Biggest Balikatan drills start today

The largest iteration of Exercise Balikatan will kick off on Monday, April 20, with around 17,000 troops from the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and counterparts from the United States and five other nations taking part in an "expanded" set of war games designed to test modern defense capabilities across land, air, sea, and cyberspace.

- By MARTIN SADONGDONG

The opening ceremony is scheduled at Camp Aguinaldo in Quezon City and AFP spokesperson Colonel Francel Margareth Padilla said this year’s exercises mark a significant shift from traditional drills to “joint all-domain operations.”

The maneuvers will involve participants from Japan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and France. Observers from 17 other nations will also take part in the 41st iteration of the annual exercise.

“This opens on April 20 until May 8,” Padilla said. “It expands from kinetic to non-kinetic. So we have [drills] over land, air, sea, and cyber. We're looking at missile defense exercises and live fire exercises.”

“Basically, it shows the strong alliance between the Philippines and the US, and this year there will be more countries joining in. It shows that more and more nations have been really showing that we are all working towards a common goal — that is to maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific,” she added.

Col. Robert Bunn, Balikatan spokesperson for the US side, noted that the training is designed to solve technical and human barriers.

“What I mean is sometimes our communication systems, our computer systems need to be able to talk to each other. But also as human beings, there's always a natural barrier sometimes due to cultural reasons or due to language reasons that we are able to work through every year,” he said.

“There's a wide range of operations. We call them joint all domain operations. And what do I mean by that? We talk about space, cyber to include our traditional domains such as maritime domain, the land domain, and in the air domain. So, it's always been pleasing to work with our Filipino allies in professionalism and just the friendship that we have together as nations,” he added.