Ayungin Opens Pandora’s Box: Myoushu Stilting ACE War Games
Part 2 of a Series of 4: Escalation Suggested by Newsweek Report
Newsweek quotes a December 13, 2023 US Congressional Research Service’s December 13 report:
“Beijing’s intensifying efforts to dislodge Manila from one of its outposts in the Spratly Islands archipelago raises the possibility of a crisis or conflict involving China, the Philippines, and potentially the United States.”
“The U.S. and Philippines share a 72-year-old Mutual Defense Treaty, which requires American forces to intervene in the event of an ‘armed attack’ on the Philippines, including in the energy-rich South China Sea.”
The news magazine is right about raising the intensity of the conflict but way off citing an antiquated treaty.
Do we have to quote Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton over and over again that the US does not respond to hypotheses outside of its “metropolitan territory of either of the Parties, or on the Island territories under its jurisdiction in the Pacific Ocean, its armed forces, public vessels or aircraft in the Pacific? This treaty has no provision on “automaticity”.
No less than the late President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos Sr. delivered a classic situationer before the National Press Club in Washington DC in September 1982 – that appropriate action by the US will have to follow constitutional processes, to wit: “What does that mean? That you will have to pass a bill through the Senate and your House of Representatives. What does that mean? That means delay…while we are already dying over there.”
As we speak, Vlodomyr Zelensky’s dilemma sustains this – after lobbying Capitol Hill for many months, his $100-billion shopping list for additional war materiel has not only been reduced to $60 billion, but also remains unsure it will pass through Congress before the end of 2023. For the meantime, Ukraine continues to win its war against Russia in the headlines of western media but far from the reality on the ground.
Myoushu sets up ACE
Closer to home in the South China Seas, the United States has softened on lawfare but continues its information war to demonize China with the intensity of a five hundred billion dollars budget from the America Competes Act for 2023 alone.
Its centerpiece, Project Myoushu has promised maritime transparency.
But soonest the public discovered that Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for Innovative Security was only a cover for the US Naval Institute and the Philippine Coast Guard was virtually being run as willing pawns by the US Department of Homeland Security, it lost credibility.
It has delivered nothing but media hype boosted by a Php27-billion appropriated by the US Congress for the American Competes Act and managed by the US Agency for Global Media Affairs.
To the unsuspecting eye, Myoushu was simply a campaign to stir waters in the South China Seas, led by a lone ranger, Gordian Knot team leader Raymond Powell, and his tonto PCG commodore Jay Tarriela.
But Myoushu is more than merely creating dissonance, it was the foundational narrative insidiously concocted by the US Navy to justify a new war doctrine by the US Air Force called Agile Combat Employment (ACE), a new war doctrine adopted by the US Air Force.
With its airbases in the Pacific under potential threat from high-tech Chinese Dong Feng missiles, one obvious defense of the United States is dispersal. Rather than concentrating aircraft and supplies at a few central locations, spread them out among multiple airfields to make it harder and more costly to target all of them.
Hence the US Air Force is keen on its ACE concept, in which aircraft and equipment are distributed between major hub bases — such as Andersen Air Force Base on Guam — and smaller airfields at remote locations such as nine US-EDCA bases in the Philippines.
Powell’s Project Myoushu is the US Navy’s essential support to building-up ACE before the April 28, 2024 expiration of the Philippine-US Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement. Its failure now presents a threat not only to the renewal of EDCA but the viability of the Mutual Defense Treaty.
Myoushu has miserably failed because it is old hat, and the only “inspired moment” it delivered was not from a Chinese board game of “Go” but more decibels showing real-time but meaningless satellite and spy plane intelligence feeds from the US Navy that excites military minds but dulls public appreciation.
The predominant questions that have arisen is why is a foreigner controlling the theatre of war games when the foundational issue being sold to the Filipino people is protecting our sovereignty?
Second, why designate is a dropout from the Philippine Military Academy, dismissed for of all reasons – cheating in an exam and violating of institution’s code of honor, serving as spokesman of the National Task Force on West Philippines Seas.
Third, why have the pertinent cabinet secretaries defaulted public pronouncements on matters of defense and foreign relations to this lone ranger and his tonto?
And worst, why has the President Marcos abandoned his powers as chief architect of our foreign policy, by tolerating improvisations not just by these caricatures but any Tom, Dick and Harry wannabe surrounding him?
The ultimate nausea is when someone that former Ambassador Rigoberto Tiglao calls an ignoramus, who is occupying a high position in our national security cluster and who loves guesting in oligarchic TV channels say that “conversations cannot form part of international law”.
Misrepresenting the Ripley principle
Myoushu’s recycled scenarios in disregard of the now erstwhile “PH-CN protocol” – supporting the fielding of provocative resupply missions intended to court false flags using the Philippine Coast Guard as baits, cannot work when social media is replete with openly-sourced videos belying PCG reports.
Myoushu has not delivered a smoking gun.
People cannot just believe-or-not because government said so. PCG’s Jay Tarriela must learn how to cheat the people better, especially as he pollutes the mainstream media materials coming from the US Naval Institute, a office supported by American taxpayers, often debunked by other videos coming from open sources.
To see is to believe.
Specifically, two videos of PCG-contracted resupply boats on separate occasions have shown to our naked eye that they were the ones engaged in dangerous maneuvers in violation of the 1972 Convention on International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGS). In another incident, videos manifested that it was a PCG vessel that backed up on a Chinese fishing vessel, causing a minor collision.
When Malacanang got wind of Tarriela’s faux pas, a quiet order to clip his wings was sent to the new PCG commandant, Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan to remove the embarrassment from his post as deputy in charge of human resources (personnel), and remove from his adhoc assignments as maritime adviser and PCG spokesman on the West Philippine Seas.
Beside Tarriela’s collision videos, his most devastating booboo was presenting to the press, a rope attached to an anchor, which he claimed was cut on September 25 from a 300m floating barrier at the entrance of the lagoon at Scarborough Shoal. While the Chinese Coast Guard admitted blockading the lagoon after it shooed away a Philippine Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources vessel that was insisting on entering the lagoon on the morning of September 23, they also emphasized that they removed its floating barrier before dusk of the same day.
Tarriela never explained where his boys got the anchor that was still attached to a rope two days after the Chinese left the area, except to call it a violation of international law. It appears that he is ignorant that the Chinese have become the custodian of Scarborough Shoal after our Philippine Navy BRP Gregorio del Pilar surrendered control of the area, following orders of President Noynoy Aquino on the incompetent advice our Foreign Secretary then, Albert del Rosario.
The Chinese have repeatedly announced that it will not allow any incursions into the Scarborough lagoon for reasons of nature conservation because that is where fish of all kinds nestle and spawn. There is no prohibition of any kind, and to nationals of any flag, to fish anywhere else in the vicinity of the shoal, except in the lagoon.
High noon over Hainan
Options employing joint patrols between US, Australia or Japan naval assets and our coast guard has also been frowned upon not just by Filipinos but its neighbors, as it may create an irreversible hot war against a country the ASEAN countries have difficulty imagining as an “enemy”.
Messing with China in this respect, is no walk in the park.
On April 1, 2001, a US Navy EP3 spy plane was flying within 100 miles from China’s military installations at the Paracel Islands when it collided with one of two Chinese J8 interceptors. The EP-3 was forced to make an emergency landing on Hainan without approved permission from the Chinese authorities.
The blow-by-blow account was recorded by James Bamford last March 23, 2023 for the Business Insider in an article entitled “Mistakes by the US’s top spies allowed China to turn a deadly mid-air collision into an intelligence coup”.
Its 24 crew members eventually were allowed to return to the United States, amid vague diplomatic exchanges for both sides to save face. The reconnaisance aircraft was dismantled by Lockheed Martin technicians and returned in pieces via cargo plane to an air base in Georgia.
But only after the Chinese made an intelligence coup by dissecting its electronic counter-measure technology that could completely fry the electronics of a state-of-the-art MIG 29, let alone a vintage Chinese F-8.
Bamford wrote that was not the first US loss in what China claims as its waters. in 1956, another Navy reconnaissance aircraft was flying off China’s coast when it was challenged by Chinese intercepts. As a result, the plane crashed into the sea, killing all sixteen crew members on board.
He said the incident shocked President Dwight Eisenhower quoted as saying “We seem to be conducting something that we cannot control very well. If planes were flying 20 to 50 miles from our shores, we would be very likely to shoot them down if they came in closer, whether through error or not.”
Take it from “Little Ike”, a close shave is never a good idea. #
Adolfo Quizon Paglinawan
is the anchor of Ang Maestro – the Unfinished Revolution at Radyo Pilipinas1, co-host of Opinyon Ngayon at Golden Nation Network Television, a political analyst, and author of books.
His third book, The Poverty of Power will soon be off-the-press. It is a historiography of controversial issues of spanning 36 years leading to the Demise of the Edsa Revolution and the Rise of the Philippine Phoenix. Paglinawan’s past best sellers have been A Problem for Every Solution (2015), a characterization of factors affecting Philippine-China relations, and No Vaccine for a Virus called Racism (2020) a survey of international news attempting to tracing its origins. These important achievements earned for him to be named one of the 2021 international laureates for the Awards for the Promotion of Philippine-China Understanding. Ado, as he called for short, was a former press attaché and spokesman of the Philippine Embassy in Washington DC and the Philippines’ Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. Facebook
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