The Philippines’ military chief has backed the permanent presence of a US missile system north of the nation’s capital for months now, risking anger from China which had branded the weapon deployment as “destabilizing.

The U.S. Army transported the Typhon missile system, a land-based weapon that can fire the Standard Missile-6 and the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, to the northern Philippines as part of combat exercises in April with Philippine troops and to test its deployability aboard an Air Force aircraft.