Philippine and United States defense chiefs discussed way to strengthen the the 71-year-old Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) and the two agreements between the two countries.

This was announced by Department of National Defense (DND) Officer-in-Charge and NDRRMC Chairman Jose Faustino Jr. and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III during their press briefing in Hawaii on Thursday.

"We discussed several priority areas for the alliance including strengthening our MDT commitments and enhancing maritime cooperation, and building on our mutual defense posture, and improving interoperability and information sharing," said Austin.

"By deepening our cooperation and modernizing our alliance we can help secure the Philippines future tackle regional challenges and promote peace and security in the Indo Pacific," he added.

Faustino said the Philippines will continue to stand by with its mutual defense treaty with the United States.

"The PH's defense and security engagement with the US remains the key pillar of the US-PH bilateral relations," he said.

"We continue to stand by the PH-US Mutual Defense Treaty and it has been the basis of the national defense policy of our country and we look forward after this bilateral meeting that we have of a more robust cooperation particularly in issues pertaining external threats to our country, and coming up with other avenues of cooperation where we could discuss things with mutual interest to the US and PH," he added.

As they also discussed the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) and the Enhance Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) between two countries, Austin and Faustino agreed to continue to improve US-Philippine cooperation.

"We have a robust dialogue on positioning the alliance to address emerging challenges. We fought together, we trained together, and so we consider ourselves--we're allies, but we consider ourselves to be more family than anything else and I'm proud to say that. You heard me say a couple of times that, I cannot imagine a day when the US and PH aren't allies. It's who we are. Again, I consider us to be more family," said Austin.

"But today, we agree on a number of ways to continue to grow that cooperation. As you know, we've been able to move forward our VFA and we discussed EDCA which is critical to our alliance cooperation, and strengthening our combined capabilities," he added. Robina Asido/DMS