Anti terrorism on Guam

AFP/Washington Times:

The world's biggest anti-terrorism exercise will be held this year on Guam, underscoring the Pacific island's growing importance to Washington, officials said yesterday.
Exercise TopOff4 is part of a series of large-scale maneuvers established to strengthen the U.S. ability to respond to terrorist attacks involving weapons of mass destruction.
William Marhoffer, the U.S. Coast Guard commander in Guam, said the TopOff4 exercise would be bigger than last year's Valiant Shield war games, in which the United States mobilized 30 ships, 280 aircraft and 22,000 military personnel.
"It will be bigger in some ways. Valiant Shield was a military exercise. It was a show of force. It was the first time we had three carrier strike groups in combined operations in the Pacific since the Vietnam War," he said.
TopOff4 "is a domestic counterterrorism exercise. ... It involves the intelligence communities, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Coast Guard." The exercise is expected to simulate a maritime terrorist attack.
Vice President Dick Cheney is to visit Guam later this week.
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I spent some time on Guam in 1968 when I was medivaced from Vietnam. Of the memorable experiences from that stay was the worse Mexican food I have ever had. Growing up in South Texas, such things are important. Then Guam was a B-52 base with a huge hospital facility. It has beautiful beaches and tropical jungles where Japanese were still being found at the time. Many of the operations that were on Okinawa have now been moved to Guam and it is becoming a very important base in the Pacific. Note to Jack Murtha, it si still too far from Iraq for redeployment of US forces.