Saturday, July 30, 2016

The best defense against ‘Guam killer’ missile strikes

How China sees itself areas of interest. Source: U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission. 

China has developed missiles that can strike Guam, the U.S. recently reported. The missiles are called the “Guam killer.”


Guam, in various news reports, is described as a “U.S. interest,” a place with “U.S. assets” or a home to military bases. Guam is not reported as a U.S. territory whose residents are U.S. citizens and no different (except for some voting rights) under law than the citizens of Kansas.

It’s as if Guam isn’t a part of the United States.


What would an attack on Guam represent? An attack on the U.S., similar to an attack on Kansas.


The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report that describes China's missile capabilities makes an important point missed in the news reports. The commission argues that defending Guam requires making sure that China understands that Guam is definitely part of the U.S.


“Clear statements by the United States that an attack on a regional U.S. base, particularly one located on U.S. territory inhabited by U.S. citizens, would be viewed as an attack on the United States itself and have broader strategic and political implications could help prevent Beijing’s capabilities from altering its risk calculations in such a dispute,” the report notes.


What will the news media report when it's announced that China has missiles capable of reaching Hawaii and California? Will those missiles be dubbed, as well, the Hawaiian Express or LA Killer? Probably not.

The use of the term "Guam killer" is just another illustration of the ongoing absurdity facing Guam. It is part of the U.S. but it isn’t recognized as such by anyone, including China.

Thursday, July 21, 2016

A Guamblog glitch, something of a repair, and hopefully ...

This blog was knocked offline for period of time of about two or three months. Totally inaccessible. No idea why.

It seemed as it might be a domain issue, but no changes were made to the domain. And no changes were made to the Blogger template.

But there were some issues with the template. I could not delete the custom domain, Guamblog.com, and go back to the original Blogspot domain. The intent was to go back to the original Blogspot domain and then try again.

Two outstanding people at Google Domains spent a significant amount of time trying to troubleshoot the problem over long chat sessions. I really appreciated their help. Eventually, it was decided the problem was with Blogger. But Blogger support (reached through the product support forums) seemed similarly mystified. Their advice was to start fresh.

I created a new blog on Blogger. The backup/restore from the earlier blog didn't work, so I had to copy and paste the earlier blog post (going back to 2006). I ended up only migrating those posts that seemed to still have value today, especially the ones that looked in depth at the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) over the military buildup.

This migration probably broke all the RSS links to this site, it wiped out comments, and the people who so graciously followed the blog. So, in this sense, what I'm now doing is similar to starting fresh.

I created new template art (which I'm not certain about), and will gradually return the links to useful bits of information and good reads about the island.

There's good, sometimes, in starting fresh.