House committee raises doubts about US Navy’s Indo-Pacific logistics

A U.S. congressional committee on China has sent a letter to the Secretary of the Navy raising doubts about a plan to move fuel from Hawaii to storage facilities across the Indo-Pacific and warning that the U.S. military risks being unprepared for a possible conflict.
In a letter dated Jan. 17 and seen by Reuters, Mike Gallagher, the Republican chair of the House of Representatives’ select committee on China, told Secretary Carlos Del Toro that a long-term plan to redistribute fuel from Hawaii’s Red Hill underground bulk storage facility was a “strategic imperative” in light of China’s historic military buildup.
The Pentagon in October began to drain the 1940s-era Red Hill facility at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam after a leak contaminated the water systems there, and said the fuel would be loaded onto tanker ships and transported to existing support sites. The full closure of the site is expected to take several years.
Gallagher wrote that he was not convinced the Defense Department had developed a long-term solution and that without a robust logistics network to sustain U.S. bases, ships and aircraft with fuel, the U.S. military in the Pacific would “grind to a halt.”