US Ally's Risky Mission to China-Claimed Territory

The Philippines successfully restocked its remote military installation at a hotly contested South China Sea feature early Friday morning.

The first resupply run of 2024 to the warship-turned-marine outpost was carried out without mishap, the Southeast Asian country said—unlike previous missions in recent memory, including last month's, which was met with Chinese water cannons.

The BRP Sierra Madre, an 80-year-old, second-hand American tank landing ship, was deliberately run aground 25 years ago to stake Manila's claim at uninhabited atoll Second Thomas Shoal, known in the Philippines as Ayungin Shoal and in China as Renai Jiao.

"Mission accomplished! Today, we executed a flawless rotation and resupply operation for BRP Sierra Madre. Teamwork, precision, and dedication at its best," read a post on X (formerly Twitter) by Philippine military spokesperson Col. Francel Padilla that has since been deleted, per local news outlet Rappler.

The mission came less than two weeks after the Philippine government airdropped a limited amount of supplies near the dilapidated vessel.

Newsweek reached out to the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs with written requests for comment.

As of early Friday morning, the Philippine coast guard vessels undertaking the mission, the BRP Cabra and BRP Sindangan, appeared to have completed it without resistance from either China's coast guard or its maritime militia, Ray Powell, director of the Stanford University-affiliated SeaLight Project wrote on X.

China claims the area, as it does most of the South China Sea, as its territory, citing unspecified historical rights. The Philippines maintains the feature lies within its internationally recognized exclusive economic zone.

According to the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, an exclusive economic zone is an area extending 200 nautical miles from the coastline of a claimant state, within which that country has the sole right to natural resources.

The past few supply missions to the Sierra Madre resulted in unsafe maneuvers, collisions, and water cannon blasts, prompting U.S. officials, including President Joe Biden, to reiterate that Washington's decades-old Mutual Defense Treaty with the Philippines extends to the disputed waters of the South China Sea.

A recent poll indicated that for the first time, as many as 72 percent of Philippine nationals now prioritize "military action" in their country's handling of the territorial issue.

Late last month, top-ranking Philippine and Chinese officials met in Shanghai in an effort to de-escalate tensions and avoid the use of force, though neither side has shown willingness to abandon its position on the territorial matter.

It is currently unclear whether the talks played a role in preventing a blockade on Friday. Instead, more than a dozen Chinese ships were shown to be hanging back at nearby Mischief Reef, according to Powell's ship tracking data.