FOREIGN Affairs Secretary Teodoro L. Locsin Jr., on Saturday said the Philippines is now just beginning to arm itself, procuring missiles, submarines and boats “to swarm China.”
“What we want is to swarm; the Chinese are swarming, if we have the capability, we swarm,” Locsin said during a wide-ranging interview by India News senior consulting editor Ramesh Ramachandran late Saturday night in the Philippines.
The country’s top diplomat envoy is referring to the Chinese tactics of deploying many of their ships so as to outnumber or “swarm” their opponents in the various features being contested in the South China Sea.
Locsin said he only learned lately that during a tense standoff with the Chinese in the Scarborough Shoal in 2012, there were 30 Chinese maritime militia vessels that were ranged against the country’s lone Philippine Navy flagship, the BRP Gregorio Del Pilar. The latter withdrew from the shoal as per agreement, leaving behind the Chinese, who eventually, never left.
However, Locsin said, “sooner or later there will be a misencounter that will trigger something bigger than anyone on both sides of the Pacific wants.”
When asked whether China wants to pick a fight in wanting to dominate the SCS, Locsin said, “the only justification I can think of is that China wants to push their ‘ramparts’ if you want to call it, as far into the Pacific as they can.”
However, he said it will never happen that any war with the United States would be fought in the western seaboard of San Francisco or San Diego.
Locsin said the war with the US would be waged, starting in Guam all the way to the South China Sea.
“So now the best thing they can do is to try to weaponize a few reefs,” although he said he told the Chinese, “that’s useless, its like you just added a third of a second to the projection of your power by putting it up, in that weaponized reef, which they [US] can destroy in 30 minutes.”
The basis for saying that, Locsin recalled, is what he learned when attending a US military briefing. When he pointed to the presence of Chinese reclaimed militarized islands in the WPS, he was told, “You now that reef, in the first 30 minutes of conflict, we can send a heat missile there and I can turn that into a Coca Cola bottle,” meaning, the sands would fuse into glass from the inferno.
“So it’s not even strategically or tactically important,” the Secretary said, adding that today’s military tactics value “mobility, or the ability to go from place to place and launch whatever missile they have at hand at the enemy.”
As for the Philippines, Locsin recalled what Douglas MacArthur said of the country: “We are the biggest aircraft carrier in the world. That cannot be sunk because it is an archipelago, each of our islands can be a turret, facing this way or facing that way.”
He continued: “Perhaps one day, the world will change, the issues will change, and territorial possessions…not territory will not be as important. Maybe we’ll find a way around it.”