Guam’s military footprint combines major Navy facilities, tenant commands, submarine operations, and a large community of service members and families. The figures below describe the island’s military presence using installation information, the 2015 Guam Statistical Yearbook, and older Department of Defense planning figures. Measurement years matter: current installation descriptions, 2014–2015 population counts, and forecasts for 2020 are kept separate.
Contents
- Guam’s military geography
- Naval Base Guam installations
- Military personnel and families
- Service-by-service counts in 2015
- The 2014 comparison
- Historical buildup plans
Guam’s military geography
Guam is a compact island, but its military facilities occupy several distinct locations. The Naval Base Guam official site describes Guam as about 30 miles long and 12 miles wide at its widest point. The same source also gives a broader width range of 6 to 12 miles and a length of about 36 miles. These are different descriptive measurements from the same official installation source, so they should not be treated as a single precise survey dimension.
The island is approximately 3,300 miles west of Hawaii and about 1,500 miles east of the Philippines, according to the Naval Base Guam official site. Those distances help explain Guam’s position in the western Pacific without turning geography into a population estimate.
The main base surrounds Inner Apra Harbor. Polaris Point is approximately two miles north of the main base front gate, while the Ordnance Annex is approximately one mile southeast of the main base. The Barrigada site is south of Route 16 near the village of Barrigada, and the North Finegayan site is on the northwest side of the island. These locations show that “Guam military base” refers to a network of sites rather than one single bounded property.
Naval Base Guam installations
Naval Base Guam hosts more than 30 tenant commands, according to the Naval Base Guam installation page. A tenant-command count is an organizational measure: it does not equal the number of buildings, military personnel, or separate bases on the island.
The installation page identifies Naval Base Guam as the home base of five Los Angeles-class submarines. That figure is specific to the submarine presence described by the source and should not be expanded into a count of every Navy vessel or unit associated with Guam.
The Ordnance Annex encompasses nearly 18,000 acres, according to the Naval Base Guam installations page. In practical terms, this is a large land-area statistic within the broader installation system. The source separately identifies the main base, Polaris Point, Barrigada, and North Finegayan, so the nearly 18,000-acre figure should not be assumed to describe every Naval Base Guam site combined.
The physical scale of the military presence has also changed over time. The Naval Base Guam history page says Guam’s wartime Navy supply base housed 50,000 personnel during World War II. It included 3,000 Quonset huts and more than 1,000 major structures. These are historical wartime figures, not a description of the island’s 2014 or 2015 resident military population.
Military personnel and families
The Naval Base Guam history page reports that about 6,300 active-duty Navy members live on Guam and about 6,900 family members live on Guam in support of the Navy presence. The same history source notes a significant population of retired military personnel among Guam’s military families, but it does not quantify that retired population in the supplied figures.
The 2015 Guam Statistical Yearbook provides a broader island-wide count. In 2015, Guam’s total military and dependents population was 13,326. That total consisted of 6,115 active-duty military personnel and 7,211 military family members. The yearbook also records Guam’s resident population as 161,785 and states that military personnel and dependents represented 8.2% of the resident population.
The 2015 figures describe a military-connected population, not just people working inside a gate. Including dependents matters for understanding housing, schools, transportation, retail demand, and other aspects of island living. It also matters when comparing the military community with Guam’s total resident population.
Here is the 2015 split by service, using the counts reported in the Guam Statistical Yearbook:
| Service | Active duty | Family members |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. Air Force | 2,074 | 1,847 |
| U.S. Army | 253 | 2,916 |
| U.S. Coast Guard | 184 | 200 |
| U.S. Marine Corps | 21 | 31 |
| U.S. Navy | 3,583 | 2,217 |
| All services | 6,115 | 7,211 |
The Navy was the largest active-duty service category in 2015, with 3,583 personnel. The Air Force followed with 2,074. The Army count was 253, the Coast Guard count was 184, and the Marine Corps count was 21. Family-member counts followed a different pattern: the Army category had 2,916 family members, compared with 2,217 for the Navy and 1,847 for the Air Force.
Service-by-service counts in 2015
The yearbook’s service categories are useful because the headline total alone hides the composition of Guam’s military community. The 2015 U.S. Air Force total was 2,074 active-duty personnel and 1,847 family members. The U.S. Army total was 253 active-duty personnel and 2,916 family members. The U.S. Coast Guard total was 184 active-duty personnel and 200 family members.
The U.S. Marine Corps category contained 21 active-duty personnel and 31 family members in 2015. The U.S. Navy category contained 3,583 active-duty personnel and 2,217 family members. Across the five service categories, the yearbook reported 6,115 active-duty personnel and 7,211 family members, for the stated total of 13,326 military personnel and dependents.
These counts should be read as the yearbook’s 2015 snapshot. They are not a current-year estimate, and they should not be combined with the Naval Base Guam history page’s approximate Navy-only figures as though every source used the same definitions and measurement date.
The 2014 comparison
The 2015 Guam Statistical Yearbook also reports a comparable 2014 snapshot. Guam’s total military and dependents population was 12,654 in 2014, consisting of 6,006 active-duty military personnel and 6,648 military family members. Guam’s resident population was 161,001, and military personnel and dependents represented 7.9% of that resident population.
The service-level counts were as follows:
| Service | 2014 active duty | 2014 family members |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. Air Force | 2,074 | 1,846 |
| U.S. Army | 257 | 2,498 |
| U.S. Coast Guard | 206 | 211 |
| U.S. Marine Corps | 16 | 36 |
| U.S. Navy | 3,453 | 2,057 |
| All services | 6,006 | 6,648 |
The 2014 and 2015 snapshots place the military community in context. The yearbook reports 12,654 military personnel and dependents in 2014 and 13,326 in 2015, while the resident population figures were 161,001 and 161,785, respectively. The associated shares were 7.9% and 8.2%.
In the 2014 service breakdown, the Navy accounted for 3,453 active-duty personnel and 2,057 family members. The Air Force accounted for 2,074 active-duty personnel and 1,846 family members. The Army accounted for 257 active-duty personnel and 2,498 family members; the Coast Guard, 206 and 211; and the Marine Corps, 16 and 36. These are reported counts for 2014, not forecasts.
Historical buildup plans
Older Department of Defense planning figures provide a separate view of Guam’s military trajectory. In GAO-10-90R, the Department of Defense planned to increase Guam’s military population from about 15,000 in 2009 to about 29,000 in 2014. The same planning material expected Guam’s military population to exceed 39,000 by 2020.
Those numbers are plans and expectations, not measured outcomes in the supplied evidence. They should therefore be labeled as historical forecasts rather than presented as confirmed population totals. The planning figures also used a different population concept from the yearbook’s 2014 and 2015 counts, so they are not interchangeable with the active-duty and family-member tables above.
GAO-10-90R stated that the planned buildup would raise Guam’s island population of 178,430 by about 14%. It also described the planned Guam military presence as about two and a half times the 2009 level. Both statements belong to the planning-era scenario and retain the source’s approximate wording.
Taken together, the historical record shows several scales of military activity: a World War II supply base that housed 50,000 personnel, a modern Naval Base Guam installation with more than 30 tenant commands and five home-ported Los Angeles-class submarines, and yearbook snapshots that counted 13,326 military personnel and dependents in 2015. The figures answer different questions and come from different periods, so geography, installation capacity, measured population, and forecast population should remain distinct when discussing Guam’s military bases.