The ship I was stationed on, USS Samuel Gompers, AD 37, overseas homeport was Subic Bay.
A good time was had by all.
In this technological era, capital surface ships at Subic Bay are more vulnerable to abrupt destruction than the American fleet was at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Defense strategy has to be rethought. Subic had its day, capital surface ships also once had theirs. Their time has passed. Sadly it will take the horrible deaths of many young sailors before today’s “battleship admirals” come to understand that in the modern technological era, capital surface ships, including the super carriers are floating coffins. The Philippines should develop Subic as a commercial port. The best their navy can do is serve as an anti pirate force. Deal with China in other ways.
Lol. Subic and Olongapo City was a craphole. I hated docking the to load 5”38 ammo.
The ship I was stationed on, USS Samuel Gompers, AD 37, overseas homeport was Subic Bay.
A good time was had by all.
From the article: “...fulfilling the U.S. obligations to withdraw all military forces and vacate all bases after the Philippine Senate rejected a new military-bases agreement in September 1991.”
Are you saying that President Bush should have kept Subic Bay open even though the Philippine Senate didn’t renew the agreement. Or should he have met whatever demands they may have made to keep it open?
Yeah, ….. where the Booted the American Military right through the uprights! That’s where we want to be.
NOT!
-WestPac sailor, inport Subic Bay many times between 1986 and 1988
Remembering the faces of the Filip rioters/protestors demanding the shut down and removal of everything American. I am sure folks are just itching to go back into that lovely ‘we hate America’ cauldron of hate and terrorism.
However, Philippine Secretary of National Defense Delphin Lorenzana recently said, “the [mutual defense] treaty needed to be reexamined to clear ambiguities that could cause chaos and confusion during a crisis.” He cited China’s aggressive seizure in the mid-1990s of a Philippine-claimed reef, saying, “The U.S. did not stop it.”
Three years after we'd been shown the door? Too damn bad. That is not, in my opinion, a grievance, it's just deserts to a government that was quite openly hostile at the time.
There is another very touchy issue involved herein, and it was one that plagued the Subic refits throughout their existence: U.S. workers would lose those jobs, and the unions were (in this case justifiably) unhappy about Filipino crane operators, for example, getting paid half or less of their U.S. counterparts. Great deal from the Navy's point of view, not so much for America First. We're angry when Silicon Valley outsources overseas for exactly that reason.
As an ex-West Coast sailor I spent many happy liberties in, er, in the Christian Science Reading Room at the corner of Magsaysay and Rizal, although I heard there were other activities going on in Olongapo but naturally never, uh, partook. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. The Filipinos are awesome, their government not so much, and their current geopolitical challenges are to a great degree their business by their desire and not ours because it would be convenient. I could be convinced otherwise but they're going to have to do the convincing, not somebody in the Pentagon.
Why should we go back to Subic? And why should we trust the Philippine government?
== GOP Free Traitor™ polices hadn't weakened the US industrial base and built up China yet.
Rotated back to Okinawa from Cubi Point 3 days before Mt Pinatubo erupted.