A Balikatan first: Philippine-US war games to boost external defence, cybersecurity capabilities

The armed forces of the Philippines and United States are doing things a little differently during their ongoing 38th Balikatan, or shoulder to shoulder, training exercises that will last until June.

While the bulk of the 17,600 combined forces – 12,200 American and 5,400 Filipino soldiers – will train for 17 days, a “few” US military officers will stay for two months to attend to logistics of sending home troops and equipment and to plan the next cycle of exercises with local counterparts, building on the lessons learned from the current one.

“For the vast majority of participants, they are here for one month or less,” said Alexander Cornell du Houx, a US Navy public affairs officer, in an interview with This Week in Asia on April 12.

Besides having nearly twice the number of troops training a week longer than the two-week exercises last year, the current war drills contain several firsts, according to military officials.

Unlike previous exercises which emphasised HADR or humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations by both forces, these drills have a laser-focus on precise combat scenarios.

For instance, in the coming days, the northernmost populated island province of Batanes – only 80 nautical miles from Taiwan – will see heavily armed soldiers dropping from parachutes, as well as a mock assault by air and possibly by sea, weather permitting.

Northern Luzon deputy military commander for training Lieutenant Colonel Loel Egos asked residents to remain calm, and said the soldiers would be enacting “a scenario where the island gets occupied by a fictitious country and the training troops take it back”.

A “cyber defence exercise”, a first for Balikatan, has also been integrated into the training, according to marine Lieutenant Colonel Michael Logico, chief of staff of the Philippine Armed Forces’ exercise directorate, and du Houx. With most of the military’s systems of command and control and information operating in the cyber domain, the new exercise aimed to patch vulnerabilities that “bleed into actual operations”, they said.

Separately, a “littoral live-fire exercise”, which in previous Balikatan events were conducted in landlocked areas, will now take place within the country’s littoral zone.

“We are going to be firing at a target located inside 12 nautical miles of our territorial waters,” Logico said.

The scenario simulates an adversary coming in via the sea, with soldiers set to engage the opponent by “utilising all of our capabilities from the army, navy and the air force”. According to du Houx, both forces will have the opportunity to sink a retired Corvette military vessel.

On who that opponent might be, Logico said it would be “any adversary that has plans to attack us”.

Du Houx also stressed that Balikatan “is not about any one country reckoning one threat”.

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The joint exercises “are really just an opportunity for the US and Filipino forces to train shoulder to shoulder”, said marine Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Huvane, the Balikatan’s combined joint information director, adding that locations of the war exercises had been planned well in advance.

Defence and security analyst Jose Antonio Custodio, however, viewed the exercises as preparation for an eventual attack by China.

“Who is our number one adversary except China which has been grabbing Philippine maritime territory and militarising artificial islands in the past 20 years?” said Custodio, who once worked at the Philippine military planning section.

“[China] has become a threat to us, so we have to plan for any eventuality,” he said.

This year’s Balikatan is expected to also feature America’s 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment (3rd MLR) in a major exercise.

The US Naval Institute, a private think tank, said in an article published on April 12 that the Marine Corps had converted its 112-year-old 3rd Marine Regiment into the 3rd MLR last year and assigned it a new way of fighting, using smaller units trained to move stealthily from island to island in the Indo-Pacific region, which includes the Philippines and the disputed South China Sea.

The article quoted Brigadier General Joseph Clearfield, deputy commanding general for the Marine Corps Forces Pacific, as saying last month: “What the MLR can do is – if it had to be – a self-contained kill chain, a combat formation that can do over-the-horizon precision strike,” referring to attacks launched at a target in another state.

As a result of this new strategy of using small, self-contained units, the US Marine Corps has also changed the way it provides battlefield casualty care. According to a Marine Corps Times piece on April 18, all marines are required to undergo training in giving emergency critical care to fellow soldiers, including how to stop haemorrhages.

Du Houx said medical training had been included in this year’s Balikatan but did not elaborate.

Huvane explained that Balikatan enabled both armies to figure out interoperability notwithstanding differences in size and scope, while du Houx said the exercises reflected the allies being in “a joint and equal partnership”.

While the Americans showed their Filipino counterparts how to fire the FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missiles, the Javelin missiles and the M142 HIMARS or High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, Filipino marines demonstrated to their American colleagues jungle warfare tactics, including where to stick the knife into adversaries during close encounters.

Training with US armed forces also helped Filipino soldiers “widen our learning aperture”, Logico said. “And we will end up breaking that invisible ceiling on how good we can actually be.”

Logico said he was at pains to remind the Filipino soldiers they were bringing “years of experience in combat” to the joint exercises.

“We are among the best soldiers in the world,” he said. “When our exercises conclude, our US training partners always go home with that good impression of Filipino soldiers. That we are not inferior. We are their equals. And in some cases we might even be better.”