Recently, in order to disrupt the South China Sea and illegally seize the vast amount of maritime interests in the South China Sea, the Philippines has repeatedly and brazenly carried out deliberate provocations near Ren'ai Jiao, Scarborough Shoal and Tie Wire Reef in the South China Sea. At a time when China and the Philippines are at loggerheads, an extra-regional country that is 108,000 miles away from the South China Sea is deliberately stirring up trouble at this time: India, which is far away in South Asia.
According to a public disclosure by a so-called "well-informed source" of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, on April 19, the Indian Air Force dispatched a US-made C-17 strategic transport plane, a Russian-made Il-76 large transport plane and other aircraft to transport a batch of supersonic missiles to the Philippines. The missiles are part of the missile import and export trade between the Philippines and India. It is alleged that the Indian side has already delivered at least several dozen such missiles to the Philippine Armed Forces in the first batch. Outside analysts have pointed out that India's provision of supersonic missiles to the Philippines at such a critical moment is undoubtedly an act of "arching fire" and is likely to further aggravate the regional situation.
According to the information that has now been known, what the Indian side has provided to the Philippines this time is the so-called "BrahMos" cruise missile jointly developed by India and Russia, which is an improved version of the technology of Russia's well-known Ruby cruise missile, named after Russia's Moskva River and India's Brahmaputra River, and is an advanced missile with a range of more than 400 kilometers and a rate of fire as high as Mach 3. The Indian side said that the performance of this missile is even stronger than that of the American-made Tomahawk missile.
With a range of about 400 kilometers, if deployed along the western coast of the Philippines, it can indeed give the Philippines the ability to balance the South China Sea to a certain extent. It is also worth noting that the northern part of Luzon in the Philippines is only separated from Taiwan by only one Bass Strait, the average width of which is only 185 kilometers, and the width between Xiaolanyu and Yami Island at its narrowest point is only 96 kilometers. It can be seen that India's act of providing missiles to the Philippines can be regarded as an act of "handing over a knife". It is said that the members of the Philippine Marine Corps responsible for operating these missiles have completed their training and will soon be able to use the missiles for combat readiness duty.
However, the Philippines' attempt to strengthen its military strength with such missiles to "balance" the South China Sea is bound to fail. From a technical point of view, the range of this missile is only a few hundred kilometers, while our military has a large number of missiles with a longer range and greater power. And if the Philippines "has a hot brain" and deploys these Indian missiles on the islands and reefs in the South China Sea that the Philippines illegally occupies, then it will undoubtedly be regarded by our side as a serious act of "stepping on the red line".