New footprint for America in SE Asia
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When is a military base not a foreign base?
When visiting troops rotate through it on training missions and do not actually maintain what one senior Asian official describes as a “permanent, extra-territorial presence”. Something like Darwin’s Robertson Barracks, for example.
The recent announcement that up to 2,500 American Marines will eventually use Australia’s sprawling Northern Territory facility may have caused a stir, but defence officials argue it is not a base – even if the United States is keen on developing a so-called “pre-positioning” capability.
Take the Singapore Armed Forces’ Payar Lebar airbase and Thailand’s Vietnam-era B52 base at U-tapao on the Gulf of Thailand. Both act not as bases, but as staging points for US maritime patrol planes and aircraft transiting from US West Coast bases to Afghanistan and the Middle East.
The one exception is a small 200-man US Navy 7th Fleet logistics detachment at Singapore’s Sembawang naval base, which was transferred from Subic Bay in the Philippines in 1992. Even then, it is located within a Singapore Armed Forces facility.
The closure of Subic and, to a lesser extent, neighbouring Clark airbase – forced on the Americans by the fallout from the Pinatubo volcanic eruption and subsequent political opposition to a lease extension – was a major blow to 7th Fleet operations.
Over the following two decades, with terrorism, Iraq and Afghanistan dominating the agenda, the US went missing in Southeast Asia while China used its growing economic power to build up a blue-water navy and assert its ambiguous “historic” claims to the South China Sea.
The Darwin agreement, the US$8-billion expansion of air and naval facilities on Guam and a planned US$250 million upgrade of the Indian Ocean base at Diego Garcia now mark a US commitment to restoring its presence in the region and, without saying so, offers a direct challenge to Beijing.
There are 865 American military bases around the world, rising to over a thousand if Iraq and Afghanistan are included. Maintaining them doesn’t come cheap: more than US$100 billion (Bt30.9 billion) a year by one count.
US forces in Asia are mostly in Japan and South Korea, with eight airbases, three naval bases, 23 army posts, a Marine Corps base incorporating eight different camps, and a host of ancillary logistics and communications facilities.
In Australia, it is not so much the Marines themselves, but the associated ships and aircraft, that will give the US a much bigger footprint closer to trading corridors in the lower reaches of the South China Sea where China has been asserting its influence.
While the Americans have long used Australia as a permanent electronic listening post going back to the Cold War, the new training arrangement allows them to strengthen military linkages between the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean.
“The key is geographical distribution and the understanding that we have important interests in the Indian Ocean, not just through it,” says one senior official. “We are also looking to strengthen relationships with littoral states around the Indian Ocean.”
During visits to the region this year, US President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defence Secretary Leon Panetta have taken turns declaring that the US will always be a Pacific power, intent on maintaining maritime security and freedom of navigation.
