United States Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will be in Manila on July 29 for his first high-profile, three-nation swing in Southeast Asia.
The first Black Pentagon chief, a retired army general who had commanded troops in Iraq, will also be in Singapore and Vietnam during the week to strengthen and deepen bilateral security relations.
The visit to the region, particularly in the Philippines, is not only symbolic of the more than 70 years of military alliance, but emphasizes the growing role of the country in the United States’ new deterrence strategy in the Indo-Pacific region.
Last year, the US Congress funded the new strategy aimed at regaining the balance of forces in the region against China’s growing influence. It is actually a follow-up to the 2018 Asia Reassurance Initiative Act (ARIA) in Congress, which provided $1.5 billion in annual funding for security operations in the Indo-Pacific region for five years.
Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and South Korea are the focus of the funding.
The new strategy, called Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI), enacted two years later, would provide a total of $27.4 billion up to 2027 to develop a conventional defense system to prevent China from changing the status quo in the region, like attacking Taiwan, grabbing the Senkaku Islands from China and boosting its anti-access and area denial (A2AD) strategy in the South China Sea.
For 2022 alone, the US Congress has allocated $4.7 billion to buy more warships and aircraft that could likely revive the US Navy’s plan to deploy a dedicated Fleet in the region, the 1st Fleet.
Although the US Navy has the 7th Fleet in Japan and the 3rd Fleet’s carrier strike group often patrols the disputed waters in the South China Sea, Washington wanted to add more to thwart any Chinese ambition to dominate the Indo-Pacific waters.
The former Indo-Pacific commander, Admiral Philip Davidson, has outlined PDI’s four key elements, which make the Philippines a key component of the strategy. Two of four elements include strengthening US relations with allies and partners in terms of exercises, training, as well as seeking access to local bases for the prepositioning of supplies and other logistics.
Under the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty with the Philippines, the US holds regular training and exercises in the country, like the joint and combined Balikatan exercises, the Marine-led Kamandag and Army-led Salaknib, and the Air Force exercise Talon Vision.
These trainings and exercises were done under the 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement. The 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) allows the US Air Force to rotate aircraft in four air bases and the US Army to train in a jungle base in Fort Magsaysay in Nueva Ecija.
Secretary Austin is expected to take up the VFA and other security mechanisms with his counterpart, Delfin Lorenzana, and with foreign secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr., during the visit.
President Rodrigo Duterte has sent a notice of abrogation to end 20 years of the VFA after Washington revoked the visa of the former national police chief, Sen. Ronald dela Rosa, in 2019.
But pressures from the defense and foreign affairs officials forced him to suspend the termination thrice, extending its life until February 2022.
Austin’s visit demonstrates the importance of the Philippines to America’s new security strategy in the region as it looks for supply depots and staging areas, and trains its troops to respond to any contingency in the Indo-Pacific area.
It gives the Duterte administration enough leverage to seek a bigger share in the US State Department’s annual military assistance to upgrade military equipment and acquire newer and more reliable platforms.
However, there’s one hitch. The United States is also looking for areas in the region to deploy medium-range and intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) after former president Donald Trump walked away from the 1987 INF treaty with Russia to eliminate nuclear and conventional missiles with ranges of 500 kilometers to 1,500 kilometers in 2018.
Trump used Russia’s non-compliance to withdraw from the treaty, but the real reason was China’s rapid development and deployment of nuclear missiles as it is not a party to the Cold War treaty.
Both Washington and Moscow have started testing nuclear and conventional hypersonic land-based ballistic missiles and may deploy them within the next two to three years.
After 2018, a nuclear arms race started, with Iran trying to catch up with the help of China. Luckily for the US, the North Korean delivery system is faulty, making its ballistic missiles unreliable and ineffective.
But, just the same, the US is preparing against a North Korean missile landing on its bases in Guam as well as on the continental United States.
Part of the PDI plan is to set up a network of radar systems as an early warning against attacks from aircraft and missiles as well as anti-missile defenses in Guam, Alaska and space-based defense systems.
The US planned to deploy offensive medium-ranged missiles from mobile launchers from Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines as the first line of defense. The US also can launch nuclear missiles from long-range bombers now in Guam, prowling attack submarines and land-based silos in many parts of the US.
Will Duterte allow the United States to deploy future ballistic missiles in the country? He is not in a position as his term ends next year and the earliest deployment of US missiles will be in 2023.
Austin will be laying the groundwork for future and closer Philippine-United States military relations with eyes fixed on countering China’s ambitions to dominate the region.
Austin’s visit will have far-reaching implications on the stability and security of not just the Philippines but the entire Indo-Pacific region.
Does Austin’s three-nation swing this month in Southeast Asia signal a new era in America’s security engagement with the region?
Or is this the end of the Philippines’s flirtations with China as Duterte exits in the political scene next year?