What If China Builds a Military Base on Scarborough Shoal? The prospect of Scarborough Shoal becoming a permanent Chinese military base would mark one of the most consequential strategic ruptures in the South China Sea since China’s island-building surge of the mid-2010s. What was once a quiet fishing ground, known as Huangyan Dao in China…
US and Philippines Boost Presence in the Bashi Channel Amid Rising Tensions The Indo-Pacific has become the defining arena of 21st-century power competition, and few places capture that reality more starkly than the Bashi Channel. Stretching between northern Philippines and southern Taiwan, this narrow waterway has rapidly shifted from a geographic footnote into a frontline…
Philippines’ Archipelagic Defence Strategy Explained Amid Rising Tensions with China The Philippines sits at the heart of one of the most contested maritime regions on the planet. Comprising 7,641 islands and straddling critical sea lanes linking the South China Sea to the broader Western Pacific, the country’s geography has always been both its greatest asset…
Philippines Set to Receive Historic $1.5B in U.S. Military Assistance The United States is preparing to deliver one of the largest military assistance packages to the Philippines in modern history, authorizing up to $1.5 billion under the FY2026 NDAA, a move that repositions Manila from a peripheral ally to a frontline security pillar in the…
Philippines and Taiwan maritime security cooperation amid Rising Regional Tensions What looked like a low-key technical meeting in Manila between the Philippine Coast Guard and Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration was, in reality, a quiet signal of how frontline states are adapting to a rapidly hardening maritime environment across East Asia. The discussions, focused on intelligence sharing,…
Philippine Air Force Receives New S-70i Black Hawks from Poland Military Modernization Beyond Paper and Budgets. What does military modernization look like when it moves beyond policy documents and budget allocations and begins delivering results in real time? For the Philippine Air Force (PAF), the answer is increasingly visible in modern aircraft taking to the…
Russia and China Deploy Drones and Submarines as the Philippines Faces New Sea Threats War at sea no longer announces itself with fleets on the horizon or cannons over open water. Today’s most consequential maritime weapons often remain invisible, slipping beneath waves, loitering silently for weeks, or operating autonomously without flags, radio calls, or crews….
10 Chinese Ships vs 1 Philippine Vessel How Beijing Turns Aggression Into “Routine Patrols” 10 Chinese Ships vs 1 Philippine Vessel. On paper, Beijing calls it a “routine patrol.” On the water, it looks very different. The overwhelming numerical imbalance is not accidental; it is designed. By surrounding a lone Philippine ship with coast guard…
China Is Watching the 9th U.S.–Philippines Patrol Very Closely! The West Philippine Sea has seen tension before, but nothing quite like this moment. As dawn breaks over contested waters, Philippine and U.S. warships slice through the waves in tight formation, their radars sweeping, their aircraft carving arcs across the sky. It is a scene that…
Hegseth’s Pacific Posture Shift: Reinforcing U.S. Deterrence Along the First Island Chain (2025–2030) What if the front line of the next great-power conflict isn’t Washington or Beijing, but a narrow arc of islands stretching from Okinawa to Taiwan and all the way down to Luzon? That is the strategic question framing U.S. Defense Secretary Pete…
