China’s growing military capabilities – including the largest navy, coast guard, and rocket force in the world – are driving smaller regional countries to counter that might with asymmetric capabilities while leveraging intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) technologies from commercial industry and foreign militaries.

At the same time, neighboring countries like the Philippines and Taiwan – who have clashed over territorial disputes – have put aside some differences in response to Chinese aggression, going so far as to break past political restrictions that prevented diplomatic contact between the two.

The US relies heavily on its allies in the region, especially the Philippines and Japan, for access to Indo-Pacific waters, intelligence sharing, and military capabilities to counter China’s growing influence. Maintaining and strengthening US soft power and influence in the region is seen as an increasing challenge alongside military alliance-building efforts.

Breaking Defense discussed the details of these realities with Gregory Poling, director and senior fellow in the Southeast Asia Program and Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Breaking Defense: We know about the threat that China poses to Taiwan and countries across the South China Sea/Indo-Pacific, but what is China doing militarily that concerns the West the most such as ships and satellites? We know what they want to do, but how are they doing it?

Gregory Poling is director and senior fellow in the Southeast Asia Program and Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Poling: Obviously there’s a quantity problem. Biggest navy by number, biggest coast guard, largest rocket force in the world, which means that all of the smaller states, particularly Philippines, Vietnam, and Japan are thinking more about asymmetric capabilities, about intermediate range strike, about uncrewed platforms.

There’s a ton of interest just over the last few years in places like the Philippines and Indonesia on getting external support for more uncrewed platforms. A lot of investments in things like the BrahMos missile system from India for both the Philippines and Vietnam. The strategic rationale is more or less identical to what you hear on the US side for the Marines and increasingly the Army – the need to engage in relatively low cost sea-denial capabilities because it would be a fool’s game to try to match China tonnage for tonnage these days.

One of the other big factors that regional states have to think about now is China’s increasing edge in ISR and communications, at least in the theater. Take the South China Sea, because of both the capabilities that China has built, the sensor arrays out on the artificial islands, and because of its increasing edge in low-Earth orbit, one has to assume that China sees and hears and can target almost anything in the First Island Chain. That’s a very new thing for the South Asians to think about.

So they’re trying to rapidly catch up. A lot of it is about, again, low-cost options. Filipinos are doing things like putting more unmanned AIS (automated identification system) buoys out in the middle of the South China Sea on reefs to try to keep an eye on Chinese vessels in order to hold back their more expensive ISR platforms for more important missions.

[There’s] a lot more work with allies and partners in order to leverage space-based technologies. A recent example being the Canadian rollout of what they call the DVD system, dark vessel detection, that combines all the stuff that you would get from SeaVision from the US Navy, but with a lot of Canadian and European platforms that the Americans aren’t able to share. There’s a lot of incorporation of both foreign and commercial sensing platforms that would’ve been considered a bit too unusual a decade ago. Now I think they’re increasingly recognizing that if you’re going to keep up with China in that space, you have to look at the commercial world.

If we had this conversation a decade ago, we would have been talking about piracy, internal security threats in the Philippines and Indonesia, and also China. Now it’s all China, with recent headlines like this one from the The Washington Post: “Chinese aggression at sea is driving Manila closer to Taipei.” How significant is this development between historically non-friendly nations?

I think it’s a remarkable change. If you had gone to a Philippine government official three years ago and said, would you like to have a Track 1.5 discussion with your Taiwanese counterpart, they would’ve said, no, you’re out of your mind. That’s way too politically sensitive. We’d never do it. In fact, since 1989, it has been illegal under executive order in the Philippines for cabinet officials and other senior officials to have any formal meetings with their Taiwan counterparts in Manila or in Taipei.

But in April of this year, President Marcos issued an executive order relaxing that. Now any official in the Philippines except for the president himself or the secretary of foreign affairs or defense are allowed to meet with their Taiwanese counterparts officially either in Manila or in Taipei. The aperture for what’s possible there is opened up, and it’s driven by the sense that China is an external threat that cannot be assuaged.

Under the previous Philippine government, they tried it the other way. They spent six years trying to butter up Beijing and get some kind of political accommodation, and they got kicked in the teeth for it. Now the strategic consensus in Manila is that we shouldn’t be that worried about what upsets China because nothing we do is going to make Beijing happy. So we need all the friends we can get.

Particularly after Pelosi’s visit a couple of years ago, and the fact that some of the Chinese missiles landed in Philippine waters, and that there are 150,000 Filipinos living in Taiwan, you have Filipino officials publicly saying for the first time over and over that, look, if there’s a crisis in Taiwan, if there’s a Chinese invasion or missile strikes or a blockade, we can’t sit on the sidelines. We’re only 200 kilometers away. We’re a US ally. We have to start thinking about this very seriously. And that involves talking to Taiwanese counterparts for the first time.

How is the US responding to these realities? What are our most important assets in the region?

It’s trite to say, but our most important assets are our allies. Without the Japanese and the Filipinos, we’re not an Indo-Pacific power, at least not in the First Island Chain. You can’t possibly contest Chinese A2/AD capabilities if you’re operating from Guam and from Hawaii. You have to do it from Japan and from the Philippines.

That’s our biggest political asset. It allows everything else [such as] leveraging that for things like Marine Littoral Regiments in the southwest islands or [around] Japan. Doing heel-to-toe rotations in the Philippines makes a big difference, at least if you want to be able to hold Chinese vessels at risk in order to enhance deterrence.

Our undersea capabilities are the one that’s most talked about, and it still is our greatest edge. It’s the one capability the US Navy has that China can’t compete with, at least not yet. The ability to ensure that the US sub fleet has uncontested access everywhere in the First Island Chain, and China cannot in the inverse break out of the First Island Chain uncontested, is key.

That, again, brings you back to the Philippines and Japan. You have to be able to monitor those points of ingress and egress from the First Island Chain. Luckily for the US, almost all of those points of ingress and egress are controlled by the US or its allies. That’s a huge advantage that boxes China in.

Number three that I would point to, at least based on wargaming that CIS has done, is still the US’s long-range strike capabilities – particularly its bomber fleets flying out of Guam or out of the West Coast and Alaska. In a hypothetical armed conflict, both sides are probably going to be stuck in the position of firing from out of theater into theater. The best option the US has is going to be long-range anti-ship cruise missiles or anti-air capabilities launched from more than a thousand miles away on bombers that take off from Guam or the West Coast.

A 9th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron B-1B Lancer takes off at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, in 2020 to conduct a training mission in the East China Sea in support of Pacific Air Forces’ training efforts and strategic deterrence missions in the Indo-Pacific region. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman River Bruce)

What advanced military and intelligence technologies do these Pacific allies need?

In both cases, they need ISR support – the Philippines much more than Japan – but still they need to be able to leverage space-based and over-the-horizon systems. In the case of the Philippines, they need [maritime] patrol aircraft. They don’t have their own P-8s, they don’t have their own AWACS.

They need a lot of the more sophisticated airbase ISR to be provided by the Americans, which is why it was very important and overlooked that last year we finally concluded a GSOMIA, a General Security of Military Information Agreement, with the Philippines after negotiating on it for 20 years. We can finally provide highly classified and near-real-time data to the Philippines.

They still need support for strike, again, particularly the Philippines. The Philippines has one battery of BrahMos intermediate-range cruise missiles that they’ve bought from the Indians. But if they want to be able to range any Chinese vessels that are more than about 150 miles from the coast, maybe 200 for the BrahMos, then they need to rely on things like Tomahawks, which is why it’s important that we’ve seen those systems rotating through the Philippines for the last two years as part of joint exercising.

They rely ultimately on the US for both the US surface fleet and especially the US strategic bomber fleet for ultimate deterrence. They don’t have anything they could throw against the Chinese if this escalated.

I think the most important thing, particularly, again, for the Philippines, is the repeated political commitment that if China uses force against Filipinos in the South China Sea, the Americans will intervene. That Article 5 of our mutual defense applies in the case of what we would consider a secondary or even tertiary concern. But without that, the Filipinos are not going to say, you can have access to the Philippines through a Taiwan crisis, and you don’t have to defend us if we’re attacked in the South China Sea. Those two are intrinsically linked in a way that the Americans sometimes have trouble remembering.