To explore the physical reality of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s footprint in Hawaii and address the hidden costs of the islands’ role as a platform for great power rivalry, the Monitor spoke with Dr. Kyle Kajihiro. In this conversation, we discuss how local communities navigate the tension between economic reliance on the military and extreme vulnerability, the lingering historical impacts of World War II martial law, and how advocates are pushing to restore Hawaii as an independent, neutral space for Pacific peacebuilding.
Dr. Kyle Kajihiro is a scholar and community organizer who teaches courses focusing on Asian American history, social movements, and critiques of U.S. militarism and imperialism. A yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese in Hawaiʻi) based in Mōʻiliʻili, he earned his PhD in Geography from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2020. His research critically analyzes U.S. imperial formations and Indigenous decolonial movements, including the Kanaka ʻŌiwi movement to protect the island of Kahoʻolawe from military training. Prior to his graduate studies and continuing today, Dr. Kajihiro works closely with community organizations engaged in social and environmental justice, focusing on groups like Hawaiʻi Peace and Justice, Mālama Mākua, and Oʻahu Water Protectors to counter the negative impacts of the military in the Pacific region.
Elijah Shoaf: For most Americans on the mainland, Indo-Pacific deterrence and strategic competition are abstract policy terms they might read about in the news. But for residents of Hawaii, which serves as the command center for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, that posture is a daily physical reality. How would you describe the day-to-day footprint of the military in Hawaii to someone on the mainland who only sees the islands as a vacation destination?
Kyle Kajihiro: Because people’s understanding of Hawaii has been shaped so much by this projection of a touristic destination—a tropical paradise and multicultural playground—it masks the large presence of the U.S. military and its contradictory role. Some have said the military is everywhere in Hawaii, yet hidden in plain sight.
It occupies a tremendous amount of land. On the small island of Oahu alone, nearly a quarter of the land is controlled by the U.S. military. That scale compares to places like Guam and Okinawa, which are also dealing with similar conflicts over land use. There are environmental problems that come from this military presence, including contamination, unexploded ordnance, and the destruction of ecosystems and cultural sites.
Many of these areas are crown and government lands going back to the Hawaiian Kingdom era, before the U.S. took over. They have a unique trust status, and most of the military’s land holdings in Hawaii are from that corpus of land. It’s a constant source of tension and conflict that doesn’t normally rise to public awareness.
This massive presence has resulted in major flashpoints. For example, fifty years ago this year, a Hawaiian protest movement began occupying Kaho’olawe Island to block live-fire training. They succeeded in stopping the bombing and having the island partially restored for cultural use, but it is still contaminated with unexploded ordnance. We have other sites currently undergoing similar struggles. Mākua Valley on Oahu, for example, is an ongoing issue involving live-fire training, unexploded ordnance, and a Hawaiian community that has been trying to get that land returned and restored. Cleaning it up is going to be a much longer process. These are the lingering problems of the military presence that aren’t readily apparent to people looking from the outside.
ES: Unsurprisingly, given what you’ve said, defense accounts for the second-largest driver of Hawaii’s economy after tourism. Yet being the nerve center of U.S. Pacific operations places the islands on the front line of any potential military escalation, specifically with China. How do local communities navigate the tension between economic reliance on the military and extreme vulnerability, both in terms of the strained peacetime relationship you described, and the physical risks that could emerge during a crisis?
KK: Economic reliance on military spending is a benefit, but it also constrains our options for future planning and development. Because we’ve become so reliant on two major industries, political capital gets poured into securing and perpetuating them, often at the expense of other opportunities and needs.
The military economy comes with unequal benefits and costs. We have to ask: what are the true costs, and who is bearing them? The displacement of Hawaiians from the stolen lands of the Hawaiian Kingdom places a tremendous burden on that specific community. Native Hawaiians represent some of the largest percentages of poor and unhoused persons in the islands. The people reaping the benefits of military spending and contracts are rarely the ones paying the price.
Another factor creating inequality is the effect on the housing market. Because military personnel make up such a large percentage of the population and receive generous housing allowances, it creates unequal competition. These subsidies allow military families to out-compete local residents, driving up the overall cost of housing. While there have been attempts to address this by expanding on-base housing, service members receive that allowance as cash and can choose to spend it off-base. This is one of the hidden impacts of the military presence that people feel deeply, even if it isn’t always visible.
Navigating this vulnerability creates a somewhat schizophrenic relationship. There is a strong sense of the harm and irritation caused by these impacts, but there is also a dependency on military spending for jobs, coupled with this abstract notion that the military is here for our protection. That makes it hard to have these conversations. Look at our history: Hawaii was placed in the center of a war not of our making when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, which was a response to the massing of the Pacific Fleet here. We have to ask if there are ways we can avoid being used by great powers as a platform for waging wars against other people. Being a platform puts a target on our backs. That goes not just for Hawaii, but for Guam, Okinawa, and all the other places being used for military power projection. They are all in the crosshairs.
ES: Moving forward, Hawaii has deep organic ties to China, from 19th-century migration and commercial trade to Sun Yat-Sen being educated in Honolulu and founding his Revive China Society there. Historically, the islands served as a diplomatic and cultural bridge. Today, however, as geopolitical tensions rise, those relationships are increasingly viewed through a national security lens. How has this rising drumbeat of conflict reshaped Hawaii’s cultural, academic, or economic connections with China, and have you observed a changing environment for international outreach?
KK: While I don’t have direct personal experience with this, my sense is that where there used to be much more open cultural exchange and academic collaboration, it is now a much more fraught relationship. People are concerned about national security pressures and are significantly more cautious.
There is an added level of scrutiny—if you do anything with China, you might wind up on someone’s radar as a security threat. Given the present climate, where anything friendly to China could be deemed a threat, it has a deterrent effect. It makes international relations much harder. Many foreign students are afraid of attacks on migrants and international students, which creates a tense environment overall.
ES: Many institutions have faced budget cuts in the education sector during the second Trump administration, and the East-West Center was hit pretty badly. Can you speak to how these budget constraints and shifting political priorities have affected your work and the broader academic environment in Hawaii?
KK: The East-West Center was definitely hit. In ethnic studies, where I am, we work closely with other social science and humanities departments dealing with ethnicity, race, and diversity. Much of that funding was threatened, withheld, slowed down, or in some cases, canceled completely. It has been incredibly disruptive.
While some of that funding, which comes through various government grants and cooperative agreements, eventually returned, other areas were also hit hard. The University of Hawaii is a leader in climate science, and they suffered significant cuts as well. All in all, there is a crippling of higher education. The attacks on what can be taught and how you can express certain ideas have made it a much more difficult environment. People are deeply concerned.
ES: In any direct confrontation between the U.S. and China, Hawaii’s concentration of military sites makes the islands a natural target for missile strikes, cyber warfare, blockades, or hybrid warfare tactics. Hawaii imports roughly 85 to 90 percent of its food and most of its energy via commercial shipping. If a conflict breaks out, the military will naturally prioritize its own logistics over civilian resupply. How would this potential conflict impact civilian life and everyday Hawaiians?
KK: In many ways, the general population in Hawaii is not a priority for the military and its logistics needs. We had the experience during World War II of being under martial law for three years. The military actually had a scorched-earth policy: in the event of a Japanese invasion, our critical infrastructure would be destroyed so it could not be used by Japan. We were a sacrifice zone in some ways.
We need to develop more autonomous, independent capacities for providing for ourselves. There has been a greater effort recently to make Hawaii more resilient in terms of our food systems: growing more locally and diversifying the food supply. We depend heavily on shipping, which would absolutely be a choke point in a crisis. This is why we have been working to raise these questions and push for a shift away from the concentration of militarization in the islands, toward a greater diversity of economic resources. We need to return lands so they can be used in productive ways that benefit the community.
ES: You mentioned that Hawaii was under martial law during World War II, which isn’t a widely circulated piece of history on the mainland. Because Hawaii became a state after World War II, was the drive for statehood partly about securing more legal rights to prevent that kind of unilateral military control? It seems like it would be much harder to place Hawaii under martial law today because it is a state with legal recourse.
KK: During World War II, we were a territory, effectively a colony. Between 30 and 40 percent of the population was of Japanese ancestry. Even though most were American citizens, the federal government and the military saw the Japanese community as a potential threat. That is what drove the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans.
They couldn’t incarcerate everyone in Hawaii because that community made up a massive part of the workforce. Doing so would have ground the economy to a halt and impaired the war effort. They wanted to keep people working while maintaining a degree of strict security and control. By placing all the islands under martial law for three years, they effectively turned the archipelago into a heavily controlled zone where the economy, the law, and the media were all run by the military.
There was also a selective incarceration of community leaders. Priests, lawyers, and the intelligentsia were all considered potential threats. Several thousand people were incarcerated, less than one percent of the overall population, but it had a deeply corrosive effect on community solidarity. There would be a knock at the door, the FBI would take someone away at night, and they would disappear before their family even knew where they were. Later, they were shipped out to Department of Justice or military concentration camps. It was terrifying for these families, and it was a primary way for the military to maintain control.
ES: If being caught in the crosshairs of a Pacific conflict is an unavoidable reality of geography, the conversation needs to shift toward mitigation. Local advocates argue that work is needed to improve civil defense measures and food security. From a policy standpoint, what tangible steps should state and local leaders take to ensure Hawaii’s civilian population isn’t left helpless if military infrastructure is targeted or Pacific shipping shuts down?
KK: While other folks are focusing on the practicalities of our food systems and resilience, the questions I have are broader. Why is it that geography should be a curse for places like Hawaii, Guam, and Okinawa? In a world system based on the rule of law and diplomacy, couldn’t there be a way to maintain peaceful relations where our islands are not used as anyone’s weapon or platform?
It has become a zero-sum game: the assumption is that if it isn’t the U.S. here, then it will be China. That assumes the geographic vulnerability of our islands is an automatic justification and permission to be occupied and used. When Hawaii was an independent country, it tried to maintain neutrality through treaties. If that neutrality was actually respected by global powers—maintaining a space where ships could move freely without being territorialized—wouldn’t that be better for the world as a whole? Turning islands into secured military outposts makes them a threat to other countries. It creates a security dilemma of escalating militarization that doesn’t serve anyone in the region, especially given the enormous military spending going on in the U.S. and elsewhere.
I would like to open up the question to a different paradigm. There are small, strategically vulnerable countries in the world that are protected by the global commons. Could our islands in the Pacific be under a kind of international protectorate that does not require us to be a military platform for the United States, China, or any other power? Right now, development in the region is stunted. Nations like the Compact of Free Association (COFA) states are beholden to the United States. The U.S. puts its thumb on them and uses their space for the military, and because they are dependent on that spending, they never had a real shot at true independence. As a region, we’ve never had a real shot at developing in a way that truly benefits the Pacific.
ES: For mainland U.S. policymakers, Hawaii is often treated as an unsinkable aircraft carrier, a strategic asset used to project power toward Asia. But historically, many Native Hawaiian and local leaders have advocated for the islands to be recognized as a center for Pacific diplomacy and a neutral space for peacebuilding. What is the core message you want mainland Americans to understand about what the people of Hawaii actually want?
KK: It is a contradiction to say that Hawaii is an unsinkable aircraft carrier while also aspiring to be the Geneva of the Pacific. Many people active in the Hawaiian movement would like to see Hawaii restored as an independent country that is genuinely neutral and serves as a place for peacebuilding.
If we are not seen as a weapon by other countries, but as a place that brings people together, that brings us more security in the long term. We are already seeing in the Middle East how bases that were supposedly there for the protection of host countries become targets as soon as a conflict breaks out. Being someone else’s weapon means you are the first target. We want to envision a future where we are not a target, but where we develop in ways that benefit the people of this region.
ES: Looking ahead 30 to 50 years, what is the trajectory of this movement? Do you see Hawaii drifting toward greater sovereignty?
KK: With current economic conditions and political conflicts, it looks like many elements of U.S. power in the world are unraveling. That presents an opportunity for Hawaii and other Pacific countries to carve out a different kind of geopolitics—one based on values rooted in this region, rather than dictated by outside great powers.
We are already working to reclaim military lands. The leases on about 40,000 acres of land are expiring in 2029, and groups are working to transition and restore them. There is a debt owed from the military’s use of these lands for 65 years for just one dollar, not to mention the environmental harm that has been done to them. That debt should cover the removal of unexploded ordnance and the restoration of ecosystems and cultural sites. That restoration work could actually act as an engine to generate new kinds of economies and jobs in our communities. We are looking at this time of transition not just as a period of unraveling or conflict, but as an opportunity to shift priorities and invest in a sustainable future.