By: Andy Wong Ming Jun
“Very dramatic” Chinese diplomatic reactions, even by their usual standards, to a recent US military exercise with the Philippines involving a new land-based, road-mobile missile system provide the latest evidence that deepening US-Philippines military cooperation and diplomatic engagement has begun to feature more heavily as a potential obstacle to Chinese plans for establishing regional hegemony in the South China Sea and the widely-posited future military reconquest of Taiwan.
If the US has always been keenly aware of how the Philippines is the single largest weak link in its First Island Chain containment strategy against China in the Western Pacific, it is something that is only being belatedly addressed. Admittedly, this has been helped in no small part by the election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr as president of the Philippines in 2022, who has since then steered the country to be perhaps the most overt Southeast Asian country to openly pick sides and align with the US against China in what some have described as “the New Cold War.”
Breaking with the pro-China foreign policy of his predecessor Rodrigo Duterte, Marcos has chosen to throw in his lot with the US by seeking renewed and greater military support to buttress the Philippines’ weak material strength in supporting its legally strong position over the disputed Spratly Islands territory in the South China Sea. The US doubled down on its support earlier this week when US Indo-Pacific Command chief Adm. Samuel Paparo Jr. said in Manila that US ships providing escort to Philippine vessels on resupply missions is “an entirely reasonable option within our Mutual Defense Treaty” although later officials sought to clarify Paparo’s comments, saying the Philippines would continue to be “the lead for its own operations.”
Philippine support for the aging BRP Sierra Madre, a WWII-era tank landing ship which the military intentionally stranded on a reef near the Ayungin Shoal more than 27 years ago to stake its claim to the area and which has been maintained since by regularly supplying marines stationed there, has become a flashpoint between Beijing and Manila, raising concerns regionally that the situation could draw the US and China into a shooting war. Increasingly serious confrontations culminated on August 25 when an offshore vessel operated by Manila’s Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources was surrounded by at least eight ships belonging to the China Coast Guard and People’s Liberation Army Navy and rammed and disabled. A move by US Navy vessels to begin escorting Philippine supply ships would represent a major increase in tensions in an already fraught situation.
The Philippines has been of significant military and geographical importance to the US since the Spanish-American War of 1898, when the archipelago became an American colony. As a key strategic foothold in the Asia-Pacific, the Philippines played a crucial role in US military plans, including the pre-WWII “War Plan Orange” and as a staging area during the Vietnam War. The US-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty of 1951 solidified US-Philippines military ties during the Cold War. However, after the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos Sr. in 1989 tensions arose over US base leases in the country, leading to strained relations and the eventual closure of all remaining US bases in the Philippines by 1992. This occurred during a period of post-Cold War optimism, as the US underestimated the long-term strategic implications of losing its bases in the region.
More than three decades on, the resurgent revanchist Chinese power has once again provided the external impetus in driving US-Philippines military and political relations together with shared common ideological and pragmatic interests. The signing of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement in April 2014 reestablished US military basing presence in the Philippines for the first time since 1992, albeit in a reduced form whereby the Philippines retained full ownership of military bases that the US could operate its military forces out from. As of 2024, the US has secured nine locations to operate from, with more than half of them concentrated in the northern island of Luzon allowing for direct contestation against China’s Southern Theater Command’s presence in the South China Sea and potential support for its Eastern Theater Command in any potential amphibious invasion of Taiwan.
It is a powerful statement of intent that was demonstrated by the US with its recent Exercise Salaknib 24 airlifting of a Mid-Range Capability missile system centered around the US Army’s new Typhon road-mobile missile launcher over 15 hours from the US west coast to northern Luzon. The ability of the Typhon to launch ground-attack Tomahawk cruise missiles and long-range Standard SM-6 antiaircraft missiles makes the ability to forward-deploy such missile batteries to Northern Luzon extremely potent in piercing the Chinese area-denial bubble it has projected over the entirety of the South China Sea and the First Island Chain in the Western Pacific.
This should be seen as part of the wider US strategy of Agile Combat Employment, which seeks to proactively impose operational and political complications on any Chinese targeted strikes against US forces in the region as part of a wider Taiwan invasion, as well as directly challenging Chinese assumptions of free and safe hostile operations within their theater “front yard”. In attempting to preemptively deny China the ability to project power outwards from its coastline as a default “safe” option with erstwhile acceptable costs, the US hopes to influence the decision-making calculus of Chinese politicians and military leaders as to how far they can push their luck with aggressive gray-zone or overt hostile actions to coerce diplomatically advantageous outcomes for their national grand strategy.