Philippine military gets lift from Spratlys
Philippine military gets lift from Spratlys
China's encroachment onto a reef claimed by the Philippines has provided the latter's armed forces with a much needed boost. Francisco L. Roman Jr. examines the issue.
The combination of the ascendancy of Corazon Aquino to the presidency in 1986, and the end of the Cold War in 1989, substantially eroded the Philippine military's traditional role as the defender of the nation against both internal and external aggression. The communist insurgency in the Philippines has lost its ideological edge and it is being treated, to a large extent, as a problem of banditry. And the Philippines, without the U.S. military bases, is no longer a prime military target in any potential global conflict.
Up to 1991, the Philippine Armed Forces used to receive US$200 million in military aid from the U.S. as part of the U.S.' global containment policy. During the Marcos years, the official line item on the defense budget reached more than $300 million in 1986 when Aquino took over. The 1990s might seem unkind to the Philippine military but the defense budget has been increasing, although the increases have had little to do with post-Cold War regional issues such as the Spratlys. In Aquino's time, probably as a result of the more than half a dozen abortive coups, the annual defense budget rose spectacularly, to a threefold high of $1 billion by 1992, when Fidel Ramos took his turn at the helm. Since then, the annual budget has increased by about 15 percent. Note, however, that more than $1 billion is less than 2 percent of the Philippines' GDP, compared with 5.5 percent of GDP for Singapore's defense budget, or 2.7 percent for Thailand, for example.
Since the 1990s, the Philippine armed forces has therefore been trying to redefine its role and by experimenting with an assortment of non-traditional social development activities, including disaster relief and environmental protection. As an example of the latter, soldiers have been assigned to protect 8,000 hectares of virgin forest adjacent to the former naval base in Subic Bay and to guard watershed areas in Lake Lanao, a major resource of hydroelectric power for the southern island of Mindanao. The armed forces is also engaged in tree-planting programs, and there are plans to use military helicopters to protect forest lands from illegal loggers, whose activities deplete the forest cover, erode the soil, and create floods and drought. These activities result in desirable and even calculable benefits to society and, at the very least, make for excellent public relations by placing the military on the side of the underdog. Unfortunately, such non-traditional activities have not provided sufficient urgency to justify substantial increases in the budget of the armed forces.
An incident in February this year changed this picture. This was the "sighting" of Chinese naval vessels, followed by the "discovery" of an assortment of Chinese installations, such as guard posts and communication facilities, already well in place, on one of the scattered islands in the Spratlys area. The island is appropriately named "Mischief Reef", which the Philippines calls "Panganiban Reef" and which it claims as part of its territory.
The Mischief Reef incident at one point received daily media coverage and television crews competed with one another to broadcast from, or as close as possible to, Mischief Reef. President Ramos himself went on television to tell the nation that his government regarded the intrusion as a serious matter involving national security.
The Spratlys incident coincided with a another discussion in the Philippine legislature of long-standing proposals to spend an additional 50 billion pesos (about $2 billion) over a five-year period to upgrade the nation's armed forces. For example, the current stock of a dozen aging F-5s can hardly compare with the announced purchases of MiG-29s by Malaysia and a further tranche of F-16s by Singapore. The expenditure would be over and above the current line item on defense and, therefore, required legislative approval. The armed forces got its budget increase in mid-February. One congressman, Joker P Arroyo, went on television to speculate that the entire affair was merely a campaign to ensure passage of the bill. However, one of its chief proponents, Senator Ernesto Meceda, in voting for its approval, indicated that the bill was not a "knee-jerk" reaction to the Spratlys crisis. The Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Roberto Romulo, went public to state that the issue was being resolved through "quiet diplomacy and amicable discussions" with the Chinese. In any event, Philippine national security no longer appears to be at stake and the issue is no longer in the public eye. The Chinese naval vessels may or may not still be in Philippine waters but the installations, which were present long before they were "discovered", are still on Mischief Reef.
Where does that leave the Spratlys, at least in so far as defense implications for the Philippines are concerned? Probably nowhere. Hand in hand with the increase in the military's budget came statements from the Secretary of Defense, Gen. Renato de Villa, that the Philippines will focus on peaceful resolution of the Spratlys problem and that any military response will be a last resort, defensive measure. It seems unlikely that Mischief Reef is going to be significantly reinforced by a Philippine contingent in the near future, although naval and air reconnaissance will undoubtedly continue.
The increases in the Philippine defense budget, however, carries other implications unrelated to the Spratlys. For one, the Philippine military has been concerned over the law and order situation in the south, where regional autonomy for the Moslems is a long-festering issue; the issue is exacerbated by the growth of two Moslem groups, the Moro National Liberation Front, and the larger Moro Islamic Liberation Front, both of which maintain men- at-arms. For another, the armed forces still has strong proponents among its generals and colonels for the military's non-traditional activities in social development; the National Security Council, for example, defines intelligence and defense as tools for achieving broad-based, socio-economic goals of equity, social justice and poverty alleviation.
Furthermore, from a purely economic perspective, illegal tuna fish catchers, for instance, deprive the Philippines of an estimated $1 billion in revenues, which the Philippine Navy's 50- odd patrol, support and transport vessels can do little to impede. So, the enhanced military budget might find immediate uses other than that of resolving the dispute over the Spratlys.
Dr. Francisco L Roman, Jr is Director of the Manila-based Asian Institute of Management's Policy Forum.