had a “soft opening” on June 3, ten days after the island was hit. The island’s first debris disposal areas opened on June 4, while Florida’s post-Ian debris disposal efforts were operational almost immediately. Government distribution of emergency water and food has been halting and full of hiccups.

Guam’s slow pace in establishing critical, albeit low-profile pieces of recovery infrastructure is hard to understand. While Guam is a remote U.S. territory, tropical storms are a fact of life for the island. Both FEMA and Guam should have standard recovery infrastructure—Disaster Recovery Centers, debris disposal areas and other must-have recovery services—ready to roll out almost immediately after any hard hit.

It is tough for a population to recover without these basic post-disaster services.

To support a faster response, gear and personnel to support the recovery of water, power and other key lifelines should be cached across Guam and on other nearby islands, in a mutually supportive web of shared backup infrastructure and response personnel. And while Saipan, a neighboring island, was employed as a pre-positioning area for support ships and gear, the recovery support process must have more standardized critical supplies in the pipeline and a stronger/faster reach-back to the continental United States.

As an island in “Cyclone Country”, Guam’s utility providers and government personnel likely have a pretty good idea where the island’s critical infrastructure and disaster-relevant management practices (building code promulgation/enforcement or disaster preparation and management) can be hardened up. Even though Guam does not vote and lacks strong advocacy in Washington, Congress should hold any slow-performing Federal agencies to task and provide the strategically critical Micronesian islands the resources they need to be resilient, “hard” targets.

It wasn’t all bad. Despite damage, Guam weathered the strong storm relatively well. It has learned some lessons over time. But hardening the island’s now-struggling power and water infrastructure is long overdue, and those fundamental investments in securing island lifelines will go a long way towards helping the island shrug off mishaps.

If capital investments cannot be made quickly, then Guam and Federal emergency response partners should focus on performance-based actions like getting money into the community after a disaster. Money is critical for recovery work, and in Florida, recovery funding flows quickly to the populace. Within six months of Hurricane Ian, the Florida Division of Emergency Management had received nearly $800 million in Public Assistance obligations. Those funds helped unlock nearly $1 billion in federal resiliency funds.

Guam will not meet this pace. It should. As a disaster-prone community, and a potential front-line target, likely to be subjected to cyber and other disruptive attacks, Guam’s resilience is a matter of national security.

A tempting target for China’s vast influencing machinery, Guam should be a proud U.S. recovery showpiece, and a hardened, resilient example for the rest of the Pacific to follow. But, to do that, the continental United States must do a bit more than sending the island a parade of junket-seeking “preparedness” charlatans, and really invest, helping the island harden up key lifelines.

Without real improvements, China will exacerbate islander resentment and work to put the future of America’s Pacific redoubt in doubt.