HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — Village mayors have been invited to a briefing on regional threats with Indo-Pacific Command and Defense Intelligence Agency officials at the Joint Region Marianas headquarters on Jan. 18.
A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile battery sits on a launch pad at an undisclosed location on Nov. 17, 2022.
“We did this last year and we had a few of the mayors that came to that. … We didn’t have a whole lot of people, but we’re looking to do this a little bit bigger this year,” JRM commander, Rear Adm. Benjamin Nicholson, told mayors during a Mayors’ Council of Guam meeting last week.
Military officials are in the process of scouting locations for a more comprehensive missile defense system on Guam, Nicholson added later in the meeting, referring to proposed air and missile defense architecture.
The fiscal year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act requires an assessment of that architecture by a federally funded research and development center.
Last year, JRM moved the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense or THAAD system, already on Guam, from Andersen Air Force Base to a site in South Finegayan. The change was a short-term result of on-island evaluations done by the Missile Defense Agency.
The new location gives the THAAD greater capabilities, Nicholson said Wednesday, but added that he could not go into details.
The more comprehensive system will be able to defend against ballistic missiles, as well as cruise missiles and hypersonic missiles, and protect the island against threats in all directions, Nicholson said.
“Right now the THAAD can only kind of look in one sort of direction. But the new system will be able to defend the entirety of the island. … That’s a number of years away. There’s a lot of things that have to happen before then. But that’s kind of what the future looks like,” the JRM commander added.
Nicholson said JRM will also be holding a cultural resource fair on Jan. 19.
“It’s going to highlight a lot of the things that have been going on, both culturally and environmentally, that we have been doing here over the last several years to bring back some of the protected areas. Bring back some of the endangered species and preserve the cultural and historical elements here in Guam,” Nicholson said.
The fair event will also be open to the public, the rear admiral added.
“We’re going to have our archaeologist there. We’re going to have a lot of our environmental experts there, … I think you’ll find it’s pretty impressive, the amount of area they’ve really gone after in these last several years, in trying to get rid of these invasive species,” Nicholson said.