Saturday, May 03, 2014

US signs pact to help Philippines and Japan as China tries to take their China seas territories

US, Philippines reportedly reach 10-year deal on larger military presence:  However, in 1999, it ratified a pact with the United States allowing temporary visits by American forces. That paved the way for hundreds of U.S. forces to hold counterterrorism combat exercises with Filipino troops dealing with insurgents in the country's south.This time, the focus of the Philippines and its underfunded military has increasingly turned to external threats as territorial spats with China in the potentially oil- and gas-rich South China Sea heated up in recent years.

 The Philippines has turned to Washington, its longtime defense treaty ally, for help modernize its navy and air force, among Asia's weakest. Chinese paramilitary ships took effective control of the disputed Scarborough Shoal, a rich fishing ground off the northwestern Philippines, in 2012. Last year, Chinese coast guard ships were deployed to another contested offshore South China Sea territory, the Second Thomas Shoal, where they have been trying to block food supplies and rotation of Filipino marines aboard a grounded Philippine navy ship in the shallow waters of the remote coral outcrops.

The new base "should give Japan the ability to expand surveillance to near the Chinese mainland," said Heigo Sato, a professor at Takushoku University and a former researcher at the Defense Ministry's National Institute for Defense Studies.

 
"It will allow early warning of missiles and supplement the monitoring of Chinese military movements." China's decision last year to establish an air-defence identification zone in the East China Sea, including the skies above the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islets, further rattled Tokyo.

The U.S. Takes Sides in a Dispute Between China and Japan as world war again begins to shroud the world

  The U.S. Takes Sides in a Dispute Between China and Japan:  For the first time, China will host the Western Pacific Naval Symposium, a meeting every two years of countries that border the Pacific Ocean. The W.P.N.S., as it is known in naval circles, counts among its members the United States, Australia, Chile, Canada and a number of Asian countries, including China and Japan.

 It can be an eye-popping display of war ships, destroyers and guided-missile cruisers. In 2008, when South Korea hosted the symposium, the United States sent the aircraft carrier George Washington, the guided missile cruiser Cowpens and the destroyer John S. McCain to take part. For this year’s fleet review, China, which is hosting the event in Qingdao, invited all the countries in the symposium to take part — except Japan.


Two Aegis ships bound for Japan



China ratchets up control over South China sea coming closer to confrontation






                                                
               

China demands removal of Japan’s forces from Spratley Island Group
Philippines drops food to troops after China "blockade":  "We confirmed there was an air drop of food to our troops," Defence Department spokesman Peter Paul Galvez said. He said the air drop was "via airplane," but did not say when it occurred nor give further details. The incident took place at Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly island group, which is around 200 kilometres (125 miles) from the western Philippine island of Palawan and which Manila insists is part of its continental shelf.

The shoal is more than 1,000 kilometres from Hainan island, the closest Chinese landmass, but China claims nearly all of the South China Sea based on what it says are historical records. A tiny unit of Filipino marines live on the BRP Sierra Madre, a decrepit, beached former World-War-II US navy transport ship that was transferred to the Philippine navy and run aground on the shoal in the 1990s.
China has long demanded the Philippines pull out the vessel and the marines.


 

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