The government should take decisive steps to stop China from creeping deeper into Philippine waters, or may just drop Manila’s maritime claims, and even its sovereign rights, a maritime law expert said on Wednesday.
Others, including a retired US Air Force official, also offered recommendations as to how the administration could deal with Beijing’s “gray zone” operations and strategy in the Kalayaan Island Group (KIG) and West Philippine Sea (WPS).
The KIG and the WPS are gray zone areas, which in the definition of retired Philippine Marine Corps Commandant and current Presidential Adviser on Military Affairs (PAMA) Ariel Caculitan, are areas where activities that are “short of war or kinetics” are conducted.
University of the Philippines maritime law professor Jay Batongbacal said in a presentation at a forum in Makati City that Beijing’s gray zone operations are no longer confined at the KIG and WPS, but are even conducted in other waters of the country where China’s military conducts patrol and assert maritime claims.
“China’s gray zone operations have been observed as close as 50 nautical miles of Luzon as of last year,” Batongbacal commented, adding that the country “need to push back” and ensure that China will not get used to such patrols.
“Line must be drawn… otherwise, we might as well retreat and give up everything,” Batongbacal stressed.
Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) Commodore Jay Tarriela, adviser to the PCG commandant on maritime security, who spoke during the forum as a maritime scholar, confirmed China’s incursions in the country’s northern territory and eastern seaboard, especially at the Benham Rise.
Tarriela called for the continued modernization of the Coast Guard because it cannot afford to “pull back” again like in the case of the Scarborough Shoal where a US-acquired Philippine Navy warship pulled back during a standoff with a Chinese vessel in 2012, thus giving China a de facto control of the shoal.
Caculitan agreed that whatever the country did to “remove” China from the WPS had failed.
Retired Philippine Navy Rear Admiral Rommel Jude Ong said China is conducting a combination of psychological, media and legal warfare over the WPS where it is waging a hybrid conflict.
Hybrid warfare, he said, entails the use of diplomacy, information, military and economic.
On the other hand, conventional warfare only makes use of the military.
Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation Fellow and retired US Air Force Col. Raymond Powell said that China is fully maximizing civil-military fusion in its gray zone operations in the WPS.
Powell said this strategy could be checked by the Philippines by sticking to its rights as reinforced by the UN Permanent Court of Arbitration, reaching out to the open society and collaborating with allies and partners.
He said the government should tap the public and the media, and use commercially available maritime data to deal with and expose the Chinese gray zone activities.
Powell predicted that China would maintain a strong presence in Pagasa in support of its claims.
Image credits: PCG