Eighty years ago today, Gen.
Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia, three days after retreating from
Corregidor in the Philippines under withering Japanese assault. Another three
days later, at Terowie railway station, MacArthur made his famous declaration
in an interview with two Australian journalists: “I came through and I shall
return.” It would be 31 months before that return and another nine months
before MacArthur’s announcement that the Philippines had finally been
liberated.

In the eight decades since, the
United States has taken steps to ensure it would never again need to fight its
way back into the western Pacific. Forward presence, enabled in large part by a
hub-and-spokes alliance system, has been the sine qua non of the American approach to date. It is an approach
that needs updating.

Today, American forces are
concentrated in a relatively small number of locations, with just a handful of
major bases in allied nations and in US territory in the western Pacific Ocean.
An increasingly modern, increasingly capable People’s Liberation Army means
those forces are vulnerable in a way they were not during the Cold War and the
first two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall. What is more, relatively
small numbers of US naval vessels combined with limited stocks of munitions of
all kinds means that, in the event of a conflict, sustaining combat operations
will be a challenge. These weak spots are well understood in Washington, but
resources to address them have not been forthcoming.

American weak spots in the
Pacific were also understood in the leadup to Pearl Harbor and, then as now,
largely left unaddressed. The price was steep: more than 200,000 American
allied casualties in the defense of the Philippines and the campaign to retake
it, to say nothing of campaigns elsewhere in the region.

“By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil,” MacArthur said upon landing at Leyte in 1944, “soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples.” American lawmakers and policymakers should commit themselves to ensuring that such consecrations are never again necessary.

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