By Gerry Doyle and Karen Lema

(Reuters) - The U.S. military has moved its Typhon launchers - which can fire multipurpose missiles up to thousands of kilometres - from Laoag airfield in the Philippines to another location on the island of Luzon, a senior Philippine government source said.

The Tomahawk cruise missiles in the launchers can hit targets in both China and Russia from the Philippines; the SM-6 missiles it also carries can strike air or sea targets more than 200 km (165 miles) away.

The senior Philippine government source said the redeployment would help determine where and how fast the missile battery could be moved to a new firing position. That mobility is seen as a way to make them more survivable during a conflict.

Satellite images showed the batteries and their associated gear being loaded onto C-17 transport aircraft at Laoag International Airport in recent weeks, said Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. The white rain canopies that had covered the Typhon equipment were also removed, according to the images, seen by Reuters and not previously reported.

The Typhon system is part of a U.S. drive to amass a variety of anti-ship weapons in Asia.

Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), which oversees U.S. forces in the region, told Reuters the Typhons have been "relocated within the Philippines". Both INDOPACOM and the Philippine government declined to give the specific location to which the batteries were moved.

"The U.S. government has coordinated closely with the Philippine government on every aspect of the MRC deployment, including the location," said Commander Matthew Comer of INDOPACOM, referring to the Typhon by the initials of its formal name, Mid Range Capability.

He added that the relocation was not an indication that the batteries would be permanently in the Philippines.

The weapon drew sharp criticism from China when it was first deployed in April 2024 during a training exercise. In September, when the United States said it had no immediate plans to pull the Typhons out of the Philippines, China and Russia condemned the deployment as fuelling an arms race.

Typhons are relatively easy to produce - drawing on large stockpiles and designs that have been around for a decade or more - and could help the United States and its allies catch up quickly in an Indo-Pacific missile race in which China has a big lead.

Although the U.S. military has declined to say how many will be deployed in the Indo-Pacific region, more than 800 SM-6 missiles are due to be bought in the next five years, according to government documents outlining military purchases. Several thousand Tomahawks are already in U.S. inventories, the documents showed.

Both missiles are Raytheon products.

(Reporting by Gerry Doyle in Singapore and Karen Lema in Manila; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)