CIA's Vietnam-Era Airfield Is Now China's New Base Under Expanding Footprint

China's air force seems to have found its first foothold in mainland Southeast Asia, in Beijing's new outpost in Laos. The base at Ban Keun, located about 65 kilometres north of the capital Vientiane and just 40 kilometres from the nearest border with Thailand, was once a Vietnam-era CIA airfield.

The China-Laos joint training facility began operations last month, according to an announcement from China's Defence Ministry.

The base is "designed to help Laos strengthen the training and development of its air force pilots and will be jointly maintained by both sides," the ministry statement said.

Satellite images, taken by commercial satellite provider Vantor, showed at least eight light attack aircraft and more than two dozen support vehicles appearing to be parked on a runway that is still being built under Beijing's latest expansion of its overseas military presence. 

Singapore-based security analysts Collin Koh and Alexander Neill, as well as Vantor specialists, said the planes appeared to be Hongdu JL-8 aircraft, which both the Chinese and Lao air forces operate. The two-seater aircraft, also known as the K-8, extensively serves both training purposes and light attack capabilities. It was jointly developed by China and Pakistan and is exported to other militaries.

Laos currently has four of the planes, according to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies' annual assessment of the world's militaries. Koh, a scholar at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, described the Laotian planes as being of "questionable serviceability".

Photo Credit: Vantor/Handout via REUTERS

The images also show extensive construction work around the runway.

The swift development of the airbase is under the tight scrutiny of regional military attaches and security scholars, some of whom believe its construction potentially marks China's first fully fledged overseas military base in Southeast Asia.

China's Military Footprints

Despite more than 20 years of intense military modernisation, China is widely perceived to lack a strong network of overseas facilities beyond the South China Sea, port access in Cambodia's Ream Naval Base on the Gulf of Thailand, and a logistics installation in Djibouti, northeast Africa, that opened in 2017.

Rachel Vandenbrink, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told Reuters that the selection of Ban Keun for a facility that the People's Liberation Army could access "is likely more about a target of opportunity than filling an obvious operational need."

"Laos does have some geostrategic value as an accessible foothold in mainland Southeast Asia, given its shared border with China and infrastructure links, including (its) railway," Vandenbrink said.

As construction continues, diplomats and analysts are keeping watch for any sign of air defences, ammunition, and fuel storage as well as surveillance facilities, all of which could point to the base serving broader military functions beyond training.

Neill, an adjunct fellow at Hawaii's Pacific Forum think tank, told Reuters that while the airfield looked relatively short and innocuous at present, it could in the future serve larger aircraft, including signals intelligence and electronic-surveillance planes, to extend China's reach into Southeast Asia.

"It looks like the airfield has been engineered to accommodate a runway extension, allowing larger aircraft to operate," he said.

The US Connection

In helping Laos build up Ban Keun, China is now occupying a site the US used covertly at the height of the Vietnam War.

During the US war against communist forces in Laos in the 1970s, Ban Keun was an airfield known as "Lima Site 44" used by Air America, an airline discreetly owned by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to records shared with Reuters by Ryan Wolfson-Ford, a Southeast Asia specialist at the Library of Congress.

The airline carried American-backed troops from the country's Hmong highland minority as well as supplies into rough mountain airstrips known as "Lima Sites."

As early as 1968, Ban Keun was used as a point from which Air America helicopters delivered Hmong troops to other combat zones, said Dr Joachim Leeker, an academic who has written about the history of the airline.