The Philippine and US navies will start on Wednesday an 11-day series of combined military exercisesin the northern Philippine province of Pampanga.
The opening ceremony will take place at Subic Bay on Wednesday,a former US navy base, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) public information office said in a press statement released on Tuesday morning.
The annual bilateral naval exercise, also known as the Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) 2002, is a regularly-scheduled annual bilateral exercise between the two navies, and is now the eighth session.
A total of 18 combined military exercises were outlined as partof the Mutual Defense Treaty between the US and the Philippine military for the calendar year 2003, and 13 of those have already been completed. The five others will be executed before the year end, the statement said.
The training exercise is designed to promote interoperability between the US and Philippine forces in the areas of operational planning, command and control, tactics and community rations projects.
About 1,400 US soldiers, sailors, marines and coast guards, headed by Rear Admiral Jeff Cassias of the US Navy, will participate in the operation. A total of 1,396 Filipino servicemencomposed of sailors, marines and coast guards will also join in.
A Philippine-US joint military exercise coded Balikatan 02-1 isstill going on in the southern Philippines targeting the Abu Sayyaf kidnap-for-ransom group which is allegedly linked to the al-Qaeda international terror network. Around 1,000 US troops are being deployed for the exercise slated to wind down on July 31.