Mamasapano: the Philippines' Benghazi

What's it mean for the pivot when a US-directed operation in the Philippines leads to the greatest loss of life in the history of special forces?

On January 25, 2015, 44 members of the 84^th and 55^th Companies of the Philippine National Police Special Action Force or SAF died in an engagement with Muslim insurgents near Mamasapano on the island of Mindanao.

Perhaps there have been worse days for special forces, but I can’t bring any to mind.  The bloodbath is recognized as a tactical and political fiasco, a focus of popular anger and dismay, and a source of considerable political embarrassment for President Aquino.  Its anniversary was marked with fresh hearings on the disaster in the Philippine Senate.  It’s the Philippines’ Benghazi scandal.

Like Benghazi, Mamasapano also reveals some interesting new things about expansive US security operations overseas...things that are getting covered up and swept aside in a rush to make political hay out of the disaster.

The short story is that the SAF ventured into a stronghold of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, an insurgency seeking self-determination for the Muslim population of Mindanao, to apprehend a Malaysian miscreant, one Marwan, wanted for making the bombs for the 2001 Bali attacks that claimed 200 lives.  Marwan was killed in the operation but an SAF force was attacked during the withdrawal and suffered tremendous casualties before it could be extracted.

Long story is that the SAF troopers were pinned down in a cornfield for 10 hours—which must have felt like a thousand eternities—getting slaughtered by MILF snipers.  Only one member of the 55^th Company survived.  While this massacre dragged on, three SAF companies supporting the operation stayed in their backstop roles instead of advancing to cover the withdrawal.  Command bickered about providing supporting artillery fire and sending in evac helicopters.  In the aftermath, it transpired that the military—Armed Forces of the Philippines aka AFP—was not able to provide effective support because they were not involved in the planning of the raid.  The Minister of the Interior and the Minister of Defense were totally flummoxed because they had no prior knowledge of the operation.  President Aquino had personally greenlighted the operation—Oplan Exodus—and passed the order to the SAF commander, Gutelio Napenas, through the former Director-General of the Philippine National Police Alan Purisima.  Former, because at the time of the operation Padremas had been suspended from the force for corruption, leaving President Aquino pretty far out on a limb, chain of command wise.  

By a suspicious coincidence, President Aquino was lingering in the nearby town of Zamboanga the day the operation went down, well positioned to share in the expected triumph of the neutralization of Marwan, an obsession of the United States who had a US$5 million bounty on his head.

In parallel with Benghazi, there is even a “stand down” narrative.

It is plausibly alleged that President Aquino, instead of ordering the AFP to waste the perimeter with artillery fire & send in the cavalry by helicopter for evacuation, tried to defuse the situation by contacting the MILF through mediators and begging them for hours to back off.  The Philippine government itself released a timeline documenting joint attempts with the MILF leadership to effect a ceasefire.  Apparently the message only got through to the local MILF commanders at 4:00 pm, because a brownout the night before had prevented them from charging their cellphones.

The MILF, you see, is in negotiations with the government in Manila concerning a law, the Bangsamoro Basic Law or BBL, that would grant Mindanao considerable autonomy and there’s some kind of truce in place.  Apparently sending the SAF into Mamasapano unannounced to pick up Marwan (who was sheltering with another group, not the MILF) was a violation of this truce, and perhaps it was felt that killing clutches of MILF fighters during an extraction would sink the Mindanao peace process once and for all. 

As it stands, the BBL is dead in the water anyway, thanks to public outrage at the MILF for massacring the 44 SAF troopers.

The fact that President Aquino still has his job after this mega-fracaso is a tribute to something, I suppose.  Perhaps a tribute to term limits.  President Aquino leaves office for good in early 2016 and will perhaps can look forward to relentless pursuit by his adversaries and the aggrieved families of the victims once he has lost the protection of his office.  For the time being, the designated fall guy is the SAF commander, Getulio Napenas.

Napenas, defending himself from accusations of incompetence, overconfidence, and loose-cannon behavior, had an interesting defense: that he was working with the United States.

Asked if the operation was solely a Philippine effort, Napenas replied that the US, through its Joint Special Operations Task Force Philippines based in Zamboanga City, provided real time intelligence support, training and equipment during the preparations and, during the execution, humanitarian and medical support and “investigation,” referring to the handover of Marwan’s finger to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for DNA confirmation.

Napenas also confirmed that the units involved in the operation were trained by a combination of US military and JSOTF members.

When Enrile asked whether the CIA participated in Exodus, Napenas said the name of the agency was “never mentioned” but added that because intelligence was involved, it was “likely” that personnel from the spy agency were also involved.

And there’s this:

US military officials were present the whole time at the tactical command post in Shariff Aguak in Maguindanao, while a “tall, blond, blue-eyed Caucasian” was seen among the slain SAF men.

There were also reports that a US drone from a Zamboanga flew overhead for a week before the operation.

The PNP review determined that six Americans were involved in the operation.

According to the initial “draft” Senate report from March 2015:

“One of six Americans involved in the Mamasapano assault ordered the Philippine Army's 6th Infantry Division commander, Major General Edmundo Pangilinan, to fire artillery, but Pangilinan refused and reportedly told the American: “Do not dictate to me what to do. I am the commander here!”

“The testimonies of various resource persons, particularly during the executive hearings, provide indications that the US had significant participation in Oplan Exodus,” the executive summary of the Senate report read.

 

 According to various media reports, Napenas identified one of the US advisors as either “Al Latz” or “Al Katz”.  There has been no stampede by Western media outlets to try to track down this interesting individual.  

The US was compelled to confirm that it advised the operation, but insists its only direct involvement—documented by an AFP photo—was casualty evacuation.

  

US military involvement in Philippine operations is a dicey constitutional, legal, diplomatic, and political question.  Officially, the United States military is restricted to non-combat roles in the Philippines, although plenty of wriggle room does seem to exist.  US military personnel can accompany Philippine forces during operations and defend themselves if fired upon.  Direct operational participation by JSOC in dozens of AFP operations is, at least on the left, openly alleged.

The hand-in-glove ally and pivot partner of the US, Alberto Del Rosario’s Department of Foreign Affairs chipped in with its defense:

In a report submitted to the Senate, the Philippines' Department of Foreign Affairs said that based on their discussions with US authorities, they were able to ascertain that Oplan Exodus was 100-percent Filipino planned and implemented.

“The DFA emphasized that 'the only constitutionally restricted activity in Philippine cooperation with the US under existing agreements is that, they (US) may not and have not, in the case of Mamasapano either, engage in combat operations and which non-participation (of the Americans) in combat was affirmed by PDIR Napeñas,” the report said.

Ah-huh.

On one level, the Philippines looks like another example where the United States cultivates a loyal and dependable local kinetic asset to enable lethal operations in nations where the US doesn’t have the legal right to operate freely but feels regular forces are too corrupt, compromised, or incompetent to properly execute US objectives.  And there’s often hints that US “advisors” tiptoe over the non-combat line at crucial junctures to get things done.  I wrote about it here in the context of the US drug war in Mexico and Colombia. 

There is another twist, one that comes courtesy of a 2012 AP report on a previous attempt to get Marwan, one of many, many tries, that time involving the Philippine army, not the PNP/SAF, to kill Marwan using GPS-guided smart bombs delivered by turboprop (the same weapon used to assassinate FARC commander Raul Reyes):

(Smart bombs) offer a less manpower-intensive way to combat Abu Sayyaf at a time when both the Philippines and the US militaries want to focus resources on tensions with China in the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea). They also dovetail with a change in recent years from massive offensives to surgical, intelligence-driven strikes that target holdouts of the battered Abu Sayyaf.

So also consider the Mamasapano massacre as blowback from a US/Philippine decision to transition from a military to political/security force joint approach in Mindanao, using a different group of actors—actors that fatally lacked their own coordinated artillery and airlift.   

But using the Philippine National Police is a bit hinky legally as well as tactically, since the conventional understanding is that the US and Philippines have military to military cooperation, with the US in advisory/training/non-combat role…to the Armed Forces of the Philippines.  It should be noted that JSOC in the Philippines—headquartered at Zamboanga, indeed at the airfield where President Aquino lingered on the day of the assault—frames its activities in terms of cooperation with AFP.

JSOC is not formally partnered with the PNP or SAF, which are civilian forces under the Ministry of Interior. Nevertheless, General Napenas directly identified JSOC Zamboanga as his working partner for the assault.  And the idea that US milsec was expanding its cooperation with the Philippines to encompass domestic law enforcement did not sit well with Philippine Senate Minority Leader Juan Ponce Enrile.

Enrile said he asked about the VFA because the pact “deals only with the military” and “does not cover the enforcement of the criminal laws of the Philippines.”

“This is something that the government must explain,” why it allowed “a police matter to include US participation,” he added.

The US Ambassador to the Philippines, Philip Goldberg, speaking on February 3 of this year, obligingly lectured the Philippines on what the laws and agreements they had concluded actually meant.  

“I also think people should look and be very careful when they talk about the various legal and other issues involved because they’re complicated, they’re complex, they’re not simple,” he added.

The US ambassador cited as an example the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) between the Philippines and the US that shows what cooperation can do for both countries.

“My understanding, if you read the [VFA], it is a government to government agreement, it’s not between the militaries [of the US and the Philippines], that deals with treatment and conduct of our forces in each other countries and that’s what the essence of what the DFA [Department of Foreign Affairs] is all about, it doesn’t deal with the agenda of what our cooperation will be,” Goldberg said.

And:

“I think it is irresponsible to discuss those things publicly. They should be discussed for accountability sake in closed sessions of our Congresses, not just here, but in the United States,” Goldberg said.

…

“We have a process for doing that in the United States. I have testified as a U.S. official in private session, in secure areas in the United States Congress. And those are the kinds of things that we should do to both assure accountability and release publicly those areas of policy, and of law, but not of specifics that can only reveal the kind of cooperation that we have that help people whom with very much like to know that information.”

Beyond the obvious “shut up and stop laundering your dirty laundry in public” element, Goldberg is engaging in some ad hoc lawyering to declare that the Visiting Forces Agreement—which governs treatment of US military/contractor activities inside the Philippines—is not mil to mil, it’s gov to gov.  So the US can work with Philippine government bureaus other than the military—like the PNP, and in areas other than external defense—like domestic security/counterterrorism.  

Let us pause to consider Ambassador Goldberg.

He was expelled from Bolivia in 2008 on suspicion of regime change shenanigans against its president, Evo Morales.  More significantly, previously he had served as Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, which, Wikipedia tells us, was originally the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services.

I, for one, was unaware that the US State Department had its own spook program or, for that matter, it had provided a haven to Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS when the CIA won that particular turf war.   It’s now a big operation: 20+ offices, at least 300 staffers, and an undoubtedly hefty but classified budget.  Anyway, Goldberg ran this thing.  Now he’s in the Philippines.

Clearly, there are some ambassadorial postings that can’t be filled by a well-heeled campaign contributor tasked with throwing expensive parties and groping the spouses of the local businessfolk.  Shaky spots like Syria (Robert Ford) and Ukraine (Geoffrey Pyatt) call for more of the “proconsul from the dark side” skill set to armtwist proxies and local political assets, deal with paramilitaries, manage US military and covert programs that stray across the bounds of legality, and deal with the execution and blowback from all sorts of wet work.  The Philippines appears to be one of those places.  So Goldberg’s there to handle the spook stuff.

And there’s a lot to be done in the Philippines.  Americans tend to slot the Philippines into the plucky People Power democracy/bulwark against Chicom aggression division. But the Philippines is also a rickety, insurgency-beset state that the US wants to see secured and stabilized as a vital base and locked in politically as a reliable pro-American ally for US power projection in East Asia.

The Philippines has been in and out of the US counterinsurgency meatgrinder more than Anbar Province, and that’s saying a lot.  It started with the Aguinaldo insurgency against the US conquest in 1899-1902, paralleled with the Moro insurgency (fascinating little-know historical fact: the US government prevailed upon the Ottoman Empire to order Mindanao’s Sultan of Sulu to stand down from the Aguinaldo insurgency and he did!; but then the US doublecrossed the Moro and took them on the next year in one of the most brutal campaigns in US history, one that lasted more than a decade); then there was guerrilla warfare against the Japanese; then the Huk rebellion in the 1950s; now we’re back to the Moro on Mindanao.

Today, the U.S. is backing a peace process with the MILF, exercising its honest broker muscle to try to bring peace to Mindanao after an insurgency that has cost 100,000+ lives in the post World War II period alone.  This involves US outreach to Malaysia to support the peace process, and even features US envoys clandestinely playing pattycake with the MILF.  Though a priority for President Aquino, the MILF initiative provokes understandable ambivalence in nationalist quarters in Manila (and suspicion concerning the leverage Malaysia might have over President Aquino by funneling in money to support reconciliation) since Muslim Malaysia seems a better fit for Mindanao than Roman Catholic Philippines, and it’s thought that business opportunities and political influence in an autonomous, peaceful Mindanao might naturally flow toward Malaysia instead of Manila. 

With this context, sending the SAF to barge into MILF territory unannounced and dooming the BBL peace process does not seem to have been some of Ambassador Goldberg’s best work.  I am willing to speculate that one of the drivers of this process was the $5 million dollar bounty on Marwan offered under the State Department’s “Rewards for Justice” program, despite allegations that Marwan was a semi-retired second banana and perhaps not even a real bomb maker.

Apparently, as the AP report cited above indicates, Marwan’s outfit, Abu Sayyaf, was already considered to be flat on its ass in 2012 and not an operational threat.  Both US and Philippine militaries want to focus their planning and budgeting on the bigger (and bigger money) and conventionally manageable China threat.  Maybe that’s why the Marwan got turned over to the junior varsity: the PNP and the SAF.

The RFJ program is already blamed for skewing Philippine operations toward single-minded pursuit of rich bounties on “HVIs” (High Value Individuals) at the expense of more systematic counterterrorism ops.  The SAF itself had contributed an additional 7 million pesos (about US$150,000) to the Marwan bounty pot, perhaps because US RFJ awards aren’t that easy to get and a locally-controlled bounty was perhaps seen as the best way to shake loose an informant.  It looks like Marwan was way up on the PNP’s agenda.  Oplan Exodus was the SAF’s 10^th attempt to nail him.  Yes, tenth.  And that doesn’t count the AFP bombing raid.

Was apprehension of Marwan pursued as a pretext/opportunity for nurturing sustained cooperation between the US and the PNP, perhaps with a nice payday/reward at the end?  Was the assumption that the MILF would stand back and let the operation go on rather than endanger the peace process?  The AFP, no friend of the SAF in this matter, released a photo of a relaxed Commander Napenas in civilian clothes smiling in his command center at the height of the crisis, with mocking captions sneering that he expected the operation to be a “walk in the park.” 

Deeper in tinfoil hat territory, was the MILF expecting to shop Marwan at the appropriate time & decided to make the Philippine government pay an exceptionally bloody price for snatching him from under their noses?  After all, the MILF would seem to have had ample opportunity to ascertain the true identity of the SAF intruders on January 25; but they kept picking them off for hours until almost no one survived.  But the SAF did emerge with Marwan’s finger, which was forwarded to the FBI for DNA ID and possibly—kaching!—reward money.  (The PNP, by the way, has subsequently declared it will not receive any reward money from the Marwan operation).

It’s not going to be easy to find out the backstory.  The Mamasapano massacre appears to be seen mainly as a stick with which to beat President Aquino—and his anointed successor, Interior Minister Roxas—in the runup to the presidential elections.  Senator Grace Poe, a well-regarded presidential candidate if she works out some legal difficulties, opened up a fresh set of hearings.  But she neglected to table the commission report in the Senate prior to adjournment, which means it will be archived instead of released.  Senator Enrile, the 92 year old lion of the Senate (and occasional prisoner based on ongoing corruption charges put forth by the Aquino administration) and fierce partisan of his own presidential candidate, current Vice President Jejomar Binay, promised bombshells at the hearing—but satisfied himself with collecting testimony that President Aquino might bear legal responsibility for the disaster.

Enrile did flay Ambassador Goldberg for telling the Philippines to stop blabbing about US mission creep, while hinting at the corrupting influence of the big rewards the US State Department throws around.  He criticized the US for extending its security cooperation beyond the military to the PNP, but also implied the US would be welcome to dispatch its own soldiers to pursue targets in the Philippines:

“What is sensitive about the police operation? I ask the great ambassador of the US. (Why is) he saying enemies of the state may also be watching? We have the host country for him. Why does he talk as if this is the US?” Enrile said in a weekly forum at the Senate.

The minority leader, who called for the reopening of the Mamasapano investigation, said the US should first answer why they put up a US$5-million reward for the capture of Malaysian terrorist Zulkifli Bin Hir also known as “Marwan"…

“And why did they not use their elite troops instead of training these officers to become pawns and to be dead meats, to capture dead or alive a quarry of the US?” he said.

And the whole political exercise only took place just after the US-Philippine relationship had navigated a risky shoal.  On January 12, 2016, the Philippine Supreme Court by a 10-4 vote confirmed that the “Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement” with the United States (signed on US behalf by Ambassador Goldberg) did not require any messy ratification by the Philippine Senate.  The EDCA dodges some pretty categorical language in the Philippine constitution prohibiting permanent foreign military bases by permitting the Philippine government to give to the US military the right to operate free of charge “Agreed Locations” that can host “rotated” i.e. not permanent US military personnel and stock them with various logistical goodies but not nuclear weapons.  Pretty much the only shoe left to drop is a formal return to Subic Bay, which already sees dozens of port calls from the US Navy each year.  And I expect that may happen soon enough.

Apparently there was no interest, at least among Philippine elites, in exploring the awkward question of what happens when a bollixed US-advised military operations leads to a massacre of 44 Philippine security personnel, and thereby raising doubts about the merits of the EDCA. 

And also zero public convo about any shortcomings of American attention, planning, and advice, or what they might imply for Filipino lives and interests as America's best and brightest a.k.a. the Sith Lords of the Pivot prepare to lead the Philippines into a prolonged struggle with the People's Republic of China.  Taking into account the US role in Mamasapano and the fact that as a result the Mindanao peace process is on indefinite hiatus, one could argue that friendly fire from the US pivot to Asia is damaging Philippine interests in ways the PRC can only dream of.
 
It's not just that US intel, advising, and support pervaded the Mamasapano fiasco.  Marwan was a US target with a US bounty on his head.  Judging from the circumstances surrounding the order to conduct the operation, given by President Aquino without the knowledge of his Cabinet and outside the normal chain of command, it looks like he was obliging Ambassador Goldberg in setting up a risky, compartmentalized op.  As compensation, it seems there was the promise he would be basking in some personal political glory at the airport in Zamboanga when Marwan was brought in.

Instead, all Aquino got was Marwan's finger and 44 body bags holding the remains of his own troopers.  He may spend the rest of his life battling the consequences, legal and otherwise, for that decision. And his successors will have to deal with the fact that the US expects and demands its own direct channel into Malacanang Palace as the price of the alliance.


It appears that after a twenty five-year hiatus, the US has successfully re-embedded itself in the Philippines: not only basing rights but deep penetration into the Philippine security, civilian, and political spheres, as well as military.

South China Sea: How Many Battalions Does the Passive Voice Have?

And...Island Games: Okinotorishima vs. Johnson South Reef

My Twitter feed contained the following ringing statement:

Claims disputes pervade maritime Asia. All parties must be prevented from use force/threat thereof to alter status quo.

To paraphrase Napoleon on the Pope, how many battalions does the frickin’ passive voice have?

“Must be prevented”.  That’s the problem with the pivot.

The "pivot to Asia" is an idea.  It's not a doctrine, like the Monroe Doctrine, the Truman Doctrine, the Eisenhower Doctrine, or the Bush Doctrine, all of which were based on the statement, "If you do X, It's War!"(Or, in the case of the immortal Bush doctrine, If you're thinking of doing X, or I think you're thinking of doing X, or if you're not thinking of doing X but I want to bomb you anyway, It's War!)

The pivot expresses the hope that the PRC will mistake a US preference for an national doctrine, construe the US desire to make mischief for the PRC in its near beyond as a matter of existential resolve, and do the United States the courtesy of dignifying Washington’s expressions of disapproval as a deterrent.

The PRC, on the other hand, has a genuine doctrine: its territorial integrity is an existential issue.  And it has openly applied it to the South China Sea.  

I might point out that the PRC tried to make its South China Sea priorities a matter of engagement with the United States (remember the “core interest” kerfuffle?), but Hillary Clinton instead, oh so cleverly, turned the issue on its head as a matter of Chinese aggression, and made support for the PRC’s South China Sea adversaries into the keystone of the pivot.

So those chickens have come home to roost.  As the United States committed fully to the pivot architecture, the PRC has decided to flout the US deterrent by moving the HYSY 981 into Vietnam’s claimed EEZ and so far the US response has been…extremely muted.

I expect that President Obama is loath to pile a PRC crisis on top of his Russian crisis.

I also suspect that the United States did not have a riposte ready in its well-financed, exhaustively think-tanked China strategy for a PRC provocation like this.

Perhaps the US was lazily assuming that the PRC, its military completely overmatched by the United States’, would never have the gumption to test the US deterrent.

In any case, there it is.  

Undoubtedly, the US foreign policy apparatus is working up a portfolio of appropriately muscular options for President Obama, all the way from blasting the HYSY 981 out of the water to sailing the USSN Ronald Reagan et. al. through the Chinese flotilla, to joint patrols with the Philippine navy/coast guard, to drawing a red line in the waters of the South China Sea…

Anyway, I think the PRC is determined to show that its determination and staying power exceed that of the United States in South China Sea jostling up to the point of military confrontation.

And maybe even including war, if a feisty op-ed in Global Times is taken at face value:

It's a demanding and risky job to let other countries get used to China's rise and treat China as a major power. Vietnam and the Philippines, which haven't updated their knowledge about China, still cherish the illusion that China can simply be forced back by pressure.

China's interests are beyond the South China Sea. It must strike a balance between securing its territorial waters and maintaining a vibrant growth trend.

China faces a dilemma with its growing power. On the one hand, it will be confronted by neighbors like Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan, and other stakeholders like the US if it makes use of its power.

On the other, if China conceals its power, its determination to safeguard territorial integrity will be underestimated, which would further foster the unscrupulousness of countries like Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan.

…

China has taken the first assertive step in securing its territorial integrity in the South China Sea, and in the meantime faces strong protests from Hanoi and Manila, and obvious bias from the US. China's diplomatic risks are rising, but these are the costs that have to be borne as China becomes more powerful.

The South China Sea disputes should be settled in a peaceful manner, but that doesn't mean China can't resort to non-peaceful measures in the face of provocation from Vietnam and the Philippines. Many people believe that a forced war would convince some countries of China's sincerely peaceful intentions, but it is also highly likely that China's strategy would face more uncertainties.

There are some off ramps for the current crisis short of a direct mano-a-mano confrontation between the US and the PRC.

Vietnam, the United States, et. al. might simply suck it up and limit themselves to verbal castigation of the PRC until August 15, when the HYSY 981-zilla is due to lumber off.

Or Vietnam will decide that capitulation is the better part of valor, heed PRC calls for bilateral talks and, in bad news for the Philippines, contribute to the further fracturing of the shaky South China Sea anti-PRC United Front.  

I suspect that the PRC has put an attractive pile of economic carrots on the table together with the HSYS 981 stick, and Vietnam is currently weighing the psychic benefits of partnership in an anti-Chinese alliance with the economic benefits that might accrue from expanded PRC trade and investment.

I think in the medium term, Vietnam will come to the conclusion that existential, war-worthy interests for the United States are not identical with those of any other nation in Asia, including Japan, and the most credible deterrent is one that it is in the control of Vietnam.

I’m sure France would be interested in obliging Vietnam with the sale of a few ship (and platform)-killing missiles that might make the PRC think twice before it engages in tomfoolery in Vietnam’s offshore near beyond.

And that, I think, is how the PRC’s leadership sees the endgame playing out.  Asian powers become richer, stronger, and more independent of the United States.  And the United States, anxious for regional influence, eventually comes back to the PRC…

Anyway, moving from the general to the particular, there’s an apparent PRC building program on Johnson South Reef, a formation that the Philippines considers inside its 200 nm EEZ.

The Philippines released photos that appear to show a dredge pumping up sand to expand the above surface area of the reef.  The Philippine foreign ministry accused the PRC of violating the stand-still agreement negotiated with ASEAN.  According to AFP, the PRC for its part acknowledged work was going on but it was just “renovation” of facilities for Chinese troops stationed on the reef, presumably claiming that its work therefore doesn’t violate the standstill agreement.

Interestingly, the PRC had actually established itself at Johnson South Reef after a skirmish with Vietnam, not the Philippines, in 1988, at a time when both Vietnam and PRC were both racing to occupy the reef.  Vietnam, thanks to its “flying rectangle”—an EEZ claim only slightly less risible than the Chinese “cow tongue”—claims many of the islands that are also subject to PRC-Philippine wrangling.

As a reminder to readers of the folly of turning the South China Sea into an internationalized issue, here is the map of what I call the “salad bowl” of Spratly sovereignty claims, courtesy of Wikipedia.  Remember, EEZs can’t be defined until sovereignty is agreed—and there is no accepted multi-lateral mechanism for determining sovereignty.

As to the motive for the Chinese jiggery-pokery on Johnson Second Reef, the Philippines raised the specter of airfield construction and, by implication, enhancement of the PRC military threat to adjacent Philippine claims.

It is apparently unlikely that an airfield that could contribute significantly to the PRC military presence in the islands could be constructed on the reef.

For a more likely explanation of PRC intentions, let us turn to…Okinotorishima Island!

Long story short, Okoritorishima Island was the occasion for an exercise of EEZ aggrandizement by Japan, abetted for some reason by the complaisant solons of the UNCLOS Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.

The PRC has cast a stern and disapproving eye on the Okinotorishima exercise.  The information and illustrations below, unless otherwise acknowledged, are from a presentation by Julia Xue of Qingdao Ocean University at a conference in Washington, D.C. in 2010.

The two Okinotorishima islands, 1700 km SSW from Tokyo and a good 700 km from the nearest inhabited Japanese territory, were not impressive in their original form.  One lump was 4.7 meters across, the other 2.6 meters across.  And they were clearly eroding and not long for the above-surface world unless steps were taken:

Through an intensive application of resources i.e. $600 million dollars to build a protective cofferdam around the islands, sheath the islands itself, and construct a platform, the rocks were transformed into this:

Here is Shintaro Ishihara, everybody’s favorite advocate of island restraint, standing on one of the islands of Okinotorishima.

And kneeling on the island to kiss the sacred territory:

Except he’s not standing/kneeling/kissing the rocks themselves.  He’s standing on an erosion-prevention cap over the rocks.

Here’s the rocks, under the cap:

And Japan, over the objections of the PRC and South Korea, proclaimed a radial 200 nm EEZ around Okinotorishima.  The Japanese government leaned on the argument that, although UNCLOS denied an EEZ to “rocks” that could not support “human habitation or economic life on their own”, Okinotorishima was not “rocks”; it was an “island” that could not support “human habitation or economic life on their own,” UNCLOS was talking about a totally different thing, so problem solved.

Anyway, Japan took this less-than-impressive, less-than-natural feature to UNCLOS and was able to get an extension of the Japanese continental shelf to Okinotorishima Island.  (Thanks to the creation of the Okinotorishima EEZ, the “Shikoku Basin Region” was a non-EEZ zone surrounded on all sides by Japanese EEZs, so I imagine that UNCLOS committee was relatively cavalier in assigning it to Japan).

Image from Yomiuri Shimbun. 

Okinotorishima plus “Shikoku Basin Region” add about 400,000 sq km to Japan’s already impressive EEZ endowment.

And Japan further used Okinotorishima to apply to UNCLOS for another southward extension of its continental shelf to the boundaries of Palau (the application is pending).

An article for a Japanese think tank, the Ocean Policy Research Council, by an admiral in the JMSDF declared that Japan’s EEZ grab was related to security: that it wanted to be able to “constrain” Chinese military vessels.   If this was indeed the intent, that dog may no longer hunt.  The United States has strongly asserted its right to send military vessels through the PRC EEZ to track PLAN submarines, and the PRC has apparently grudgingly accepted that point, so it would be difficult to exclude PRC military vessels from the Okinotorishima EEZ.  On the other hand, if PRC decides to get chesty again about US military vessels operating inside its EEZ, Japan’s massive EEZ holdings could be used to bottle up the Chinese inside the oft-invoked “first island chain”.

As to where this all leads, it appears that UNCLOS has been rather feckless in alienating ocean areas on the basis of dubious exercises in “islandisation”.  It is difficult—though of course not impossible—for China’s adversaries to criticize the PRC for adopting the Japanese precedent of jacking up an island and claiming an EEZ.  

Perhaps at Johnson Second Reef, the PRC is cloning the Japanese “lilypad” approach displayed at Okinotorishima, not for military purposes but to assert rights to an EEZ.

As to the motive for doing this in the cluttered confines of the South China Sea, I would speculate that the PRC is looking forward to the day when it finally retreats from the anachronistic and ahistoric “nine dash line” (which has never even been surveyed; it’s literally just lines drawn on a map), turns on a dime, and presents a portfolio of territorial sovereignty and EEZ claims…that pretty much cover the same area.