A long-running saga over costly land reclamation work for a new U.S. base in Okinawa Prefecture took another twist after a prominent U.S. think tank researcher said the project is “unlikely” to ever to be completed as planned.

The project to relocate the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Ginowan to the Henoko district of Nago, both in Okinawa Prefecture, has been plagued by repeated delays and alienated residents of the southernmost prefecture who vociferously complain they shoulder an unfair burden in hosting 70 percent of all U.S. military facilities in Japan.

“The soil is apparently unstable and requires 71,000 pilings to be secure,” Mark Cancian, who advises the Washington D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on international security issues, said of the seabed in the planned construction site.

The goal of the CSIS is to make policy proposals on diplomacy and national security to whichever administration is in power.

In a report issued last November, the CSIS said: “This project continues to have difficulties, with the completion date pushed out again, to 2030, and the price skyrocketing. It appears unlikely that this will ever be completed.”

The report was authored by Cancian, a former U.S. Marine colonel, who analyzed a major restructuring of the U.S. Marine Corps.

In its previous report, published in October 2019, the CSIS noted that the relocation project “continues to move forward (slowly) despite opposition from local politicians, who complain that Okinawa bears too much of the burden of stationing U.S. forces.”

The latest report and Cancian’s answers to The Asahi Shimbun in an email interview add to growing skepticism voiced by experts in Japan over the hugely expensive and time-consuming reclamation project amid calls for alternatives to the Futenma relocation issue.

“Weighing options other than relocating the Futenma base to Henoko would benefit Tokyo and Washington in terms of strengthening their alliance,” said Fumiaki Nozoe, an associate professor of international politics at Okinawa International University. “At the same time, the Japanese government has the responsibility to reduce the prefecture’s U.S. base burden.”

The Japanese government contends the project is the “only viable solution” to resolving issues concerning the Futenma facility, a longtime source of complaints over deafening aircraft noise and the potential danger of accidents as the base sits in a densely populated residential area.

Most Okinawans oppose the relocation of the Futenma air facility within the prefecture and say it is high time that the main islands of Japan share more of the burden, a sentiment that has evoked little enthusiasm to help out.

The government began reclamation work in December 2018 in the face of fierce local opposition voiced in a gubernatorial election, a referendum and daily sit-ins outside Camp Schwab which is used to enter the offshore site. It later acknowledged that the seabed in an area opposite to where work is in progress was “as soft as mayonnaise” and needed 71,000 pilings to be strengthened.

As a result, projected overall costs for reclamation and completing the base soared to at least 930 billion yen ($8.4 billion), about 2.7 times the central government’s initial estimate. In another setback, completion of the entire project is expected to be pushed back to the 2030s from the previously planned fiscal 2022 or later.

In the email, Cancian said, the relocation project appears “unlikely” to be completed if the government sticks to its current plan.

“It's certainly possible that a smaller or different kind of facility would be built even if the full facility turned out to be impossible,” he added.

By his own estimate, Cancian said using the U.S. Kadena Air Base in the prefecture for some of the helicopters based at Futenma might prove to be an “attractive” alternative if it is ever decided that building a full Futenma replacement facility as planned becomes impossible.

Cancian said U.S. bases in Okinawa Prefecture will remain strategically important under the Biden administration, which takes a hard line against Beijing.

“I expect that U.S. forces on Okinawa will continue to play their long-standing role of supporting forward deployments and providing an advance base in the event of a conflict in the region,” he added.

Weighing in on Cancian’s remarks, Nozoe said it is inconceivable that the researcher's views will prompt the U.S. government to reassess its decision making any time soon.

“What the report and his views suggest is that the U.S. side will be happy to have facilities in Okinawa that it can use and that it does not necessarily count on the completion of the Futenma replacement facility in Henoko,” Nozoe said.

In the U.S. Marine Corps’ Aviation Plan for 2019, the listing of the Futenma replacement facility under the Marine Corps military construction plan was dropped even though it had been featured through the Aviation Plan for 2018.

The Aviation Plan for 2019 instead listed the use of the Futenma base through fiscal 2028.

Nozoe said a change in the description suggests that Washington is paying more attention to how to enhance the functions of the Futenma airfield, rather than the new facility clouded by uncertainty.