Western analysts are welcoming an upgrade of a key air base in the Philippines as necessary to boost the readiness of the Philippines and U.S. militaries to deter Chinese aggression in the South China Sea.
Basa Air Base, located about 100 kilometers from Manila, is set to receive a 58,000-square-meter parking apron that can accommodate up to 20 aircraft.
The Pentagon announced last month it has awarded a contract worth over $32 million to Acciona CMS Philippines LLC to build the parking apron, shoulders and taxiway by July 2026.
The upgrade will be funded under the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, a Pentagon program aimed at countering China’s growing military threat in the Indo-Pacific.
“The United States and its allies in the region will be able to deter aggression more effectively if the infrastructure at key bases such as Basa is modernized and expanded,” said Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“The ultimate goal, of course, is to deter Chinese aggression in the region. This is not a theoretical problem. Beijing daily demonstrates that it believes in a might-makes-right foreign policy that ignores sovereignty and rights of its neighbors,” Bowman continued.
Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., told VOA on Tuesday that the Philippines and the United States “should not target any third party” in their cooperation to upgrade the base.
“China made clear its positions on the military cooperation between the U.S. and the Philippines more than once," he said. “The U.S. is not a party to the issue of the South China Sea and has no right to interfere in the maritime issues between China and the Philippines.”
Manila on Sunday condemned “dangerous provocative actions” by two Chinese aircraft dropping flares in the path of a Philippine aircraft conducting a routine patrol around the Scarborough Shoal on Thursday in the South China Sea. Beijing defended its action as a legal move against Manila’s “illegal” intrusion into its airspace.
The Scarborough Shoal is one of the region’s most contested maritime flashpoints. Manila and Beijing often find themselves in frequent flare-ups over the sovereignty and fishing rights of the shoal. It sits about 300 kilometers from Basa Air Base, well within the Philippines’ Exclusive Economic Zone and about 900 kilometers from the Chinese mainland.
The base, which hosts the Philippines fleet of FA-50PH combat aircraft, is currently ill-equipped to host additional fighter jets that the Philippines is in the process of acquiring, said Abdul Rahman Yaacob, a research fellow in the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute.
Philippine military chief Romeo Brawner Jr. said in July the government had approved a decision to purchase multi-role fighter jets because the FA-50s were “not enough to defend the country.”
Yaacob said, “The air base, if equipped with sufficient infrastructure and facilities, could support and sustain Filipino and friendly forces’ joint operations at the top end of the South China Sea,” including surveillance operations.
“Basa Air Base could play a role in any tension or conflict between the U.S. and China” because of its location, Yaacob said. The base faces the South China Sea across from China’s Hainan Island.
The modernization of the base is part of an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) signed in 2014, which allows the U.S. to build and operate facilities on Philippine’s bases for both countries and rotate American forces through the Philippines. The agreement did not establish permanent U.S. bases in the country.
The U.S. allocated $66.57 million for Basa Air Base out of $82 million allocated for infrastructure investments at five bases designated as the EDCA sites in 2016.
Prashanth Parameswaran, a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington and founder of the twice-weekly ASEAN Wonk online newsletter, said the Basa Air Base modernization is “the latest in an impressive series of advances in the U.S.-Philippine alliance among both countries, as well as their wider network of partners under Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.”
“Alliance collaboration in four new defense sites announced last year will also be key to monitor, in addition to five previously agreed sites including Basa Air Base, that were part of the 2016 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement,” Parameswaran said.
In addition to five bases including Basa, the U.S. and the Philippines announced last year they will expand the EDCA to include four new sites.
