The report provides detailed analysis of a threat that received some attention on Capitol Hill last year.

U.S. and allied airfields are extremely vulnerable to attack by Chinese forces, a new report warned last week. The lack of hardened defenses among U.S. and allied forces stands in contrast to China’s extensive use of hardened aircraft shelters.

The report, published by the Hudson Institute last week, found that China has undertaken an effort to more than double its use of hardened and unhardened shelters. “This constitutes enough shelters to house the vast majority of China’s combat aircraft,” the report’s authors, Thomas Shugart and Timothy Walton, wrote.

They found that it would take more than 3,000 munitions to destroy a Chinese airfield but far fewer shots to destroy U.S.-operated airfields in Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan.

“This could make air operations in a conflict significantly easier to sustain for the PRC than for the United States,” the study states.

Additionally, the Hudson report found that, between the early 2010s and the early 2020s, the total number of hardened shelters at allied facilities declined slightly.

Chinese forces could neutralize the Marine Corps Air Station at Iwakuni, in Japan’s southwest, and the Naval Support Facility on Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, with just ten missiles.

The report provides detailed analysis of a threat that received some attention on Capitol Hill last year.

In May, Senator Marco Rubio and Republican lawmakers on the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition with the CCP wrote to Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro about the “alarming lack of urgency” by the Pentagon to protect U.S. bases in the Indo-Pacific, citing preliminary findings from Shugart and Walton.

“We are spending hardly any money on military construction to improve base resilience in the Indo-Pacific,” the lawmakers wrote. Of the $15 billion allocated to military base construction activities in fiscal year 2024, they wrote, the Pentagon was expected to spend less than 2 percent on base-hardening efforts.

One obstacle they identified was a policy that delayed military construction at facilities on Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands on account of the presence there of unexploded munitions from World War II. They wrote that while “the safety of our services members and their families is obviously of the utmost importance,” it isn’t clear that those precautions are still necessary.

“They have noticed it’s quite obvious that we depend upon a small number of assets, including forward air bases, to conduct operations,” Kendall said during an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security in 2022. “Because they’re fixed, they’re easily targetable, and they’ve built the assets to come after them. So we have got to respond to that.”