The U.S. Coast Guard has redeployed six 154-foot fast-response cutters from Bahrain to operate from Singapore and Subic Bay in the Philippines through at least September, a Coast Guard spokesperson said, as Washington seeks to bolster its presence near contested waters in the western Pacific.
The six cutters are operating from Singapore and Subic Bay, a former U.S. military base on the Philippine island of Luzon, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal that was summarized by other outlets. A Coast Guard spokesperson said command and logistics for the deployment are managed from Singapore, while the ships rotate through Subic Bay.
The Coast Guard spokesperson said the cutters are approved to operate from the two locations through at least September. While the United States has previously deployed larger Coast Guard cutters to Subic Bay, this is the first time the service’s smaller fast-response cutters have operated from the facility.
The cutters were previously forward-deployed to Bahrain, where Coast Guard vessels have supported U.S. operations since the period surrounding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and in recent years have intercepted drug and weapons shipments in and around the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. The ships were moved out of Bahrain earlier this year as U.S.-Iran hostilities escalated because the cutters are not equipped with missile-defense systems, the Journal report said.
Analysts said the Coast Guard deployment gives Washington an additional way to sustain presence in the region as China increasingly uses its coast guard to assert maritime claims. “The Coast Guard is one way of maintaining a U.S. presence when the U.S. Navy is clearly much in demand in the Strait of Hormuz and the Middle East,” Euan Graham, a nonresident senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told The Wall Street Journal.
Operating from Singapore and the Philippines places the cutters closer to South China Sea flashpoints, and the Daily Wire reported that the ships are supporting U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, which oversees U.S. military activities across a vast area stretching from the U.S. West Coast to India’s western border.
