The U.S. says it could escort Philippine ships during resupply missions in the South China Sea, but what would that look like? TaiwanPlus spoke to security analyst Ray Powell from the Sea Light Initiative at Stanford University to learn more.
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00:00Ray, I want to first start off by asking you about these calls for the United States to
00:03help and escort Philippine ships going to resupply their own vessels in the South China
00:08Sea.
00:09Well, the discussion about escort has been going on for actually quite some time.
00:15And the United States has been open about its willingness to consider doing this.
00:20And the Philippines has actually apparently been the one balking at the idea of bringing
00:26in the United States.
00:28And part of that may be simply that the Philippines doesn't necessarily want to fire that arrow
00:35from its quiver until it needs to.
00:38There have been discussions about whether bringing in the United States in that particular
00:42way somehow deprives the Philippines of its own agency.
00:48But on the other hand, why do you have a mutual defense treaty if you can't invoke it for
00:53things like this?
00:54The gray holes that, you know, China has been sort of shadowing a lot of the Philippine
00:59missions with Navy ships for a while, but they tend to stay further away on the horizon
01:05so there's not a direct interaction between the Philippine ships, the Philippine Coast
01:10Guard ships and the Philippine fishery ships and those gray holes.
01:14In a previous interview that we did, you talked about the difference between white holes,
01:18which is the Coast Guard, and gray holes, which is the Navy.
01:22In this situation, when we talk about the Escort, is this going to be the U.S. Navy
01:25getting involved or the U.S. Coast Guard getting involved?
01:28Well, if it does turn out to be Escort, that will be one of the discussions.
01:32Now, having a Coast Guard Escort for a Philippine, a U.S. Coast Guard Escort for a Philippine
01:38Coast Guard mission would be obviously a new thing and that would be a long conversation.
01:45There are a couple of limitations there.
01:46One was just sort of doctrinal and sort of under what the U.S. Coast Guard is accustomed
01:55to doing.
01:56So providing Escort to another Coast Guard through a hostile situation, that would be
02:01new.
02:02And there's also a resource problem, is that there's just not a lot of U.S. Coast Guard
02:06ships that frequent this part of the world.
02:09So now, again, if you bring in the U.S. Navy, then the question is, is it the Philippine
02:15Navy that's conducting the resupply and what is the role of the Philippine Coast Guard?
02:19So there are a lot of things to work out in that context.