South China Sea and China (2011-2017)

[Dayuhan]

Missiles are just a method of delivering a load of high explosives on a target. In that respect, the effect on a target they have isn't any different from aircraft bombs. Various installations have been vulnerable to being targeted by high explosive aircraft bombs for going on 100 years now. But the fact that they were vulnerable didn't have much to do with whether that vulnerability was fatal or decisive. All of North Vietnam was vulnerable to air attack by 1972 and they won anyway. Malta was vulnerable for years but it hung on and the forces based there were able to hurt the Axis severely.

So the fact that a base is vulnerable to attack by itself is neither here nor there. You have to judge whether the damage you can inflict from that base is worth the damage it may take. Guam I think is indispensable if you want to damage Red China in the event, God forbid that it would happen, of a war. It would be vulnerable to missile attack but how many can they throw, how much HE is in each warhead, how accurate are the warheads, how well would we be able to shoot down or decoy the warheads, how effective would hardening the base be etc etc. Whether the base would be worth the effort would depend upon the answers to those questions.

Haddick phrased it like this...

some military analysts fear that in a shooting war with China, missile strikes could close U.S. air bases and ports on the island, preventing the Marine infantrymen there from getting to where they might be needed....

...Under a growing missile threat, field commanders will likely prefer the flexibility afforded by an expeditionary approach compared to the vulnerability of fixed bases -- such as Okinawa -- located within easy range of Chinese missiles.

He referred to Okinawa, as nobody credible is seriously discussing bases in the Philippines.

Certainly there'd be a balance to be weighed, but apparently there's concentrating too much force in a vulnerable area could lead to a situation where that force could easily be neutralized.

There's also a question of what threat exactly we're trying to deter, and how likely that threat is to materialize. Having rapidly mobile Marine forces in the area would be of great value in a land confrontation between South and North Korea, but would have limited applicability in many of the more likely scenarios involving China. It would not, for example, be much of a deterrent to the naval and air shadow boxing that's gone on in the SCS. Again, the presence of 4500 US troops in the Philippines for the Balikatan exercsie didn't deter the Chinese from pushing at Scarborough Shoal, and may well have encouraged them.

That is an excellent point, that I of course, never thought of.

I'd say the two major factors that took the anti-bases movement out of the vociferous but ineffectual left corner and into the mainstream were residual bad feeling over the decades of American support for Marcos and distaste at what had grown up around the bases. Resentment over the support for Marcos has faded a bit with time, though the US still has very limited credibility as a champion of democracy. The second concern is still very much active, understandably. Angeles and Olongapo at the peak made Sodom and Gomorrah look like paragons of moral rectitude.

Not saying those were the only factors in play, but they were major ones. At the crux of it money was a key issue; the Philippine Senate made it clear that there would have to be a large increase in compensation, the US side declined to offer much. That to some extent may have been an example of the local habit of saying "no" by asking a price you know will be refused. At the level of popular support I suspect the money was less an issue than the factors cited above, and of course a simple desire to stop feeling like a colony.

You are probably right but I don't see why it has to be like that. In The Left-Handed Monkey Wrench the author made the point that sailors acting up when on shore leave did so sometimes because nobody really bothered to give them alternatives. When people made the effort to guide them toward something other than tearing the place up, a lot of sailors took advantage of it and things calmed some.

I don't think it has to be like that, but I think it will be like that. One of the stupidest things about the Smith case was the ease with which it could have been prevented, if a bit of discipline and supervision had been applied. There's a "boys will be boys" attitude in some quarters, and some memories of "the good old days" in Subic. Of course not everyone thought those days so good, and that's where the problems start.