U.S. citizens and forces in Guam could be exposed to bombardment from China, according to the top U.S. military officer in the Indo-Pacific who urged lawmakers to expedite the funding for missile defenses.

“We must go faster,” Admiral John Aquilino, who leads U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, told the House Armed Services Committee. “That needs to be in place by 2027.”

Aquilino trod lightly around the needs driving that timeline, but the date looms large on calendars around Washington, D.C., because Chinese President Xi Jinping has instructed his military to “be ready” for a potential invasion of Taiwan by 2027. Yet U.S. leaders have neglected Aquilino’s repeated appeals for funding to upgrade U.S. military defenses in the region.

“The security environment [is] the most dangerous I’ve seen as in 40 years in uniform,” Aquilino said. “And a big portion of that [is] the cooperation … between [China] and Russia … That cooperation, from those two authoritarian nations, puts us in a different security environment.”

Their cooperation figured into Aquilino’s assessment that U.S. support to Ukraine eases the pressure on his forces, even as he decried Washington’s failure to provide adequate funds for the Indo-Pacific.

“All that other money that is supporting the Ukraine problem-set also provides a deterrent value for INDOPACOM,” he said during the hearing. “An inability for Russia to succeed is a deterrent for President Xi in INDOPACOM. “So it’s a large number, but it’s all tied, and it is beneficial if you look at the global security environment.”

Still, his written remarks put an emphasis on the vulnerabilities that political leaders have allowed to develop.

“As the most forward U.S. territory in the Western Pacific, Guam is a strategic outpost critical to projecting power, maintaining deterrence and stability, and responding to regional crises or conflicts,” Aquilino noted in his prepared testimony. “As of today, USINDOPACOM believes the completion and integration of the GDS will be late to need and continues to advocate for prioritizing and accelerating the necessary operations, activities, and investments (OAIs) to complete the initiative this decade.”

The necessity arises from the way that China has stockpiled a variety of missiles with the range to strike U.S. military outposts around the region. One intermediate-range missile is known as the “Guam killer” because of its ability to deliver a nuclear warhead to the U.S. territory. Those missiles exist for “countering third-party intervention,” as Aquilino put it, raising the specter of extensive missile bombardments to provide cover for a campaign involving their growing military forces.

“Their numbers and their capability and capacity are increasing — that’s a conscious decision by the [Chinese Communist Party] to support a 7.2% defense increase, despite an economy that is on the decline,” Aquilino said. “It is the world’s largest Navy, right now. It is soon to be the world’s largest air force as they continue to produce.”

On the other hand, President Joe Biden’s latest budget request would not provide the funding necessary to meet the needs he has provided to Congress and military leaders.

“We’ve identified a requirement of $26.5 [billion] of which there’s an $11 billion shortfall,” he told Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI). “Any delays in those fundings or reduced fundings [would] push everything out. And then those capabilities we’ve asked for [would be delivered], not in a relevant time — or in a time where they don’t deliver the deterrent effect soon enough.”

Gallagher, who also chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, noted that the Department of Defense returned $11 billion to the Treasury Department last year that remained unspent from other appropriations.

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“Not only did we fail to take advantage of money that was appropriated — that we could have rerouted for our priority theater, the Indo-Pacific to give you the resources you need to prevent World War III — the department was actively working against a legislative effort to give DoD the flexibility to reroute that money,” Gallagher said.

Aquilino noted, in this prepared testimony, that  “the risk … is high and trending in the wrong direction, specifically due to delayed delivery of military construction, advanced capabilities, and resources to persistently project and maintain forces west of the International Date Line.”