WASHINGTON, D.C. — American forces are expected to come quickly to the defense of the Philippines in the event of an attack from China.
“The US will go as fast. It has the ability to move very quickly,” Dr. Zack Cooper, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said.
Cooper added that congressional spending for the Philippines has been made a lot easier because China is a challenger.
“The Philippine-US relations will stand on its own and there is the real desire to support our ally,” he said.
He also pointed out that the Philippine Western Command should maintain good relations with the US forces, particularly the Indo-Pacific Command, where “trust is prevalent.”
Cooper said planning in Asia as far as security and defense are concerned, will largely depend on the Taiwan scenario.
The US Army recently deployed a midrange missile system to the northern Philippines which allowed American and Filipino forces to jointly train for the potential usage of such heavy weaponry in Asian archipelago conditions, a US general said.
The Biden administration has moved to strengthen an arc of military alliances in the Indo-Pacific to better counter China, including in any possible confrontation over Taiwan and other Asian flashpoints.
The Philippines has also worked on shoring up its territorial defenses after its disputes with China started to escalate last year in the increasingly volatile West Philippine Sea.
China has vehemently opposed the increased deployment of American combat forces to Asia. But it has been particularly alarmed by the US Army’s deployment in April of the Typhon missile system, a land-based weapon that can fire the Standard Missile-6 and the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, to the northern Philippines as part of joint combat exercises in April with Philippine troops.
“What it does collectively, it provides us the opportunity to understand how to employ that capability — the environmental challenges here are very unique to any other place in the region,” US Maj. Gen. Marcus Evans, Commanding General of the Hawaii-based 25th Infantry Division, said when asked how the missile system has helped participants in joint combat training in the Philippines.
The Typhon missile system was supposed to be flown out of the Philippines last month, but treaty allies agreed to keep the missile system in the northern Philippines indefinitely to boost deterrence despite China’s expressions of alarm.
Evans flew to Manila to start talks with Philippine army counterparts on holding annual military exercises by the allied forces in the Southeast Asian country next year, particularly the Salaknib drills, which aim to boost the combat-readiness of thousands of American and Filipino troops in increasingly realistic settings.
“Conceptually, it is scheduled to be a larger, more complex exercise,” Evans said adding that there could be joint training maneuvers from the jungles in the northern Philippines to former U.S. military bases in the region.
“We’re also planning on bringing new equipment to train alongside our Filipino army teammates that last year we did not have,” he said without providing details.
“Our job is to get 1% better each day alongside our Filipino army teammates in terms of readiness,” he said. “Those relationships that are built, the readiness that is developed, should remove any doubt about the importance of our alliances and the work we do here with the Philippine army.”(With AP)
(The US State Department, together with the US Mission to ASEAN, and the East-West Center, organized a group of journalists from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations for a coverage tour in Seattle and Washington, D.C. from October 26 to November 7, 2024.)