Lawmakers eye opportunities as Philippines base access expands
WASHINGTON — Lawmakers say the Pentagon’s newly unlocked access to a handful of additional bases in the Philippines will boost the United States’ ability to deter Chinese aggression while deepening collaboration with a key ally in the region.
While it remains to be seen what kinds of investments those four new sites in the Philippines — on top of the five existing ones established under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement — will need to ensure they’re leveraged to their full potential, one House Armed Services member expects to see “strong bipartisan support” for funding in that area.
“In some ways, the heightened realization that China’s not fooling around with the surveillance balloon really will help the momentum for the Philippines decision,” Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., said in an interview Thursday.
In addition to enhancing DOD’s strategic posture in the Indo-Pacific, the news, announced earlier this month during Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III’s trip to the Philippines, supports a broader military shift toward bolstering the resiliency of current bases while distributing forces across multiple sites, making them harder to target.
Calling the Philippines “the point of the spear in the South China Sea,” Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., the former head of U.S. Pacific Command (which has since been renamed U.S. Indo-Pacific Command) and a former ambassador to South Korea, underscored the importance of the expanded site access in the so-called first island chain during the House Armed
Services Committee’s inaugural hearing of the new Congress last week.
“It’s hard to imagine a fight with the [People’s Republic of China] without being able to use bases on the Philippines,” he said.
Under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, inked in 2014, the Philippines allowed for an increased rotation of U.S. troops, aircraft and ships in its territory. But progress under the deal was slowed under former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration, which spanned 2016 to 2022.
The first five sites were announced in 2016, and the first major project — a humanitarian assistance and disaster relief warehouse — began two years after that. Those five existing bases have received more than $82 million in U.S. infrastructure investments, according to DOD’s announcement Feb. 1.
Specifically, media reports from November show the U.S. committed to spending $66.5 million on training and warehouse facilities at three of those bases, with construction to start this year.
Going forward, DOD’s release states that the U.S. and Philippines “have committed to move quickly in agreeing to the necessary plans and investments for the new and existing EDCA locations,” though it doesn’t commit to a timeline. DOD also hasn’t yet disclosed the locations of the four new sites, but the announcement said they “will allow more rapid support for humanitarian and climate-related disasters in the Philippines” while responding “to other shared challenges.”
Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow and defense program director at the think tank Center for a New American Security, wrote in an email that significant upgrades are needed at the sites to support U.S. operations. While she commended the investments in warehouses, noting many of the supplies needed for disaster relief “are dual purpose,” meaning also applicable for military use cases, she said “there is still much to be done to ‘operationalize’ the bases.”
She pointed to boosting existing airfields with runways that she said are often too short or “not made of sufficiently strong concrete to support heavy American aircraft.” She also called for additional parking ramps to allow base forces to spread out, reinforced headquarters buildings, redundant fuel tanks and pumps, heavy rapid runway repair equipment and decoys or other materials to camouflage, conceal or deceive adversaries, among other things.