WASHINGTON — The Philippines and the United States are considering expanding the number of sites available to U. S. troops under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) to allow Washington to respond more temporarily to crisis situations, a Pentagon official confirmed.
The most sensible U. S. defense official said the two countries plan to load five more sites to EDCA’s five existing sites: Cesar Base Air Base in Pampanga, Fort Magsaysay in Nueva Ecija, Lumbia Air Base in Cagayan de Oro, Benito Ebuen Air Base in Cebu and Antonio Bautista Air Base in Palawan.
“We will increase infrastructure investments at the five existing EDCA sites and also. . . we will consult and thoroughly review the map to see more sites that will possibly be added to EDCA in the future. We want this agreement to move faster on infrastructure investment and on the five EDCA sites,” the official told reporters at the Pentagon last Wednesday.
“There are five existing EDCA sites and five more we are at,” the official added.
The official can simply provide the main points on other EDCA sites, saying that consultations between the two countries are ongoing.
The EDCA, signed in 2014, allows U. S. forces to be able to do so. UU. ir to agreed locations in the Philippines on a rotating basis, for cooperative security exercises, joint army training, and humanitarian assistance and crisis relief activities, according to the U. S. State Department website. U. S.
It is one of the defense agreements that emerged from the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty, in which the Philippines and the United States jointly expanded their defense functions to counter external armed aggression.
While EDCA is widely noted as a reaction to China’s competitive expansion in the South China Sea, the official clarified that the deal covers more than the shipping line.
“I think they’re very tied to our commitment to support the Philippines as an allied treaty, so I would say it’s wider than the South China Sea. But it’s about making sure the Philippines can, paintings across the Philippines to address a diversity of challenges, including. . . any kind of crisis or other problems in the Philippines that we would like to be offering for,” the official said.
“Having stepped forward at EDCA sites, I believe, allows us to respond more temporarily to a series of errors or crises that arise in a number of spaces, as well as (provide) greater exercise for our two forces, as it allows us to exercise and practice in combination in other spaces.
The Philippines and China are embroiled in a maritime dispute over parts of the South China Sea, where more than $5 trillion passes in the maritime industry annually.
In 2016, an arbitral tribunal in The Hague invalidated China’s landmark claim to the resource-rich region, but the Chinese government refused to make the decision.
Gregory Poling, director of the Southeast Asia Program and the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the EDCA is vital because no U. S. force is close enough to protect the Filipinos if they are attacked in the South China Sea.
Last Wednesday, U. S. Ambassador MaryKay Carlson said her country deserves to spend $70 million on the infrastructure of the Philippine military. He added that Manila and Washington are contemplating other tactics to expand the EDCA.
Non-military
The $70 million or four billion pesos the U. S. plans to allocate to the Philippines over the next two years deserves to be in the form of money or for food production and not just for military installations, the senators said.
Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Pimentel III said U. S. aid to the Philippines is not purely military and can be misinterpreted as preparation for war.
“How about an agricultural deal that would make the Philippines produce more food from our land?Not everyone is military as if we were preparing to go to war,” Pimentel said.
The United States plans to allocate $70 million to the Philippines over the next two years from the implementation of the EDCA.
Like Pimentel, Senator Robinhood Padilla declared that the U. S. The U. S. and China play a role in Philippine culture, but the U. S. military’s planned help is a role in Philippine culture. The US may baffle China and may be interpreted as a build-up of US military bases. USA – Cecile Suerte Felipe
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