Cambodia announced on Tuesday that work on the Ream naval base is almost complete — a base that the US fears is intended for use by the Chinese military.
“It is near completion. We will inaugurate it soon,” Chhum Socheat, a Cambodian defence ministry spokesperson, told AFP.
Addressing concerns surrounding China’s use of the base, the spokesperson added: “We already declared that there is no Chinese military base there — we are just modernising our military to reach a capable level in order to protect our territorial integrity.”
Dual Use Base
Recent satellite imagery published by US commercial imagery company, BlackSky, shows rapid progress in constructing the Ream base over the past two years, including completing a pier that could berth an aircraft carrier.
The defence ministry spokesperson rejected the claims about the pier being built to berth aircraft carriers.
Similarly, the Chinese embassy in the US has also said that Cambodia’s constitution bans foreign military bases on its soil and that the base was being constructed only to strengthen Cambodia’s capacity.
However, this has done little to assuage international fears surrounding the intended purpose of the pier.
According to Craig Singleton of the Washington DC-based think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies — an expert quoted by BlackSky — pictures of the site located 20 kilometres southeast of Sihanoukville show a 363-metre-long pier jutting into the sea.
“China has made significant progress building a naval base in Cambodia and is close to completing a pier that could berth an aircraft carrier, according to satellite imagery.”
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“Dennis Wilder, a former top CIA expert on the Chinese military, said the Ream base would have its… pic.twitter.com/0s2AxKldNA
Singleton likened the pier’s construction as strikingly similar to that of China’s only known military base in Djibouti.
“There is a near-exact similarity between an angled deep-water pier located on the western shore of the Ream base and another military pier at the People’s Liberation Army Support Base in Djibouti,” he said.
“The similarity to the Djibouti pier certainly is another indicator that China is likely involved in the construction,” said Harrison Prétat, associate head of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative at the CSIS think-tank. “The dispute is about how the facilities would be used.”
Advantage in the South China Sea
A report by the Financial Times (FT) cited a former US intelligence official saying that “There has been debate inside the [US] government about what exactly China would do with the base and why it would be better than a base in the South China Sea or Hainan Island.”
“If the US and China went to war, the US could just bomb bases in the South China Sea. But in the case of this base, we would be bombing Cambodian territory,” the former official said.
Similarly, Dennis Wilder, a former top CIA expert on the Chinese military, noted that the Ream base would serve its “greatest strategic value were tensions in the South China Sea to boil over into a military confrontation”.
“[It] would also extend and enhance China’s naval operating capabilities towards the strategic shipping lanes of the Malacca Strait — a vital choke point in any conflict with the US and its regional allies,” he added.