The US is hunting for long sandy beaches in the Pacific as airstripes for war with China

The US is searching for 3,000ft-long “straight” sandy beaches in the Pacific for use as airstrips for special operations troops in any future conflict with China. With limited airbases available in the Indo-China region, American military chiefs believe beach airstrips will provide the perfect landing spot for aircraft such as the MC-130J Hercules transport aircraft, adapted for special operations, and the CV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor hybrid plane which can land vertically like a helicopter. Landing on improvised beach airstrips is not a new concept. Such landings were carried out in the Second World War and Britain’s Royal Air Force has successfully performed such operations in recent military exercises. However, US special operations command is now focusing much of its future planning on potential conflict in the Pacific and the search for long, straight beaches is part what is being called “runway agnostic” missions where improvisation will be the key. Long, straight highways are also being looked at. In the most recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US had the luxury of using ready-made airbases for all flight operations: Bagram and Kandahar in Afghanistan, Balad in Iraq, and the huge Al Udeid base in Qatar. The US Navy’s aircraft carriers have also supplied floating runways for a multitude of operations where land bases have not been available. However, a war with China has posed new challenges, not just because of the limited runways in the region for American use but also because of the ability of the Chinese military to target US bases in the Pacific, such as Guam, with ballistic-missile strikes. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has also developed “carrier killer” anti-ship ballistic missiles. The beach-landing concept is aimed at multiplying the number of options for flight missions which China would find difficult to counter. “We’re getting the engineers looking at it because there’s a lot of 3,000ft straight beaches [in the Pacific] that we could bring our MC-130s and CV-22s into to deliver the effects we need,” Lieutenant-General Tony Bauernfeind, the head of US air force special operations command, said. “Our adversaries have watched the American way of war for several decades and they are going to hold our initial staging bases and our forward operating bases at risk, “ Bauernfeind said, speaking at the air and space forces association annual conference in Maryland. “They understand that the way to slow the American joint force down is to target our basing. We have to acknowledge that we cannot always rely on a Bagram, a Kandahar, a Balad or an Al Udeid in the future,” he said.