As the defueling of the Red Hill fuel facility enters its final stages and the Navy prepares for a long cleanup and closure process, the U.S. military is looking at how it will support its vast Indo-Pacific operations without it. While it moves forward, some Chinese military intellectuals and analysts are also looking closely at U.S. military logistics in the region as tensions simmer.
The September 2023 issue of Chinese publication Xiandai Jianchuan — or Modern Ships — included an 18-page article titled “If the Japanese Destroyed the Oil Storage Tanks at Pearl Harbor,” examining the Dec. 7, 1941, surprise attack and Imperial Japan’s strategic thinking.
The journal is published by the 714th Research Institute of the China State Shipbuilding Corp., a major Chinese state-run naval development conglomerate. Lyle Goldstein, director of Asia Engagement at the Defense Priorities Foundation and a visiting professor at Brown University, read the article and shared excerpts on social media.
Goldstein said that it’s one of several articles he’s seen published recently in publicly available Chinese military journals examining Imperial Japan’s surprise attack on Oahu. He said that while it’s common to examine historical battles, that “it is unnerving to see this stuff, I can count maybe five or six articles now.”
Goldstein said it’s a reminder that conversations about whether places like Hawaii and Guam are potential targets in a conflict are “not just theoretical, these could have devastating impacts.”
The Red Hill facility was built to hold up to 250 million gallons of fuel for military ships and aircraft in its 20 massive underground tanks. But the tanks also sit just 100 feet above a critical aquifer that most of Honolulu depends on for drinking water. Local officials warned that posed a threat to Oahu’s water supply, while the Navy insisted the facility was safe and critical to national security. In November 2021, jet fuel from the facility tainted the Navy’s Oahu water system, which serves 93,000 people.
When the Pentagon announced in March 2022 that it would close Red Hill, military officials said they would pursue a new “distributed” strategy of storing fuel at various points around the region, as well as “afloat locations ” aboard tankers. After years of insisting that Red Hill was vital to national security, top Pentagon brass now argue the new plan will make supply lines more “resilient” and give commanders more flexibility.
Sal Mercogliano, a maritime historian at Campbell University in North Carolina, said that as the military prepares for a post-Red Hill reality, it will soon grapple with realities it may not be ready to face.
“Red Hill is a huge strategic reserve; it’s massive. I mean, it is factored into all the war plans for the (Indo-Pacific) area,” said Mercogliano.
Tensions have mounted in the South China Sea, a busy waterway that more than a third of all international trade travels through. China claims the entire waterway as its exclusive sovereign territory and has attacked vessels from neighboring countries that also have claims in the region. The U.S. military, for its part, has been conducting near-constant “freedom of navigation” operations in the area.
Those operations require millions of gallons of fuel. In the event of a major conflict, those demands could increase.
“High-intensity aircraft operations from a carrier battle group obviously entail huge amounts of oil … so we’d absolutely need vast amounts of oil in wartime,” said Goldstein. “So I think there’s every reason to believe that the Chinese have integrated that well into their plans.”
Chartered commercial tankers have ferried fuel from Red Hill to West Oahu facilities run by Island Energy Services at Campbell Industrial Park, to a fuel storage point in San Diego, a fuel storage point in the Philippines at Subic Bay and another fuel storage point in Singapore. The last tanker recently left Pearl Harbor.
Timothy Walton, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., who specializes in missile defense and military logistics, thinks commanders have the right idea with the shift away from Red Hill. But he also thinks the military has a long way to go to truly make it live up to the promises officials have made.
“The U.S. military lacks sufficient fuel storage tanks in the Indo-Pacific and maritime tankers and oilers,” said Walton. “Even before the latest Red Hill crisis, the Department of Defense recognized that there were multiple challenges to its network of Defense Fuel Support Points.”
‘Striking distance’
Mercogliano said that “the problem you have obviously with Subic and Singapore is if your main purpose for that fuel is a potential conflict with China, you put it right within their striking distance.”
Red Hill was secretly built underground during World War II to make it nearly impossible to find and attack. But its unique subterranean design also posed unique maintenance and operational challenges.
“Hardened underground fuel stores were necessary in 1943 when construction at Red Hill started, and given even more potent Chinese and Russian missile threats, they are still necessary today,” said Walton.
Walton argues that modern construction practices and technology could make new underground tanks more environmentally friendly than World War II-vintage ones, and has proposed that the Pentagon build several smaller ones spread across islands in the Pacific. Currently, the U.S. military is building above-ground tanks.
“New underground fuel facilities in coral atolls about to get swallowed by sea level rise or along the earthquake-prone ‘ring of fire’ sounds like a great way to burn millions, if not billions, of taxpayer dollars,” said Wayne Tanaka, director of the Sierra Club’s Hawaii chapter, noting that islands have particularly vulnerable ecosystems and limited resources. “Placing fuel storage facilities underground and almost certainly above fresh drinking water sources would let a single bomb, act of sabotage or earthquake render strategic locations effectively uninhabitable.”
Goldstein said there has been debate about the range and accuracy of Chinese weapons but that he personally thinks Chinese forces are perfectly able to strike targets as far as Hawaii and the U.S. mainland.
“China has a vast array of missiles and a large air force. It has been perfecting its ability to strike targets ashore from its ships and submarines,” said Goldstein. “I think that we need to realize that it will be very difficult to kind of try to sort of build our way out of this just by building more and more and more bunkers.”
Mercogliano said that while keeping fuel closer to the potential hot spots makes sense tactically, the military could struggle without a large reserve in the Central Pacific.
“If we had a big robust merchant marine like we once had, with a fleet of tankers, that’s not so much of a problem. But we don’t; we have less than 90 ships involved in international trade,” said Mercogliano. “If we get into a peer-to-peer conflict against a nation like China, I think we’re going to be at a severe disadvantage. Because once that fuel is consumed in those forward depots, or if they’re taken out or if those tankers are taken out, you’re going to have to run back to California to go get more — or through the Suez or through the Panama Canal.”
Pentagon officials have said they intend to heavily utilize tankers, both military and commercial, after Red Hill is defueled.
In March 2022 after announcing the defueling, a senior Pentagon official told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, “We’re still just now at the beginning of working through the process of determining exactly how many (tankers we need) and how fast can you get them. And if you can’t get them fast enough, would you need to pull some from elsewhere?”
‘Floating storage’
The U.S. Navy currently has 16 military tankers in service, and many of them are scheduled for decommissioning as the service looks to replace its current Kaiser-class oilers with new John Lewis- class oilers. But the USNS John Lewis, the first in the class, is currently in a shipyard in Portland, Ore., as workers go through a series of repairs and inspections regarding issues with the ship — and potentially with subsequent vessels in its class.
“These ships are not being delivered at the speed that they need, and more importantly, the cost is increasing on them to quite a bit,” said Mercogliano. “We’re going from half a billion dollars for an auxiliary vessel, and you’re probably going to start seeing price tags of up to a billion dollars on them.”
During major conflicts, the U.S. military has historically been able to call on commercial ships to support operations. According to the Center for Maritime Strategy, in 1950 there were 1,087 privately owned cargo vessels registered under the U.S. flag and 2,277 government-owned cargo ships in the National Defense Reserve Fleet. But today there are just 178 U.S.-flagged cargo ships.
“(Military Sealift Command) only has five tankers under long-term charter, even though the U.S. Navy would likely require around 20 maritime tankers to deliver fuel to naval forces at sea,” said Walton. “U.S. Transportation Command has stated it has a requirement for around 100 tankers to serve not only naval forces, but also to deliver fuel to airfields and other forces ashore. Although there are 53 U.S.-flagged commercial maritime tankers with military utility that could be called upon to support the U.S. military in a conflict, all but 10 of them are busy supporting the U.S. domestic economy and commercial economy.”
Walton said the new Tanker Security Program, which is managed by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration and intended to make more commercial ships available to the military, is “on track to add five more tankers, (so) the U.S. military appears to be around 85 tankers short of what it would need in a conflict.”
Mercogliano, who formerly worked as a captain at sea, said he has concerns about using tankers as “floating storage” to make up for lost storage on land, explaining that “tankers are typically designed to carry fuel from point A to point B. … It doesn’t do very good to keep tankers loaded with fuel floating around in the Pacific; you start getting condensation in the tanks, there’s a whole myriad of issues.”
Chartered ships and their merchant crews also potentially would become targets in a conflict.
Goldstein said that just as Chinese military scholars are examining the Japanese imperial military’s decision to focus on destroying ships in Pearl Harbor rather than fuel stores on the base, they are also looking at tankers at sea. The September article included a chart of every tanker the U.S. had in the Pacific during World War II.
“The Japanese submarines went after our battleships and our aircraft carriers, and if they were much smarter, they would have gone after U.S. logistics,” said Goldstein. “I distinctly recall the wording in (the article). It said ‘logistics is a soft rib’ — that’s the weakness.”
“There’s no escorts for these vessels,” said Mercogliano. “The Navy has been very clear about this since 2018, that they lacked sufficient escorts to escort even their own USNS Military Sealift Command oilers that provide the replenishment for the battle groups directly, let alone commercial charter tankers. … They’re going to be floating around out there on their own.”
‘We can avoid a war’
The administration of President Joe Biden has been working to restore military-to-military talks between the U.S. and China. During a meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in November in San Francisco, they seemingly made a breakthrough, but tensions have continued to mount.
In particular, Chinese ships have been attacking Philippine vessels in disputed regions of the South China Sea, ramming them and shooting water cannons. But Goldstein stressed that diplomatic efforts need to continue.
“Of course, the best approach by far is to have a strong diplomatic track with China and try to prevent a war,” said Goldstein. “I’m quite pessimistic about all these scenarios that have us fighting in the South China Sea or, even worse, around Taiwan. … I think if we we’re smart, we can avoid a war with China.”
The Red Hill water crisis has strained relations between military leaders and Hawaii residents at a time when the Pentagon sees the islands as more important than ever. Military operations and construction programs now face much more scrutiny from local officials and community groups.
In November a state working group called on the federal government to clean up contamination around Red Hill in a report that estimated that as much as 2 million gallons may have leaked from the facility over 80 years. Water shortages from well closures after the November 2021 spill are contributing to price hikes that could reach as high as 80% for some Honolulu Board of Water Supply customers.
“The U.S. Navy failed to appropriately upgrade Red Hill’s aging facilities and is now paying the price,” said Walton. “And now the bill is coming due as buildings, piers and runways age or are rendered obsolete by security threats or rising oceans.”
