The deployment signals the urgency around a flagship project that has already slipped past its original 2025 opening date.

Long Thanh airport in Dong Nai City on June 13, 2026.

Hundreds of officers and enlisted soldiers have been brought onto the site in Dong Nai City in the country's south to reinforce a civilian workforce that has struggled to keep pace with one of Southeast Asia's biggest construction projects.

The move was confirmed during a June 13 inspection by Construction Minister Tran Hong Minh, who was told by an Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV) representative that more than 76% of the total project value had been completed.

The workforce has been topped up in recent weeks but still falls nearly 2,000 short of the roughly 9,000 workers the site needs, with several units calling in military personnel to bridge the gap.

The labor crunch reflects a wider squeeze in southern Vietnam, where a cluster of megaprojects is competing for the same pool of skilled construction workers.

The nearby Bien Hoa-Vung Tau expressway and the expansion of the Ho Chi Minh City-Long Thanh-Dau Giay expressway are pulling engineers and machine operators away from the airport, and the harsh conditions across the vast, largely open site have made workers hard to retain.

To claw back time before the rainy season, contractors have added engineers, workers and equipment and moved to round-the-clock construction in three shifts and four rotating crews, part of a 180-day campaign to accelerate to the finish.

The airport is now expected to be substantially complete and to begin trial operations in September, with commercial flights targeted for late 2026.

ACV said finishing work on the passenger terminal still lacks skilled technical labor, while other packages are short of machinery operators.

The investor has ordered contractors to staff up for day-and-night work, prioritizing foundation and stone-base work to limit disruption when the rains peak.

At the terminal, which Minh called the project's "heart," he urged crews to complete each task definitively, down to the smallest item, and to push outdoor work first to stay ahead of the weather.

The schedule could not slip, he said, and crews had to race against time.

Minh singled out the airport's internal road network as critical to synchronized operations and pressed for faster progress.

For the elevated road in front of the terminal, he asked Truong Son Construction Corporation, the army's engineering enterprise, to add manpower and redeploy troops, particularly for auxiliary work once the main structure is finished.

He also asked contractors and other units to bring in more soldiers to help with cleanup, landscaping and laying turf as the airport enters its final stretch.

The push comes days after a key milestone, when the project's management board and the Dong Nai Power Company energized the airport's power supply on June 10.

The supply is drawn from the 22 kV feeders of a dedicated 110 kV substation and routed to ACV's power-receiving station. The substation, completed in December 2025, carries two transformers with a combined capacity of 80 MVA, enough to drive the equipment testing that lies ahead.

Long Thanh is the centerpiece of Vietnam's plan to expand aviation capacity and ease pressure on the overloaded Tan Son Nhat airport in Ho Chi Minh City, the country's busiest.

Built on about 5,000 hectares, it is also meant to position Vietnam as a regional transit hub and to be ready before the country hosts APEC in 2027.

Its first phase is designed to handle 25 million passengers and 1.2 million metric tons of cargo a year. Once the planned expressway expansion is finished, the airport will sit about 30 minutes from central Ho Chi Minh City.

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