(No. 50, a ±05 minute read)
Part I of II
Bearing witness is one of the fundamental roles of journalism. Journalists are afforded, or create, access to places most people aren’t able, or don’t want to visit — the extreme example of this, of course, is a conflict photographer or reporter working in a war zone. Journalists relay to the public the reality of circumstances which they report on — wars, protests, pandemics, disasters.
We are there so you don’t have to be. Or something. We do this, ideally, to inform policy, sketch a draft of history, or push a change in the face of exploitive circumstances. It should be stated that it doesn’t always go well and that we know only what we are able to know, or ferret out, in the moment.
An example of this: when describing Hawai’i as a “garrison state” in a national news outlet, the fact-checker I was working with pushed back. She didn’t know, in that moment. I asked her to search “military bases oahu” on Google while on the phone together. Her voice dropped, “Oh, wow.” There are 11 bases on O’ahu alone. My designation went to print. 22% of the area of O‘ahu is controlled by the Department of Defense (DoD).
The American military has, frankly, a terrible ecological track record. In the extreme there is Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the attendant fallout of our wartime and postwar atomic weapons programs at home and throughout the Pacific. Bikini Atoll remains too radioactive to inhabit after U.S. nuclear weapons testing. Marshallese islanders face horrifying cancer rates and birth abnormalities as a legacy of testing there. I’ll put it to you to Google “marshall islands jellyfish babies” and warn of subsequent heartbreak.
Obviously, here in Hawai’i the military’s legacy of pollution is less immediately onerous or horrifying. But it is here, make no mistake, and it goes all the way back. While covering a state conservation group seeking to prevent the establishment of an invasive weed termed the “Green Cancer of the Pacific” we crossed into an uncleared WWII live-fire training range, walking past signs warning us to not touch anything on the ground — unexploded ordinance (UXO).
The problem was we’d be spending the day surveying along the boundary and within the range, unable to see the ground due to dense vegetation. After our survey an Army Corps of Engineers officer informed me that there is no exact understanding of the boundaries of the range where American soldiers were trained to fire everything from artillery, to small arms, to newly-developed portable high explosive rockets before sailing to the Pacific War. Nor is there an active timeline for remediation in this area, merely “goals.”
But it’s complicated — the Department of Defense provides a part of that very conservation organization’s budget I was reporting on. These islands are some very attractive real estate, perhaps the most geo-strategic archipelago on earth. If not the U.S. military, then whose? It’s a question worth asking as the alternatives are a great deal more environmentally and socially deleterious. So that leaves the question, can the U.S. military behave here, and elsewhere in the Pacific, as a good neighbor, especially when it is accustomed to the state allowing its every request?
That is changing though, and Board of Water Supply, Department of Health, and activist push-back in the face of fuel leaks at the Navy’s underground WWII era fuel storage tank farm at Red Hill. But, there is now the fact of Ka‘ula, an island just shy of 50 miles southwest of Kaua‘i and fewer than 25 miles from Ni‘ihau.
Last Thursday the Navy released a draft environmental impact statement, it is planning to increase “training activities” on Ka‘ula.1 The most impactful of these are missile strikes at targets on Ka‘aula and appear to be a part of training a new “Multi-Domain Task Force” under the command of the U.S. Army and stationed at Ft. Schafter. I spoke with Col. Michael Rose, the commander of the Army’s newly stationed 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force during the Rim of Pacific Exercises (RIMPAC) and our conversation was limited to the task force’s participation in sinking ships offshore as part of these exercises — the worlds largest maritime war games.
These war games have occurred every other year since 1971 (with some interruption during the Covid pandemic). Much of the exercises occur on land, especially on O‘ahu, even as residents of Hawai‘i have little understanding of the event and less exposure to it. Here is where I, a member of the press, can help.
The following are galleries of some of what RIMPAC looks like. For local residents it can be jarring to see these events play out in front of recognizable landmarks. Visitors might find it disconcerting to see war fighting, even if fictive, in the “tropical paradise” where they have vacationed. It is important, though, that RIMPAC be seen. And that is exactly what the DoD wants, to showcase to suppliers, citizens, and adversaries what it does, and might do.
But maybe that act of seeing changes the way we residents look at the relative carte blanche the state gives the DoD. Here’s a look at the theater of war on, and offshore of O‘ahu — The Garrison Isle.
Next week we return from the Carl Vinson and go to war — at Bellows, home to innumerable trips to the beach for many generations of the children of O‘ahu.
This is what is happening in your island home.
Now open to public comment as is required by law. Email concerns to PMRF-LBT-EA-Comments@us.navy.mil, they will be happy to hear from you, especially should you reference Kahoʻolawe.