US-Philippines ties enter ‘more mature' phase with planned fuel depot

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The Philippines: This Week in Asia Politics

"US-Philippines ties enter ‘more mature’ phase with planned fuel depot"

The facility in Davao signals that defence ties are now focusing on sustainment, endurance and operational continuity, analysts say

[Photo caption: Soldiers fire a howitzer during the annual joint “Balikatan” military exercises between the US and Philippine troops in Aparri, Cagayan province, in May 2025. Photo: Reuters]

By Jeoffrey Maitem SCMP Published: 7:30pm, 14 Apr 2026

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3350066/us-philippines-ties-enter-more-mature-phase-planned-fuel-depot

The United States is planning a fuel depot in the southern Philippines to support humanitarian and maritime security missions for its long-time ally in Asia, as part of a growing network of forward-based refuelling hubs in the Western Pacific.

Located far from the flashpoint reefs at the centre of Manila’s maritime dispute with Beijing in the South China Sea, the depot marks what one observer called a “more mature and more serious stage” in the US-Philippine alliance: a shift from base access and drills towards the grinding business of keeping forces fuelled, dispersed and in the field for the long haul.

The US Defence Logistics Agency published a solicitation on March 31, inviting US-based contractors to bid for a Defence Fuel Support Point along the western coast of the Davao Gulf, including Davao City, Davao del Sur and Malalag Bay.

According to a 15-page contract brief, the facility would hold about 977,000 barrels of US government-owned fuel for warships and aircraft over a four-year period, split between naval distillate F-76, used by surface vessels, and JP-5, a high-flashpoint jet fuel designed for use aboard aircraft carriers.

Bids will be accepted until June 29 and the project is slated for completion by 2028.

The Davao site will join a chain of forward refuelling hubs the US is building across the Western Pacific, alongside planned facilities in Darwin, Australia and Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.

Rear Admiral Roy Vincent Trinidad, a Philippine Navy spokesman, welcomed the plan but said details would have to wait until it was finalised.

He brushed off suggestions that the depot could become a target, arguing it would act as a deterrent instead.

“The greater risk is to have no deterrence at all,” he told reporters on Friday.

[Photo caption: "A US Marine Air Defence Integrated System fires at a drone during a live-fire joint Philippines-US military exercise in Zambales province, northern Philippines, in April 2025." Photo: AP]

Arnaud Leveau, a geopolitics professor at Paris Dauphine University, said Washington’s decision to site the hub in Davao, rather than closer to the South China Sea, reflected a preference for strategic depth over immediate proximity.

A site around Subic or Palawan would be more directly useful tactically, he said, but also more exposed in a crisis.

Davao, by contrast, offered a location that remained connected to operational theatres while being farther from the most obvious pressure points and better sheltered from immediate disruption.

There was also a geographic and logistical logic at work, Leveau said. Davao sits near the mouth of the Sulu and Celebes seas, two of the main sea lanes along the southern edge of the Philippines, with the wider Davao region being developed as Mindanao’s main commercial logistics gateway.

“In other words, this is not simply a military location. It is a node that already makes sense in commercial and transport terms,” Leveau told This Week in Asia.

“We are looking at a distributed sustainment architecture, designed to be usable in peacetime, credible in crisis and less escalatory in appearance than a fuel hub placed directly on the South China Sea front line.”

Asked what that said about the US-Philippine logistics set-up, Leveau said it suggested the alliance was moving from a model centred mainly on access and exercises to one built around sustainment, endurance and operational continuity.

“The real issue is not only where forces can deploy, but whether they can be refuelled, dispersed, maintained and kept in the field over time. That is a more mature and more serious stage of alliance-building,” Leveau said.

Washington and Manila had already expanded the network of bases accessible to US forces under the 2014 Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) to nine sites, Leveau noted, with the US steadily pouring money into infrastructure and pre-positioned supplies. He said the Davao project fit that trend despite not being a designated EDCA site.

[Photo caption: "Philippine and US aircraft fly during a joint patrol and training over the South China Sea in February 2025." Photo: Philippine Air Force via AP]

Ease strain on air assets

Defence analyst Justin Kyle Malarayap said Manila’s willingness to host the fuel facility was a clear statement that it intended to be proactive in sustaining humanitarian and military operations across the archipelago.

The depot, he said, would ease strain on air assets in southern Philippines, support operations in the Visayas and boost response capabilities to security challenges in Mindanao.

It could also lay the groundwork for future joint training between Manila and its allies, he added.

“This development highlights the commitment of the government in ensuring that critical logistics chains are sustained during disasters and security crises. We’ve often seen that during major natural calamities the [Philippine military] has been overwhelmed by logistical challenges when responding to remote areas where roads are damaged or critical river crossings are flooded,” he said.

“In a conflict scenario, these challenges are greatly exacerbated due to the fact that modern warfare actively seeks the rapid disruption of adversarial logistics to influence strategic operations. This is one of the reasons why we’ve seen a large investment from the Philippine Air Force to improve its logistical assets.”

Why is the Philippines aligning itself with the US after years of close China ties under Duterte

Muhammad Faizal Bin Abdul Rahman, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said the Davao location could reduce the odds of the site being targeted by Chinese missiles or drones in any maritime clash.

Faizal told This Week in Asia that the war against Iran showed overseas US military facilities were not impervious to attack by powerful adversaries, a fact allies hosting American forces could not ignore.

Davao, he said, could be strategically suitable precisely because it might serve US forces’ needs in both the South China Sea and the wider Western Pacific.

“There is a growing concern that President [Donald] Trump’s focus on the Middle East might increasingly distract the US military from its security commitments to its Indo-Pacific allies. A logistics facility, such as a fuel hub, could help assuage this concern to some extent,” Faizal said.

According to Faizal, the advantage for Manila is that a fuel hub in the Philippines would give Washington stronger incentives to maintain its presence, even when its forces are overstretched, because US forces rely on a global logistics network to project power.

“Although the US is currently preoccupied with attacking Iran and supporting Israel’s war efforts, it still needs to implement its 2026 National Defence Strategy that calls for erecting a balance of military power in the Indo-Pacific that would contain China,” Faizal said.

“Deployment of troops and armaments constitutes the projection of military power, but logistics support is the backbone of sustainable military power.”

happy trails ppl

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PalawOne Serial expat

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'This is how we prevail in the Pacific'

US, allies train to repel amphibious assault

'This is how we prevail in the Pacific': US, allies train to repel amphibious assault

The U.S. Army's 25th Infantry Division brought several new weapons to this year's Balikatan exercise.

By Jennifer Hlad | May 5, 2026

Army Indo-Pacific Drones

https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2026/05/pacific-allies-repel-amphibious-assault/413328/

LAOAG, Philippines—Just off the windswept beach, a camouflage-painted unmanned vessel reminiscent of a Chinese amphibious fighting vehicle advanced through the sapphire waters of the South China Sea.

Drones buzzed ahead as American, Filipino, and Japanese soldiers waited nearby. Then two rockets whooshed from HIMARS launchers hidden in the sand dunes, heading out to target simulated enemy warships in deep water. The battle had begun.

This counter-landing live-fire training, performed less than 400 miles from the southern tip of Taiwan as part of the annual Balikatan military exercise, “is where you get to really prove if you can do what you say you’re going to do,” Maj. Gen. James Bartholomees, commander of the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division, told a small group of journalists.

One of the things the 25th ID has said it will do is “synchronize sensing through fires in a coordinated manner against multiple adversaries,” Bartholomees said, from the brigade level to battalions, “down to companies, down to platoons, down to squads, into the individual foxhole.” But “the synchronization is not real until you can actually prove it with live munitions,” he said.

“This is the modernization of our Army. This is the modernization of joint forces. This is how we prevail in the Pacific under Adm. [Samuel] Paparo’s vision.”

Last month, Paparo, the leader of Indo-Pacific Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the “strategy is clear: We must deny China the ability to achieve its objectives through military aggression while strengthening the network of alliances and partnerships that constitutes our greatest asymmetric advantage.”

He continued: “Credible, prompt and sustained combat power, visible across the Indo-Pacific region, will deter acts of military aggression that destabilize the region, undermine security and stability, and threaten the security, freedom, and prosperity of the United States.”

Here at La Paz Sand Dunes, the division’s artillery battalion worked in a small tactical operations center out of sight of enemy forces, using data from a Stalker long-range reconnaissance drone, multiple short- and medium-range loitering aerial drones, and unmanned surface vessels to coordinate fires from the battalion’s new HIMARS, one-way attack drones, 105-millimeter artillery, and more on targets in the air, on the sand, and in the water.

At the beach, automatic weapons and rifles peppered the shallows while longer-range munitions sent sprays of sea water and billowing gray smoke high into the air. Buzzing drones in orange and neon green, built in-house by the unit’s Lightning Lab, added to the cacophony as they drew incoming fire. Further out at sea, Apache helicopters and Navy and Air Force assets hunted robotic boats.

“When you think of the Army, you think of it as the land-based component. But here in the Pacific theater, we don’t have that luxury,” Col. Daniel Von Benken, the commander of 25th Infantry Division Artillery, told Defense One.

“The Army has to compete and win in both environments, or help another service compete and win in another environment. So ‘maritime deep battle’ is trying to figure out, where do our echelons connect with joint services like the Navy and Marines? Where does it connect with our partner forces on the flanks, and how can we echelon onto a direct fire conflict?

So what we'll generally try to do is echelon our fires into the maritime environment and then shape an enemy to a favorable force calculus, onto a beach where we finish the job.”

Bartholomees called the Army “absolutely essential to the joint force in the Pacific.” He invoked the activation of the division just three months before Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, saying that since then, “we prepared to fight on islands, to lead from islands and to fight forward.”

This week’s exercise in repelling a force invading from the sea showed “our ability not only to control and fight through land with our allies and partners, but also to have effects and capability in all domains,” he said.

Von Benken noted that many of the weapons and drones used this year were new to the division since last year’s Balikatan, making the exercise a key experiment as the unit works to determine what is the “best solution in terms of massing fires.”

The pace of change can be breathtaking, but Von Benken said his focus is “really balancing the modernization piece with your core function, the core function at the end of the day being: Are you good at artillery? Are you good at infantry? Are you good at the combined arms fight? And if you never lose sight of that, the modernization won’t overwhelm you. It won’t make you feel like you’re off track.

Bring yourself back to the center every time. ‘Can I shoot farther? Can I see faster? Can I sense faster?’

If the answer to that is ‘yes,’ put it back together with your core competency and move forward.”

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mugtech ViP

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Ironic to me that the 25th ID is defending an invasion along the west coast of Luzon. In 1945 my father was with the 25th when they invaded the gulf again, as had the Japanese in 1941.

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PalawOne Serial expat

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mugtech writes, " Ironic to me that the 25th ID is defending an invasion along the west coast of Luzon. In 1945 my father was with the 25th when they invaded the gulf again, as had the Japanese in 1941." - @mugtech

That's amazing Mugtech, and what a proud

family record-of-service warming fam hearts!

good man, good family i'd bet all and granny

happy trails MT

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mugtech ViP

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Thank you, P1. I did not continue the tradition. Gor busted for less than an oz of weed. In July of 1970, it was a felony in Pennsylvania. Got a $500 fine, 3 years probation and a new draft card. Said I was 4F, physically or morally unfit to serve. Seems I was not moral enough to burn villages and kill women and children because I smoked pot. Of course about 80% of the troops in Nam were doing grass or even worse. More irony. Of course as a felon I could not teach public school, for which I have a degree. So I went into accounting, but could not become a CPA. Glad I'm retired, listen to Alice's Restaurant every Thanksgiving.

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