Aviation Week Network:
On the decaying tarmac of Site Armadillo on the remote Northwest Field airstrip on Guam, a battery of the U.S. Army’s most advanced missile interceptors stands alone, the U.S. territory’s only protection from a ballistic missile attack.
But much has changed since the Army permanently deployed one of its seven Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) batteries to the Mariana Islands in 2015 in response to North Korean ballistic missile tests. Since then, that nation’s ballistic missile capabilities have expanded, yet Pyongyang now ranks as a second-tier threat to Guam, a key operational and logistics hub for the U.S. military in the Western Pacific.
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