The laws of physics and chemistry do not selectively spare one island or reef over another. Aviation equipment faces the same harsh natural environment and the same high rate of wear in all these places. Mischief Reef and Subi Reef do not have fighter aircraft while Woody Island does simply because Woody Island is closer, which makes support and maintenance somewhat easier. That is all there is to it. Even so, the aviation units on Woody Island are only small detachments rotating in and out. Large, fully organized units are not permanently stationed there.
The Spratly Islands are simply too far away, so far that many netizens living in inland provinces have no intuitive sense of the distance. Even the distance between the three airfields at Fiery Cross Reef, Subi Reef, and Mischief Reef, all within the Spratly Islands, is already nearly comparable to the distance from Woody Island in the Paracels to Hainan Island.
The front line of the contest with the Philippines is Mischief Reef. If Philippine aircraft come over to harass, and alert aircraft have to scramble from Woody Island to intercept them, the distance involved is roughly three times the distance of flying back to Hainan Island. It is even farther than flying back to the mainland as far as Guangzhou. Put another way, a single interception like this, even if the aircraft arrive on scene and immediately turn back without loitering, would involve a round trip equivalent to making five shuttle runs between a forward airfield in Fujian and the coast of Taiwan.
That should give people some sense of just how vast the sea and airspace of the South China Sea really are. As a result, relying on the Paracels to support airspace responses in the Spratlys imposes very tight limits on reaction time, which naturally places extremely high demands on intelligence, surveillance, and early warning capabilities.
Of course, deploying fighters in the Spratlys would certainly make it easier to handle similar situations. But the point of building forward bases is not that they must be used as soon as they are built. The point is to have them available when needed, and to have high-standard facilities ready for use.
The distance from the Spratly airfields to Hainan or Guangdong is comparable to, or even greater than, the distance from Russia to Syria’s Hmeimim Air Base. Maintaining forces with enough deterrent value against U.S.-Philippine forces in such a remote location would impose a logistical burden no less than operating an overseas base.
If the situation has not yet escalated to that point, would actively getting bogged down there amount to being led by the nose? Would the other side then use this as an entry point to keep draining us, tying down ever-greater Chinese investment through low-cost provocations? These are all issues that have to be considered.
To put it simply: there is no technically insurmountable obstacle to deploying fighters in the Spratly Islands. But whether to do so depends on a cost-benefit judgment of cost versus necessity. That balance is dynamic and changes with the situation.
