The June 2007 Australia-United States Talisman Sabre exercise binds Australia into the US military expansion currently sweeping across the north-west Pacific Ocean. This increasing militarisation is anchored on the small island of Guam which the US claims as its own.

Guam’s Apra Harbour is a homebase for the Pacific Command’s (PACOM) Seventh Fleet of nuclear capable ships and submarines. Its Andersen Air Force Base is described in the official 36th Wing’s mission statements as: "Provid[ing] a U.S.-based lethal warfighting platform for the employment, deployment, reception, and throughput of air and space forces in the Asia-Pacific Region". It is the US’s “hub for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and strike operations” for the entire northwest Pacific.

In 2005, AUSMIN (Australia United States Ministerial Consultations), signed a Memorandum of Understanding which specifically linked the Talisman Sabre exercises to Guam. The MoU states that the US needs to conduct exercises at Shoalwater Bay Training Area (SBTA) because it is “rebalancing its force presence in the Asia-Pacific region, including the rotation of US strategic bomber aircraft through Guam”.

Under these agreements, Australia has become a major training ground for US troops and weapons systems. The US is developing a Global Strike Force on Guam and it needs the unique facilities only Australia can provide in the region to train them. “Shoalwater Bay is the only place in Australia where air, land and sea forces can engage in joint, live-fire training exercises”.

In 2005-2006 alone PACOM organised and/or hosted 1,700 military exercises engaging a vast conglomeration of foreign military forces in the Pacific-Indian Ocean region.

The US military is manoeuvring so that it will increasingly operate according to a “Pacific Strategic Triangle” concept which links Guam, Hawaii and Alaska. This ambition has resulted in a US military expansion on Guam. In September 2006, the US Pacific Command (PACOM) released plans for a military build-up on the island: including the relocation of 8,000 Marines from Okinawa; a Marines Corp base and training area; extending Andersen Air Force Base; refurbishing Naval Base Guam to enhance its capacity to transit nuclear air craft carriers; and building an Army base at Radio Barrigada for a Patriot Ballistic Missile Defence.

An ideal location for the US’s Global Strike Force, Andersen Air Force Base will homebase B-52s, and rotate 48 F-22 and F-15E fighter jets, state-of-the-art B-1 supersonic strike aircraft, B-2s “flying wing” Stealth bombers from US bases in the continent and Alaska. The US Navy currently has five of its eleven aircraft carriers in the Pacific, and intends to bring this to six by 2010.

The US has been holding Guam’s Indigenous Chamorro peoples hostage to its military ambitions for over 60 years. In 1950, the US unilaterally signed what is known as the Organic Act which unilaterally granted Guam’s residents US citizenship. According to Chamorro rights activist Hope Alvarez Cristobal. (21) If the planned military expansion in Guam goes ahead, then Guam’s 160,000 residents will experience a population explosion expanding it by about 35,000.

7,500 Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel, 20,000 US troops, 125 aircraft and 30 ships. The pristine wilderness of Shoalwater Bay is pounded with live aerial bombing, ship to shore naval firings, under water depth charges and land based artillery firings. Nuclear subs using high level sonar frequency and nuclear aircraft carriers participate in the fun and games from within the Great Barrier Reef marine national park.

The live munitions role playing at Shoalwater Bay runs simultaneously with US bombing runs by Stealth, B1 and B52 bombers from Guam to drop their live payload from 5 kilometres high on Delamere bombing range near Katherine NT. Abrams tanks also blast the country side against the wishes of the senior Aboriginal elders, at Bradshaw tank range, surrounded by Bradshaw national park south of Darwin.

The war games and their coordination in both states is beamed live via satellite from tiny cameras on the tanks, bombers, landing craft, etc to the coordinating War Room at Newcastle where the US and Australian generals call the shots of what is fired next.