If you can fly from West Coast out of CX gateways, or East Coast out of CX gateways, your BA miles can be used to fly CX to SE Asia without going through London or pay BA's fuel surcharge. JL can be used in same fashion as well.

It may even worth it to buy a ticket (gasp!) from your home city to the gateway city if necessarily (versus using your AA miles for this purpose.)

You need to spend some time to learn about how each program works better in relation to your own situation.

The efficient ways of redeeming BA miles have been discussed Ad Nausea in the very very long thread of the BA card on this forum, even as late as a month or 2 ago. Do a search of keywords in that particular thread you may see tons of posts on related topic.