By: Andy Wong Ming Jun
For the first time, the US Air Force has deployed fighter jets to the secretive, remote island military base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, a powerful signal to China about the survivability of US combat airpower in the Asia-Pacific.
Key details of the successfully-concluded deployment, which occurred in mid-2025 were announced on November 18 as further proof of the viability of the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment (ACE) doctrine, which relies on dispersing aircraft to multiple, smaller locations instead of large, traditional bases to counter potential threats by aggressors seeking to deny strategic space to the US military.
The 7,000 km distance between Japan’s Kadena Air Base on Okinawa and Diego Garcia is significantly farther than those between American Pacific bases like Pearl Harbor or Guam, and with anticipated Chinese-contested battle spaces in the Western Pacific over Japan and the Taiwan Strait. The deployment on short notice, given the F-15E Strike Eagles’ maximum ferry range of about 4,450 km, is a demonstration of the ACE force’s agility, requiring midair refueling over the ocean in a complicated ballet involving tanker aircraft like the KC-135 Stratotanker or KC-46 Pegasus, allowing them to extend their range, transforming them from regional to global assets.
The 336th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron, a detachment of six F-15s from Kadena, first flew to Diego Garcia for three months between May and July, coinciding with the island base featuring heavily in both actual combat operations as well as maskirovka tactics against Yemeni Houthis, who have bedeviled Red Sea shipping, and the joint Israeli-US action against Iran which destroyed Tehran’s nuclear capability.
The USAF has adopted ACE as its main operational doctrine for generating and sustaining survivable airpower since August 2022, marking a significant departure from previous thinking which had assumed de facto invulnerability of large, centralized air bases from which American combat airpower could be deployed and projected over vast battlespaces with little to no ground threat.
Diego Garcia, 1,600 km south of India and 3,330 km east of the African coast, is one of the most isolated places on earth. The UK grabbed the island from its then colony Mauritius in 1965, followed by a secret agreement with British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan to allow US use in exchange for selling their newest Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missile system in lieu of the canceled Skybolt air-launched cruise missile for the UK’s nuclear deterrent capability at a discounted price.
Since the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, Diego Garca has bristled with parallel 3,700 meter runways, parking aprons for heavy bombers, anchorages for sea-going vessels, a deep-water pier, facilities for the US’s largest naval vessels, aircraft hangars, maintenance buildings and an air terminal, a 1.34 million bbl fuel storage area, and quarters for thousands of sailors and support personnel.
The UK was to hand the island back to Mauritius in return for the US joint-leasing it back from the Chagos islanders last year. But on November 4, the Labour government, led by Sir Keir Starmer, paused passage of the “Chagos Islands Treaty” through Parliament in the face of a fresh House of Lords amendment intended to bind the government into consulting before final ratification the original Chagossians displaced from the island territory.
As Asia Sentinel reported in October last year, the UK government had negotiated to not only hand over the British Indian Ocean Territory but also to pay Mauritius for the trouble. The negotiated lease sum for retaining UK-US joint usage of Diego Garcia, averaging out at £101 million annually for 99 years, triggered political fury within the UK, with the deal described as an “act of national self-harm” potentially playing to China’s advantage in a key geostrategic region.
The political fig leaf provided by the previous Biden administration in the US allegedly tying the Chagos Islands sovereignty dispute resolution to the maintenance of the decades-long UK-US “special relationship” was maintained by President Donald Trump after he regained the US presidency in January 2024. But even Trump must be impressed by the history of US military utilisation of Diego Garcia under circumstances which would not seem out of place in the art of a deal.
From the start, the US displayed an unwillingness to be dragged into any sovereignty dispute between the UK and Mauritius over the Chagos Islands, with the official stance that it was a “bilateral matter” for the UK and Mauritius to resolve themselves so long as US military access to Diego Garcia was unimpeded.
With the now-stalled Chagos Islands Treaty seeing the US continue to only cover operational costs at Diego Garcia for the “joint base” while the UK is to fork out hundreds of millions to Mauritius in leasing fees and further miscellaneous funds, President Trump no doubt feels that there is nothing to be gained from taking a personally punitive stance in reversing his predecessor Biden’s approval for a deal lopsided in American favour for relatively low cost.
Political lobbying on both sides of the Atlantic against the arrangement has been fierce, though much differing in justification. While in the US lobbying opposition against handing over the Chagos Islands and Diego Garcia permanently to Mauritian sovereignty has been over concerns about future Chinese interlocution, in the UK it has largely been focused on defending the much-ignored rights and wishes of displaced Chagossians in the entire saga.
A unified force of journalists such as Tessa Clarke at The Chagos Files working alongside the Chagossian diaspora with Bernadette Dugasse have been consistently conducting lobbying and public awareness campaigns to fight for a seat at the negotiation table for what was their once-homeland sacrificed on the altar of great power horse-trading.
With the current Labour government seeing record unpopularity levels and criticisms of fiscal spendthrift particularly in its foreign aid budget, the currently-negotiated leasing fees for Diego Garcia may well prove to be an unaffordable expenditure of political and financial capital for London that can be seized on by opposition voices to undergird their idealism appeal for Chagossian self-determination.