The escort ship conducted acceptance trials along the coasts of Washington and British Columbia and then headed south for her new home port at San Diego, California, where she arrived on 25 July 1972.

On 15 November, Bagley entered the Long Beach Naval Shipyard and began an extended post-shakedown availability during which her main propulsion plant was converted to use Navy distillate fuel.

That contingency force went to the western portion of the Indian Ocean in response to hostilities that had broken out between Israel and her neighbors, Egypt and Syria (the Yom Kippur War).

Bagley spent the next seven weeks on patrol in the Indian Ocean as an indication of American resolve to end the fighting in the Middle East and as a deterrent to keep Soviet forces from intervening in the conflict.

During that time, she and the guided missile destroyer USS McCormack entered the Red Sea and docked at the port of Masawa, Ethiopia for a few days.

For the remainder of the deployment, the warship participated in the usual 7th Fleet exercises punctuated by port visits to Hong Kong; Keelung, Taiwan; Buckner Bay, Okinawa; Pusan, Korea; and Yokosuka, Japan.

After conducting training operations—notably gunfire support drills and ASROC firings—in the Subic Bay operating area, Bagley departed the Philippines late in April in company with a task force built around the aircraft carrier USS Constellation.

En route to Indian Ocean contingency operations, the warship encountered Vietnamese refugees adrift in a boat in the South China Sea.

On that journey, she took a very circuitous route, visiting the Australian port of Geraldton, Diego Garcia Island, and Penang in Malaysia, before returning to Subic Bay in mid-April.

After the customary month of post-deployment leave and upkeep, Bagley resumed normal training duty in California waters and remained so occupied for the rest of the year.

Over the next five months, the frigate took part in a number of exercises at sea, most often with a task group built around Midway, and visited a series of Far Eastern ports.

After a call at Guam in late August and early September, Bagley steamed to Sasebo, Japan, whence she operated until the first week in November when she returned to the Philippines at Subic Bay.

At that time, the warship headed north to Esquimalt, British Columbia, where she took part in CNO Project 371, tests on new submarine torpedo designs.

At the conclusion of the evolution, Bagley called at Portland, Oregon, for that city's Rose Festival and then moved on to Concord, California, to load ammunition.

On 15 January, the warship set out on her first overseas deployment in two years as part of a task group built around the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.

On 28 June, she left Catania, Italy, steamed through the Suez Canal, crossed the Indian Ocean, and arrived in Subic Bay on 17 July.

The warships made an unusual nonstop, but leisurely, Pacific crossing during which they carried out a five-day readiness exercise in the Hawaiian operating area.

On that day she and the other warships in the group got underway for a tour of duty in the Arabian Sea, returning once more to a region of chronic political convulsions spawned by a decade of Iranian provocations.

For about two months, Bagley patrolled the waters of the northern Arabian Sea with her task group with the only untoward event being the loss of her helicopter which ditched because of a material casualty.

Soon after destroying the oil platform, the trio engaged the Iranian Kaman-class patrol boat Joshan with surface-to-surface missiles and finished her off with gunfire.

When a Marine Corps AH-1 Cobra helicopter operating from Wainwright failed to return after the actions of the 18th, Bagley spent the next two days engaged in a futile search for the missing aircraft and its crew.

It became apparent that the helicopter went down during the operation when the bodies of the crew, Marine Corps Captains Stephen C. Leslie and Kenneth W. Hill were recovered almost a month later about 15 miles (24 km) southeast of Abu Musa Island.

She stopped off at Seattle to embark a group of male relatives and friends of her crewmen for the last leg of the voyage home and completed this "Tiger" portion of the journey at San Diego on 2 July.

Bagley's unit rendezvoused with two other units—one built around the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and the other around Constellation—and sailed north to conduct the exercise Operation PACEX 89 in the vicinity of the Aleutian Islands during the period between 20 September and 30.

At one point in the massive operation, elements of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force joined American warships and planes in carrying out bilateral training in the waters surrounding Okinawa.

The crossing, prolonged by the exercise, ended with Operation Valiant Blitz carried out with units of the South Korean Navy in the Sea of Japan.

Along the way, she made a liberty call at Pattaya Beach, Thailand, another at Singapore, and a resupply stop a Diego Garcia Island before arriving on station in the Arabian Sea in mid-January 1990.

For almost 10 months, she carried out the usual schedule of drills, exercises, and inspections punctuated with visits to variety of ports in the United States and Canada.

In February 1991, however, Bagley embarked upon a brief, but novel, phase of her career when she left San Diego on the 15th bound for the coast of Central America for two months of drug interdiction duty.

During that period, she cruised the Pacific coasts of Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama and Costa Rica stopping and inspecting fishing boats and other small craft and carrying out air tracking operations.