MANILA, Philippines—To the strains of a military band playing Mariah Carey’s Christmas song, U.S. and Philippine leaders broke ground on a new coordination center—and a new era of military cooperation as the country shifts its security focus from internal rebellion to Chinese incursion.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin flew into this sprawling metropolis of 24 million on Monday to sign a classified-information agreement, turn over a symbolic spadeful of earth, and meet the country’s president and defense minister.
The pact sets out rules for sharing classified intelligence and other data, including how to handle it, safeguard it, and report breaches, U.S. defense officials said. The two countries—treaty allies since 1951—have long shared information on various occasions and in various ways, but the agreement will greatly streamline the process, the officials said.
Formally called the General Security of Military Information Agreement, or GSOMIA, the pact follows a more-or-less standard template used with at least 10 other U.S. security partners. But it was more than two years in the making because of the necessary negotiations, planning, training, infrastructure improvements, and more.
“We set the end of 2024 as the goal for concluding it,” one senior defense official said on grounds of anonymity, and it “will be a huge breakthrough in our ability to continue to deepen the cooperation that we have with the Philippines.”
At the signing ceremony, Philippines Minister of National Defense Gilbert Teodoro echoed that sentiment—and added that the agreement will also enable his country to pursue similar information-sharing pacts with other countries.
The pact also lays the groundwork for the nascent Combined Coordination Center at Camp Aguinaldo, site of the Philippine Armed Forces’ general headquarters. The building, to be erected in a vacant lot at the camp, will essentially give U.S. personnel—military as well as diplomatic—a purpose-built space where they can meet, plan, and operate with their Philippine counterparts.
“It was clear there was a need to take this out of, you know, random conference rooms and into a more dedicated center, especially one that had the right types of information feeds coming in both classified and unclassified information that we could see together,” a second defense official said. “I think certainly it will be where we do the bulk of our exercise planning, and when we conduct the exercises, it’s going to be the op center—the hub where our forces assess what’s going on for other operational activities that we do together, like our maritime cooperative activities in the South China Sea,” as well as humanitarian operations.
The center is to open next summer or early fall, the official said. Still to be determined is how many U.S. troops and officials might rotate through the center.
“I think the idea is it would have pretty large capacity to support some of our larger-scale exercises like Balakatan,” the official said. “It’s somewhere where we would envision potentially having liaison officers in the future, once it is at full operating capacity.”
Austin also paid a call to the country’s president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., at his official residence, the sprawling Malacañang Palace. The defense secretary announced he had authorized U.S. forces—he didn’t say which ones or how many—to provide humanitarian assistance to the country, just days after it was struck by a fourth typhoon in two weeks.
The visit is Austin’s fourth and likely final official visit to the Philippines. His visits—the most by any U.S. defense secretary—began during the administration of Rodrigo Duterte, who threatened to tilt the country’s security alignment toward China before being brought back into the U.S. fold. Under Austin, U.S. forces have helped reduce the country’s Maoist insurgency to a fraction of its former strength, even as China has increased its assertiveness in defiance of international courts.
Austin is slated on Tuesday to travel to the island of Palawan for a Philippine Navy demonstration of T-12 unmanned surface vessels provided by the U.S. through Foreign Military Financing, then to travel on to Laos for the ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting-Plus event.
But on a hot day in Manila, with the Philippine Army Band playing upbeat selections and golden-handled shovels awaiting their ceremonial use, officials were ebullient.
“This center embodies our aspirations,” one Philippines general said.
