China-Laos joint training facility draws scrutiny over military role
Diplomats and analysts are watching Ban Keun in Laos for air defences, storage and surveillance facilities that could indicate a role beyond training.
- A new joint China-Laos training facility at Ban Keun is raising concerns among security experts that it could become China's first fully-fledged overseas military base in Southeast Asia.
- Recent satellite imagery shows eight K-8 light attack/trainer jets and over two dozen support vehicles at the unfinished site, fueling speculation about its purpose beyond training.
- Analysts are watching for signs of further military development, such as air defenses or runway extensions, which could allow the base to host larger surveillance aircraft and expand China's reach.
- The facility is viewed as a strategic opportunity for China to establish a military foothold in mainland Southeast Asia, leveraging its shared border and infrastructure links with Laos.
China’s new joint training facility at Ban Keun in Laos could mark the country’s first fully fledged overseas military base in Southeast Asia, according to some regional military attachés and security scholars watching its rapid development.
Vantor satellite images taken on September 30 and reviewed by Reuters show what analysts believe are eight K-8 light attack jets and more than two dozen support vehicles on the unfinished runway outside the Lao capital Vientiane.
Aircraft and military support vehicles have arrived at Ban Keun while extensive construction continues around the runway.
China’s defence ministry announced that it had established the joint facility on September 29.
China’s defence ministry did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment. The Lao embassy in Bangkok and the Lao foreign ministry also gave no immediate response to requests for comment.
Ban Keun previously supported covert US operations
By helping Laos develop Ban Keun, China is now occupying a site that the US used covertly at the height of the Vietnam War.
Air America helicopters were carrying Hmong troops from Ban Keun to other combat zones as early as 1968, according to Dr Joachim Leeker, an academic who has written about the airline’s history.
Ban Keun was known as “Lima Site 44” during the US war against communist forces in Laos in the 1970s.
Records shared with Reuters by Ryan Wolfson-Ford, a Southeast Asia specialist at the Library of Congress, document its use by Air America, an airline discreetly owned by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Air America transported both US-backed troops from Laos’s Hmong highland minority and supplies to rough mountain airstrips known as “Lima Sites”.
Laos has four K-8s in its military inventory
The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies puts Laos’s inventory of K-8 aircraft at four in its annual assessment of the world’s militaries.
Those Lao aircraft were described as being of “questionable serviceability” by Collin Koh, a Singapore-based security analyst and scholar at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
Vantor specialists, Koh and Singapore-based security analyst Alexander Neill, an adjunct fellow at Hawaii’s Pacific Forum think-tank, said the aircraft visible at Ban Keun appeared to be Hongdu JL-8s.
Also known as the K-8, the type is operated by both the Chinese and Lao air forces.
Developed jointly by China and Pakistan and exported to other militaries, the two-seat K-8 is extensively used for training.
It also has light attack capabilities.
Diplomats watch Ban Keun for signs of a wider military role
Diplomats and analysts following construction at Ban Keun are looking for signs of air defences, ammunition and fuel storage, and surveillance facilities.
Such installations could indicate military functions beyond training.
Ban Keun could eventually accommodate larger aircraft, including planes used for signals intelligence and electronic surveillance that could extend China’s reach into Southeast Asia, said Neill, who described the airfield as relatively short and innocuous at present.
“It looks like the airfield has been engineered to accommodate a runway extension allowing larger aircraft to operate,” he said.
Vandenbrink views Ban Keun as an opportunity for China
Rachel Vandenbrink, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said selecting Ban Keun for a facility that the People’s Liberation Army could access “is likely more about a target of opportunity than filling an obvious operational need”.
“Laos does have some geostrategic value as an accessible foothold in mainland Southeast Asia, given its shared border with China and infrastructure links, including (its) railway,” Vandenbrink said.
China is widely perceived to lack a strong network of overseas facilities beyond its presence in the South China Sea, port access at Ream in Cambodia and a logistics base in Djibouti, despite more than 20 years of intensive military modernisation.
Source: Reuters
