Trump’s Pentagon is turning the Philippines into a missile launchpad for a war with China.
The sailors who spelled “Farewell Subic” in white paint on the carrier runway in March 1992 were wrong about one thing. They thought they meant it.
Ryan Jacinto launches his outrigger from a beach on Luzon most mornings before the sun is up. He fishes the same waters his father fished. The boat is a wooden banca with a small diesel and a net his wife mends at night on the porch. He pays the mooring fee, the fuel, the rice, the school fees. He has been boarded by Chinese coast guard vessels so often he has lost count. They used water cannon. They used batons. Once they bent a rail. He told reporters he feels safer when U.S. ships are around, and I believe him.
A few miles down the coast, at the old Subic Bay naval base the 1992 Senate vote closed, the U.S. Army has posted a contracting document. It wants contractors to support “controlled storage and weapon systems at two separate sites” inside the bay. Task Force-Philippines numbers about sixty people. Washington has committed more than $300 million in base upgrades. The Pentagon has formal rotational access to nine Philippine bases and airports. The plan calls what is happening at Subic a “commercial hub that enables logistics coordination.” Logistics, yes. A war launchpad, also yes.
This is the physical half of the U.S. push for “deterrence by denial” along the First Island Chain — the same architecture we have been tracking in these pages. A Navy-Marine truck-mounted antiship missile launcher with a stated range of about 115 miles showed up on Itbayat in June. A Tomahawk cruise missile, reported range up to 1,200 miles, was fired from Leyte. Marines practiced counter-drone work on Luzon. The gridlines at Subic still carry the names of American presidents and commanders. The launcher rails and the Tomahawk tubes are rolling onto runways that some of those same names signed into the coral.
What that means for Ryan Jacinto is this. If war starts, the Chinese rockets do not have to fly to Kadena or Andersen or Yokosuka. They fly here. To the pier where he ties up. To the market where his wife sells the catch. To the school where his children walk in the morning. Dispersal makes the American force harder to destroy in one strike. It also makes the Filipino civilian the strike instead. The dispersal arithmetic works both ways. The military planners do the first half in Washington. The second half happens on a beach he knows by name.
The strategy has a fixed-infrastructure problem nobody in the briefing books wants to talk about. Spread aircraft across more airfields and a single missile strike cannot erase the whole force. Runways, fuel, power generation, communications, and command links remain concentrated points. A network that looks dispersed on a map still depends on a limited number of places that have to keep working under fire. So the new “commercial hub” at Subic becomes a target the same way the old naval station was a target. The name changed. The targeting geometry did not.
Mayor Rolen Paulino Jr. of Olongapo says he wants the economic boost. The American Legion post still meets in his city. The bar girls and the ship-repair shops and the loading crews are still there. He is telling the truth about what his town needs. He is not telling anyone what happens to his town when the targeting geometry finds it.
I am a man who drove a tank through Iraq in 2003 and came home and read what I had been part of, too late to undo any of it. I am telling you what I wish someone had told me before I climbed into the gunner’s seat: the men who plan the first day of a war are not the men who pay for the last day of it. The people who pay for the last day live in places like Olongapo. The people who pay for it are people like Ryan Jacinto.
The contractor is now the official. Steve Feinberg, the deputy defense secretary, co-founded Cerberus Capital Management. In 2022, Cerberus took control of the commercial shipyard at Subic Bay. One of the tenants is a Korean shipbuilder, which analysts say could help repair U.S. vessels. The shipyard worker tightening a bolt on a Korean-built hull today is tightening it for a defense secretary whose private equity firm signed the lease. The chain runs from the Pentagon office in Washington to the dry dock at Subic to the payroll of the man on the scaffolding. The public record does not prove a corrupt deal. It proves a chain of interest. A man who owns the dock and signs the deployment order does not need to commit a crime to make the arrangement corrupt. He needs only to be in both rooms at once.
In his farewell address on January 17, 1961, Eisenhower warned of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” He had just left office. He had spent eight years managing the Cold War and understood what he had built. He named the threat. Sixty-five years later, the man who owns the dock signs the deployment order. The chain is the warning Eisenhower gave. The chain is the answer to why it has not been heard.
President Marcos has said Philippine territory cannot be used for offensive action. Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. said the Philippines “will only be a target if there’s a bad actor with bad intentions against the Philippines.” That is a comforting sentence. It is also the sentence of a defense secretary whose country has just become the forward operating base for a war it did not start, against an adversary it cannot defeat alone, with elections in 2028 that could bring Sara Duterte to power and reverse every agreement Marcos has signed. A basing plan built on the goodwill of a single administration is a lease with an election clause.
The Chinese pressure on the Philippines is real. The coast guard uses water cannon. A baton attack injured a Philippine sailor. The Philippines deserves a credible alliance and a defense of its own waters. The launchers on Ryan Jacinto’s coast do not answer that pressure. They give the pressure a larger map.
A real bounded alliance would defend Philippine territory, strengthen joint rescue and maritime patrol, and make every basing rule public and subject to Philippine consent. No president should be able to turn a patchwork of access agreements, private repair contracts, and rotational deployments into an offensive war without authorization from Congress and the clear consent of the government that has to live with the consequences.
The sailors on the carrier runway in 1992 spelled “Farewell Subic.” They spelled the wrong word. The Philippines should never discover it has become the terrain of this war only when the missiles are already in place.