39th Balikatan exercise to be held in Batanes, Palawan
Amid the tension in the West Philippine Sea and the Taiwan Strait, the Armed Forces of the Philippines and its United States counterpart will conduct some of this year's Balikatan exercises in the provinces of Batanes and Palawan.
"More than the quantity of the participants, the most important difference now is really in the key locations where we would be exercising," Balikatan exercise executive agent Col. Michael Logico told reporters in Camp Aguinaldo on Tuesday.
"Batanes is one of the locations that we are considering in the execution of Balikatan... we will also be doing maritime exercises (in) west of Palawan and we will also be doing integrated air missile defense exercises in Central Luzon," he said.
"Yes of course, in the West Philippine Sea, so it can be anywhere west of the shores of Palawan," he added.
Despite the tension in the Taiwan Strait and in the West Philippine Sea, Logico assures that all of the exercises will be conducted within the territorial waters of the country.
"We are not focused on Taiwan because the exercise is not happening in Taiwan, the exercise is happening within our territorial waters and our territories, so it is natural for us to exercise in those areas because its part of Philippine territory, it is where we waive our flag, these are the areas where we defend," he said.
He noted that during the exercises the AFP "will be utilizing our own newly acquired weapon systems from AFP modernization and we are going to test the interoperability between our weapon systems and that of the United States."
"We call it the maritime strike exercise so it will still be involving the same concept of sinking a vessel as our target, and the other changes that we've been doing since last year is that we have been changing the locations of the exercises. So last year we executed the maritime strike from within the, off the shores of the Naval Education Training Command, which is actually part of their area, the training area. Now we are moving away from that location. The sinkex will be happening in another location. That location I will announce later after I brief some senior leaders," said Logico.
"Another emphasis of the exercise that is a big addition to what we've been doing in the past is putting more focus on the non-physical domains like cyber, cybersecurity domain so these are exercises that in the we did not give emphasis past because we have been focusing mostly on the physical, the air, the maritime and the ground domains but now we've determined that an equal attention has to be focused also on the non physical domains, I mean the information and the cyber domain," he added.
Logico has not yet given a specific number of participants for this year's Balikatan exercises that will be conducted from April to May but he noted that allied forces from Australia and France will also join the military exercises while the Japan Self Defense Force is also invited.
"Aside from the participation of the United States forces from US Indo-Pacific Command we are also going to be expecting the involvement of the Australian defense force and also the French navy. We have also sent our invitation to the Japanese Self Defense Forces although right now, I have not yet confirmed if they have accepted their invitation to join us in the exercises," he said.
"In terms of scale I cannot honestly give you an answer because we are still consolidating the numbers, but I would say that, what we are really going for here is really focused training on interoperability, refining our internal processes on how to execute operational level maneuvers, operational level fires, and testing also communication interoperability between us and our treaty ally so its really more focused on, if we have to go to war one day we will have to answer a certain command and control issues, that is why these are our focus for this particular exercise," he added.
Logico said that observers from other country's armed forces were also invited to join the international service program.
"There is a list of countries that will be involved in the (international observers program) IOP and their role there is just to observe the exercise," he added. Robina Asido/DMS
