U.S. Set to Deploy Troops to Philippines in Rebalancing Act

From the Wall Street Journal (Mar 20): U.S. Set to Deploy Troops to Philippines in Rebalancing Act  

The deal comes as the Southeast Asian country is locked in a territorial dispute with China

U. S. forces will soon have access to five Philippine military bases, some strategically positioned in the disputed South China Sea, as the allies forge ahead with plans to station American troops in the Southeast Asian country for the first time in almost a quarter-century.

After two days of high-level talks in Washington, the Philippine Embassy there announced that four Philippine air bases and one army camp will be opened up to the U.S. under the terms of a defense pact signed in 2014.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter will visit Manila in April to finish the details of the deployments, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Amy Searight said at the talks.

The agreement to send U.S. troops back to the Philippines—a former U.S. colony that once had some of the largest American bases in the world—is part of the Obama administration’s strategy of rebalancing attention and resources to the Asia-Pacific region. New U.S. military deployments to Australia and Singapore are already under way as part of that plan.

The Philippines is locked in a dispute with China over the South China Sea, parts of which are also claimed by Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam. Manila has been encouraging the U.S. to play a more active role in resisting what it regards as Chinese aggression in Philippine waters.

For the past two years China has been constructing seven artificial islands and at least three airstrips in the South China Sea, despite its neighbors’ protests, and has refused to take part in legal arbitration initiated in 2013 by the Philippines at a U.N.-backed tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.

Chinese officials have repeatedly asserted China’s right to reclaim land within its own sovereign territory, while warning the U.S. to keep out of the territorial disputes.

The deal, announced Friday, to send American forces to the Philippines had been held up for 18 months by a legal challenge, but in January the country’s Supreme Court ruled that the pact is constitutional and can go ahead. With the five bases now identified, the deployment of U.S. forces would follow “very soon,” U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg said.

Among the four air bases being made available, Antonio Bautista Air Base on the western island of Palawan is strategically located by the South China Sea, potentially giving American aircraft quick access to any flashpoints there and improving their ability to fly surveillance missions.

The inclusion of Lumbia Air Base on the southern island of Mindanao reflected the “serious concern” in both Manila and Washington about efforts by Islamic State to establish a foothold on the island, said Richard Javad Heydarian, a security expert at De La Salle University in Manila.

“Counterterror operations continue to be a key element of American military footprint in the region,” he said.

Mactan-Benito Ebuen Air Base in central Philippines, and Basa Air Base and army camp Fort Magsaysay, both on the northern island of Luzon, are the other locations.

Access to the bases would help U.S. forces to train their Philippine counterparts, and enable them to respond more quickly with assistance to natural disasters, the Philippine embassy said.

Some security analysts had expected Clark Air Base and Subic Bay, both former American bases, would be at the top of Washington’s wish-list due to their strategic positions and relatively modern facilities.

Mr. Heydarian said they could be opened up later, noting national elections are set in the Philippines in May. But he said they aren’t as “strategically indispensable to American power projection in the region as before,” as a result of the long absence of U.S. forces from these locations.

In 1991, prompted by a wave of nationalism coinciding with the end of the Cold War, the Philippine Senate voted against extending a treaty enabling the U.S. to continue operating from Subic and Clark, which had anchored American power in the western Pacific for almost a century. The U.S. withdrawal was completed the following year.

The lack of any naval bases in the roster suggests that the U.S. Navy is already satisfied with the level of access it has to Philippine waters through regular port calls, Mr. Heydarian said. The U.S. Navy has major bases in Japan and Guam, and a smaller presence in Singapore, from which it can capably patrol the South China Sea, he said.























http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-set-to-deploy-troops-to-philippines-in-rebalancing-act-1458466797