On June 6, the Philippines participated in a trilateral exercise with Japan and the United States off the coast of the Bataan peninsula to practise freeing a vessel from pirates and stopping a suspected shipment of weapons of mass destruction.

Most significantly, the participating personnel were not from the three countries’ navies, but rather from their coast guards. The coast guard is traditionally a law enforcement agency, an extension of the police into a coastal country’s maritime territory. Increasingly, however, South-east Asia is seeing coast guards conducting foreign policy, looking and acting more like national military forces than police.