The U.S. Marines will deploy to Guam a littoral regiment capable of a flexible and rapid response in a "few years" as part of efforts to deal with China's growing assertiveness, its commandant said Friday.
Gen. Eric Smith, the commandant of the Marine Corps, told a press conference in Washington that the Marine Littoral Regiment is "designed as a counter to PRC aggression," referring to the acronym for the People's Republic of China, to protect Japan, South Korea and the Philippines.
Smith said the regiment, due to be based on the U.S. island territory of Guam, "will have responsibility to rapidly deploy inside the first island chain into the Philippines in order to spread the battlespace out and to protect those strategic lines of communication that emanate from Japan, back to the Philippines, back to Hawaii."
The island chain refers to an area off of China that includes southwestern Japanese islands, such as the Tokyo-controlled, Beijing-claimed Senkaku islets as well as Taiwan and the northwest Philippines.
The new regiment will be the third of its kind that is capable of long-range detection and engagement using mobile missile batteries, as well as deploying small groups of marines to remote islands.
The first unit was activated in March 2022 on Marine Corps Base Hawaii and the second one was set up in Okinawa in November last year.
He also confirmed that the relocation of U.S. Marines from Okinawa to Guam will begin in December of this year.
Gen. Yasunori Morishita, chief of staff of Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force, who attended the press conference following a meeting with Smith, said, "By strengthening cooperation between the GSDF and the Marine Corps, we will contribute to peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific."
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