Can we manage a large calamity and a skirmish in the South China Sea simultaneously?
At the moment, our capabilities are overstretched. Our Air Force planes are clearly shorthanded ferrying emergency relief to the devastated areas of eastern Mindanao. Our Navy does not have enough vessel to deliver the goods so generously donated by the people of Luzon and the Visayas.
The last thing we need now is an incident in the South China Sea involving China’s maritime police boarding any of our fishing vessels. Yet that is a possibility that looms large.
Last week, Hainan’s provincial government issued an order allowing her maritime police vessels to board and to detain all vessels entering waters China claims it owns. That brings terrifying prospects for our fishermen and will likely spark many more tussles in the disputed areas.
Whatever link there is between this recent order and Philippine behavior in Phnom Penh during the last Asean summit is, of course, entirely speculative. The order was indeed issued by a provincial government with jurisdiction over the claimed South China Sea waters. Given China’s mode of government, however, policy action must have been cleared with Beijing.
Hainan’s new policy sharply escalates the stakes in the South China Sea. It likewise underscores the gross asymmetry between China’s military strength and ours.
China has carefully avoided militarizing the dispute by bringing its navy into the fray (which was our mistake when we brought the BPS Gregorio del Pilar to the Scarborough Shoal). The large and impressive vessels we see sitting off the shoal belong to China’s maritime police.
Since the incident at the shoal early this year, China has maintained a constant presence in the area, using China Marine Surveillance (CMS) vessels. They likewise began building permanent structures on the disputed islands, fully aware that in the case of competing territorial claims, effective occupation is nearly the only matter to be determined. This is why, for our part, we have tried very hard foisting the myth that Kalayaan in the Spratlys is a Filipino municipality.
At the moment, our own Coast Guard is extremely stretched. With its few small vessels, it is tasked with securing one of the world’s largest territorial waters. The waters we consider part of our territory covers 2.2 million square kilometers, far more than our land area of just 300,000 square kilometers.
With our 7,100 islands, we are one of the world’s largest archipelagos. Our aggregate coastline of 36,289 kilometers is third longest, after Canada and Indonesia. Our shelf area, the waters to a depth of 200 meters from the land boundaries, spans 184,600 square kilometers. That is about 8% of the world’s total ocean area.
We cannot possibly physically patrol such a large area. To aspire to do so, we might have to assemble what could be the world’s largest coast guard service. That is obviously beyond our means.
In addition, China will likely match any increase in our maritime force with larger increases in hers. Today China spends $114 billion annually for its defense. That dwarfs the $1.4 billion we spend for ours.
With her large and booming economy, China could quickly raise her military spending without much domestic political fuss. To increase our meager military expenditure, we will take funds away from education, infrastructure, public health and, yes, civil defense. That will surely produce a political outcry.
Diverting funds to military spending will warp our own economic development as such spending warped the domestic economy of the former Soviet Union. Doing so will surely make our people more vulnerable to natural calamities of the sort we saw this week in the south.
It is not only our Navy and Coast Guard that is seriously handicapped. Our small Air Force is tasked to defend our airspace with only Italian-made S-211 trainer planes (nicknamed Widow Maker” because of the number of our pilots killed in crashes). The S-211 is a trainer plane. It is not designed for actual combat duties. On top of that, only about half of our Air Force assets may be considered in a state of operational readiness.
Quite clearly, we are in no position to indulge in an arms race with a rival who will, very soon, emerge to become the world’s largest economy.
Recall how Mexicans used to mourn their geopolitical fate: “Oh Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!” We could either join them in their mourning over the curse of geography or conduct our business a little more smartly.
Our only sustainable recourse is smart diplomacy and even smarter territorial defense.
I have written in this space about how less than smart our diplomacy regarding the China Sea issues have been. I will not add to that.
On the matter of territorial defense, the issues are clearer. The benchmark for credible territorial defense is the capacity for round-the-clock surveillance of our boundaries.
We can achieve that either by accumulating a large armada deployed on our borders and observing our territory like border sentries did during the olden times or we can use modern electronic surveillance equipment to achieve the same goal at a fraction of the cost.
We have seen, on a micro scale, how CCTV cameras enhanced the force projection of our police and helped greatly in keeping criminality in check. New technologies now allow us to observe our territorial waters around the clock not only for foreign incursions but also for such mundane but vital things like smuggling and poaching.
Indulging in an arms race is simply unsustainable.