In 2003, I was the Deputy G5 (Staff for Plans) of the Philippine Army. I wrote this essay as a speech of Gen Dionisio Santiago, the AFP Chief-of-Staff, in a stakeholders’ forum; and later, I was able to publish it in the 1st Quarter 2003 issue of the Cavalier Magazine. I was already aware at that time about Cyber warfare, a topic that until now nobody is doing anything but many are lip-service grandstanding …

All of us in the AFP, as you know, appreciate the strong and continuous support that’s been provided to us by the national government, particularly: the Executive Branch and the Congress.

We have just seen once again, as you would expect an outstanding support from these institutions to slowly realize the AFP Modernization Program. There is a need to expedite the program, though.

One of the stories that came into mind from the armed engagement two years ago in Lamitan was how incredibly swift and slippery the group of Abu Sabaya (http://www.philstar.com/opinion/205777/how-we-treat-soldier?nomobile=1). Through deception, the bandits were able to escape the cordon of the AFP, despite the dominance in number of the latter. You have seen the skirmishes and results on TV that the bandits have achieved in terms of firepower. They had the Scout Rangers seeking cover and not able to move and run after them. The total outcome of the battle was inexcusable and unacceptable.

But there’s another part of the story that’s incredibly important as well. That is the bravery, professionalism and performance of our soldiers. They used nothing but guts. But those are not enough! We are responsible to properly equip our soldiers; and there is the need to do it now!

We all saw the photograph of the battle scene. You would notice many bullet holes on the walls – toward the direction of our soldiers. The volume was so great! A tank commander was killed. The AFP was devastated and even accused of conniving with the enemies. But let us not dwell on this topic. Let us talk about the three (3) major priorities of the AFP: First is readiness. Right now, the forces are not that ill equipped. We might as well pay a lot of attention to readiness that would be making sure we are ready and we have everything we need to be ready.

Second is quality of life. We cannot have the forces we need if we do not attend to the quality of training, equipment and also their compensation. We are very grateful for the increase in our pay.

Let us turn now to the third but not the least of the priorities, which is modernization.

Capability Assessment

Why do we have to modernize? As an overall assessment, the AFP capability to perform its mandated mission, which is to protect the people and secure the sovereignty of the state and its territorial integrity, is relatively limited. While the AFP can still perform internal security operation (ISO) missions fairly, it may not be able to sustain a prolonged campaign of considerable magnitude and the territorial defense against formidable external treats. The AFP also continues to have difficulty in terms of joint operations and interoperability among major services.

With this, the AFP capabilities need immediate substantial upgrading and it has to re-acquire the essential capabilities that have been eroded. We have to do it fast in order to prevent the AFP from absorbing losses.

The AFP Modernization Program

We have to build a force with enhanced combat capability that will allow them to operate efficiently. The force must also be innovative and flexible to meet ever-changing challenges.

Let us talk about each of these positive features. First of all, we need enhanced combat capability. We need a force that is flexible, responsive and reliable – a force that can deal with unknown situations and respond to change.

It means that, as we look at our modernization program, for example, we have to buy Blackhawk helicopters to replace UH-1H Huey helicopters and to ensure that we have that lift we need for a newly configured force. We need them, for their stealthiness and maneuverability, in order to assure our effective close air support.

We need to modernize our ground forces by upgrading their equipment. Modernizing or upgrading the ground forces is important because again we want to make sure our people to be ready so that when they have to fight, they are able to fight well and then come home to their families. The army is asking for mostly the basic stuff – body armors, tactical communications gear, trucks, ammunition, artillery pieces, and armored personnel carriers. The army leadership is asking – not to forget these small procurement because these things make the difference in combat capability.

Beyond that, we are going to need the joint detection technologies, such as: unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), night vision goggles (NVG), radars and thermal devices, which will provide us with battlefield surveillance and common platforms. We are now getting as much as 80% to 85% commonality across the major services. So we have to look at advanced technologies to provide us tools for decisions making process in combat. Frankly, we need these kinds of capabilities more that we need multi-role jets. Everybody would love to have more fighter jets but given the budget that we have, we want to make sure that the forces we have are not too expensive to maintain.

That’s also true for our major Navy program. It will need new ships. All of these new capabilities have to be joint in nature because we have been operating in joint operations and will still do in the future in almost every case. We ask the major services to take on new responsibilities and as they move forward and develop superb new systems such as the multi-role jets. We want to continually remind them that we want these systems to operate in a joint environment.

Jointness takes a lot of training, and it takes a lot of cooperation, and a lot of trust too among the major services. That’s not easy but it is critically important. Modernization does not only mean new weapons but also joint vision. It means joint training, joint planning and joint doctrine. With the budget that we have, we have to think AFP – not just Army, Air Force nor Navy.

The eerie thing that bothers us is the hesitation of our troops in Lamitan. The problem occurs usually when we have too many systems that are not integrated. They are not mixed in the context in which they ought to be fused in the best manner. Our intelligence organizations are, unfortunately, still “stovepipe” and we need to work on that.

Finally, in terms of combat capability, there’s one last criterion we want to mention. We want to make sure that we are dealing with the real threat out there. Do we focus on internal defense or external defense? Some of those threats, as you know, will be unknown. We have to define them as we go forward.

So, the challenge to us is that we need to keep looking at who’s out there? What it is that potential threat going to be and making sure that we are not mesmerized by our own capabilities? Nevertheless, to be conscious of the situation where, in point of fact, we will be responsive to the needs of the future?

We have mentioned, in this regard, is efficiency. We need to be efficient because we are short of money. We will be increasing our modernization program account from 2001 through 2002, from P126.8M to P5.2B.

The modernization budget is reflected in the Reprioritized Program List (RPL). Most of the money came from BCDA. DND has published the rules that implement the acquisition. We can buy from the private sector the way we ought to and we will continue to be accurate on the milspecs (military specifications) and live with many of the regulations that we have.

Another of the modernization effort that we want to discuss is innovation. Innovation is critically important if we are going to have a new, reliable and flexible organization that can respond to change. We need to be dynamic. It means evolving the AFP so it specifically becomes responsive and adaptive to change. For a couple of illustrations:

First, information technology runs through a generation about three years. We need to adopt it, not fight it. It is driven by the private sector, not by us. So we need to reach them out, adapt to what’s going on and use it for our own purposes.

We have to face the question of cyber warfare! It is a major threat in vast number of areas inside our domain. We have to figure out how to deal with this threat and do it both offensively and defensively. The answers will not be easy, and by definition we will need to be innovative. We are moving rapidly to heavy use of simulation in training. We have to understand where it works and where it does not work and where we can make real trade-offs with the simulation in terms of other forms of training which are much more expensive.

We have to understand better our environment and the effect of these technologies. We mentioned our experience in Lamitan. We focused on firepower. We are not hitting the targets. Firepower is not the only solution then, and has major implications for us to go forward. We need to understand those implications. We recognized that our battlefield is not a dessert. It is a cloudy, rainy, forest covered area where we are seeking our targets in an area that is far from the best of conditions.

The question is: how can we make even better use of our new technologies as threat changes? We look at J9, the AFP’s Modernization Office, to help us sort the use of technologies in dealing with new and unexpected threats as they emerge.

Conclusion.

In conclusion, we are embarking on a major modernization program. It will take several years from now – indeed, the budget program will go out into the next horizon. It will stress new efficiencies and most importantly, it will stress innovation. In many ways, the AFP is already on that task, and that’s good news. We have a force that in the future will be capable and efficient, innovative, responsive and joint. We want to continue to look for new ways to improve and even make it better.

We need it now!