Title: Soldiers Contend With Stalled Promise Of Afp Moder
Description: AFP
Description: AFP
Jack Bauer - August 28, 2008 02:38 AM (GMT)
Soldiers contend with stalled promise of AFP modernization
Written by Criselda Yabes
Wednesday, 27 August 2008
ImageOver P40 billion is needed to bring the military back to a decent standard of capability.
The Army camp of the 66th Infantry Battalion was a scene of near squalor tucked away in a hillside hamlet in the town of Malapatan in Sarangani province. The roads were muddied and giving no directions as to where you might be. The motor pool stood lopsided. The tarpaulin for the soldiers’ gathering place was tattered. If it weren’t for the presence of a howitzer, there seemed to be little chance that this camp could defend an entire province.
There is a comfort zone, though—the mess hall where the cable TV is on (any Tom Hanks movie will make soldiers happy) and the air smelling of frying fish. Lt. Col. Manuel Sequitin, who was soon going to be commander of this battalion, was having his late lunch, eating with his bare hands, as he talked about the conditions that he himself has to make the best out of and his plans of improving them when he takes over.
He felt a sense of accomplishment when he fixed the ceiling of his sleeping quarters with a laminated sack. The walls of the washrooms are made of linoleum, something that should count as luxury even when there is no running water.
Despite what it looks on the outside, this battalion has scored well under its division’s anti-insurgency operations; it has produced successes against rebels.
Barely equipped
“Look at them,” said Sequitin, motioning toward a queue of soldiers, standing under the shade of a tree in their camouflage trousers and boots, waiting for their turn for a crew cut. “If you ask them to fight, they will do it. They will whine a little, but they will follow.”
When they have to go into the jungle chasing after rebels, they are barely equipped. They have to rent a World War II vintage carrier called “Saddam,” an ugly version of a Humvee that villagers use to transport their harvest of rice from the upland. In this vehicle, they have to cross a river 19 times, bringing with them radio and some supplies that would make up their tactical command post. They keep their water in a gallon of jerry can and each soldier carries his own in a 1.5 liter recycled Coke bottle, which they cover in a black sock, stashed in their combat pack.
“My dream,” said Sequitin, “is to see my soldiers in full formation in their best uniform with a camel back of 3.5 liters of water, a bandolier for the magazines, and a combat pack with frame. It’s a simple dream, but I’m sure they would feel they are the best.”
Every military camp in every province across the country has its own characteristics, depending mainly on how organized the commander runs it and the discipline he imposes on his men and the extra resources he could obtain to make the camp a decent place to live in. (The brigade camp in Sarangani, for example, is the ultimate model of having an operations center complete with maps and laptops, quarters and bathrooms that are clean.)
Start from scratch
But there is a common picture depicting the state of the Philippine military in the field, a stark impression that time has been standing still since the 1980s, when it was at its height of fighting a growing communist insurgency; and here it is now facing still a running insurgency on two fronts and threats of terrorism under a dismal environment of neglect.
Sequitin’s classmate in the Marines, Lt. Col. Leonard Teodoro, recalls how the battalion camp he occupied in Basilan province was exactly the same as when he first saw it as a lieutenant. He changed the basic structures, forming a ring road for easy access and obtaining a constant supply of water and power.
Other commanders think that to survive with what little they have, they have to go back to the basics. What makes this important, they say, is giving the soldiers a backbone to their mission, a boost to the morale when, as it is, they live on a daily meal budget of P90 pesos and have been using the same weapons, vehicles, and communication equipment that were standards issues of the U.S. military from the Vietnam War.
And as though it would have to start from scratch, the battalions—which form the line troops of fighters—were given priority in upgrading under a comprehensive multi-year Defense Reform Program. The PDR calls for the armed forces to move out of its outmoded familiarities, from when it was spoiled and pampered under a dictatorship, to the current reality of trailing behind its counterparts in Southeast Asia. Changing the poor state of the battalions in the field is the first order of priority before the armed forces could even think of embarking on modernization.
P210 B in three phases
The first six years of the Capability Upgrade Program under the reforms look into the basics of “move, shoot, communicate” for the battalions—acquiring helicopters, trucks, patrol boats, rifles, and radios with P30 billion that the program hopes to earmark.
The second phase, or the next six years, is intended to gear up for a transition into the first level of modernization with a budget of P60 billion pesos. The third phase is being considered as the beginning of “real modernization” with a larger fund of P120 billion.
The central component to all this, before a bigger goal is set on the table, starts from upgrading the battalions in what the program dubbed as “Battalion of Excellence.” Under this, 12 Army battalions and 2 Marine battalions will be trained initially—or the equivalent of 72 Army battalions and 12 Marine battalions over a period of six years starting in 2006. Training four Army battalions and one Marine battalion would cost P12 million and P4 million, respectively.
Unlike the Marines, which had a practice of literally pulling out an entire battalion from the field to put them on training for about six months, the Army has had to do it only by individuals or teams, thus losing the momentum of maintaining rigid standards. After a training period, “ideally the equipment will follow,” said Lt. Col. Teodoro, who was one of the mid-level officers involved in early stages of brainstorming for the reform program. “When you re-train a battalion you have to refurbish the unit with equipment, weapons, ordinance, supplies.”
Just a shopping list
“What the U.S. had in the 1960s, we had it here, everything was relatively new to us. They moved on and we didn’t. When they see us with the old jeeps and rifles, they wonder how we do it. We rebuild our tanks using our own ingenuity even without the basic spare parts. Our Navy’s LST (Landing Ship Tank) is from World War II. We decommission ships not because we have used its life span; we maintain it until we have outlived it to its last breath. Our Huey choppers are from the 1960s and Sikorsky from the ’70s and ’80s; they have a lifespan of 12 years supposedly.
“Our weapons are the old M-16s. Upgrading them to M-16A3s would be modest enough—same rifle but heavier barrel. Our radios should be the Harris encrypted military brand, not the Motoralas civilian use. And what about shelter? We don’t even have tents! The Marines build their kubo (nipa hut) on the spot. Before, the engineering battalions built our shelter, now we do it on our own using our mobility and operational expenses or what we have invented as ‘huts-ments.’
“If the battalions can’t be mission-capable, how much more the bigger units? Luckily we have had no external threats and that made us take things for granted,” he said.
It all goes back to the question of how the much touted modernization program—the buzz word in the armed forces in the mid-1990s when the insurgency was waning and it could finally put together a shopping list of new boats and choppers and decent radios and night vision goggles—has remained just a shopping list.
1992 standards
The program was hoping to get a share of the profits from the Bases Conversion Development Authority that oversaw that sale of huge tracts of the sprawling Fort Bonifacio at a whooping P30,000 per square kilometer, only to see the money used to shore up a flagging economy and all it got was spare change.
The armed forces was about to get, in late 1999, a windfall of P22 billion from the sale, out of which 35 percent was to be allocated for the modernization program. However, after some land disputes and bureaucracy at the treasury, that amount was whittled down to P5.2 billion in mid-2003, with an extra P251 million for the purchase of new squad automatic weapons.
It did not foresee the raw end of the deal. Fort Bonifacio was hectares of prime land housing the headquarters of the Philippine Army, now known as the upscale Global City of plush shops and condominiums. The government had sought to sell the land for a profitable enterprise instead of using it as a training ground when the Army could very well do that in Fort Magsaysay in Nueva Ecija province.
The list of new material the armed forces needs now is estimated at over P40 billion just to bring the military back to its standard of capability in 1992, before things went spiraling down. From that level, it hopes to start anew with an upgrading program harnessing on its capabilities rather than being driven by threats (where the impulse is to be overwhelmed by the need of having the state-of-the- art equipment when it has meager budget to buy them in the first place), according to Rodel Cruz, who was undersecretary of national defense when the program for reforms was in the making.
No missile-capable ships
“A threat-based planning is skewed,” he said. “The problem is the economy won’t grow without a stable security situation.” Security primarily starts from improving the lot of the men on the ground, thus upgrading their capability, which is more likely to work in incremental stages. The end goal is modernizing the army in its true sense.
As of June this year, several contracts had been approved for the standard needs of the military: automatic weapons, troop carrier, watercraft, armored personnel carrier, radio and communication system, night fighting system, combat helicopter, basic trainer aircraft, sniper rifle, Global Positioning System, Islander aircraft for the Navy, grenade launchers, mapping aerial cameras, and such.
This list also shows the country’s inadequacy in defending its territory from external threats. It does not, for basic defense requirement, have missile-capable ships which neighbors like Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia have. To acquire them would mean a pole vault for the Philippine armed forces.
The law has so far appropriated P10 billion pesos for modernization from a trust fund, according to Defense Undersecretary Ernesto Carolina. But the road to modernization could again be hampered by a new procurement law signed by Congress two years ago, a law that some say puts the defense department at equal basis with other agencies where “buying a paper clip is the same as buying an armored personnel carrier.”
Bottomline: Money
Carolina explained how the procurement law imposes on regular spending when in fact modernization requires long-term planning coupled with a tedious bidding process for contractors, mostly from overseas defense manufacturers.
The weakness of the law, he said, limits the defense from entering into multi-year contracts, as is usually the case. “It’s like shopping in the open market,” he said, “you have to show them you have the money.” Therefore, the trust fund for modernization will have to be continually increased and replenished as proof of confidence in any purchasing deal of major hardware, especially that of planes and ships that tend to take a longer process in terms of costing priorities.
Rear Admiral Emilio Marayag, commander of the Naval Forces in Mindanao where majority of the forces are deployed, says the military has been concentrating on ground operations, which constitute a heavy portion of the budget. If the military were to do “right-sizing,” such as reducing recruitment and streamlining the units, there could be more share of the modernization pie for the Air Force and Navy craft.
“The bottom line is money,” he said. “We could do more with it. For now we tend to be more reactive to immediate problems. We cannot aim for the moon and the stars.”
Written by Criselda Yabes
Wednesday, 27 August 2008
ImageOver P40 billion is needed to bring the military back to a decent standard of capability.
The Army camp of the 66th Infantry Battalion was a scene of near squalor tucked away in a hillside hamlet in the town of Malapatan in Sarangani province. The roads were muddied and giving no directions as to where you might be. The motor pool stood lopsided. The tarpaulin for the soldiers’ gathering place was tattered. If it weren’t for the presence of a howitzer, there seemed to be little chance that this camp could defend an entire province.
There is a comfort zone, though—the mess hall where the cable TV is on (any Tom Hanks movie will make soldiers happy) and the air smelling of frying fish. Lt. Col. Manuel Sequitin, who was soon going to be commander of this battalion, was having his late lunch, eating with his bare hands, as he talked about the conditions that he himself has to make the best out of and his plans of improving them when he takes over.
He felt a sense of accomplishment when he fixed the ceiling of his sleeping quarters with a laminated sack. The walls of the washrooms are made of linoleum, something that should count as luxury even when there is no running water.
Despite what it looks on the outside, this battalion has scored well under its division’s anti-insurgency operations; it has produced successes against rebels.
Barely equipped
“Look at them,” said Sequitin, motioning toward a queue of soldiers, standing under the shade of a tree in their camouflage trousers and boots, waiting for their turn for a crew cut. “If you ask them to fight, they will do it. They will whine a little, but they will follow.”
When they have to go into the jungle chasing after rebels, they are barely equipped. They have to rent a World War II vintage carrier called “Saddam,” an ugly version of a Humvee that villagers use to transport their harvest of rice from the upland. In this vehicle, they have to cross a river 19 times, bringing with them radio and some supplies that would make up their tactical command post. They keep their water in a gallon of jerry can and each soldier carries his own in a 1.5 liter recycled Coke bottle, which they cover in a black sock, stashed in their combat pack.
“My dream,” said Sequitin, “is to see my soldiers in full formation in their best uniform with a camel back of 3.5 liters of water, a bandolier for the magazines, and a combat pack with frame. It’s a simple dream, but I’m sure they would feel they are the best.”
Every military camp in every province across the country has its own characteristics, depending mainly on how organized the commander runs it and the discipline he imposes on his men and the extra resources he could obtain to make the camp a decent place to live in. (The brigade camp in Sarangani, for example, is the ultimate model of having an operations center complete with maps and laptops, quarters and bathrooms that are clean.)
Start from scratch
But there is a common picture depicting the state of the Philippine military in the field, a stark impression that time has been standing still since the 1980s, when it was at its height of fighting a growing communist insurgency; and here it is now facing still a running insurgency on two fronts and threats of terrorism under a dismal environment of neglect.
Sequitin’s classmate in the Marines, Lt. Col. Leonard Teodoro, recalls how the battalion camp he occupied in Basilan province was exactly the same as when he first saw it as a lieutenant. He changed the basic structures, forming a ring road for easy access and obtaining a constant supply of water and power.
Other commanders think that to survive with what little they have, they have to go back to the basics. What makes this important, they say, is giving the soldiers a backbone to their mission, a boost to the morale when, as it is, they live on a daily meal budget of P90 pesos and have been using the same weapons, vehicles, and communication equipment that were standards issues of the U.S. military from the Vietnam War.
And as though it would have to start from scratch, the battalions—which form the line troops of fighters—were given priority in upgrading under a comprehensive multi-year Defense Reform Program. The PDR calls for the armed forces to move out of its outmoded familiarities, from when it was spoiled and pampered under a dictatorship, to the current reality of trailing behind its counterparts in Southeast Asia. Changing the poor state of the battalions in the field is the first order of priority before the armed forces could even think of embarking on modernization.
P210 B in three phases
The first six years of the Capability Upgrade Program under the reforms look into the basics of “move, shoot, communicate” for the battalions—acquiring helicopters, trucks, patrol boats, rifles, and radios with P30 billion that the program hopes to earmark.
The second phase, or the next six years, is intended to gear up for a transition into the first level of modernization with a budget of P60 billion pesos. The third phase is being considered as the beginning of “real modernization” with a larger fund of P120 billion.
The central component to all this, before a bigger goal is set on the table, starts from upgrading the battalions in what the program dubbed as “Battalion of Excellence.” Under this, 12 Army battalions and 2 Marine battalions will be trained initially—or the equivalent of 72 Army battalions and 12 Marine battalions over a period of six years starting in 2006. Training four Army battalions and one Marine battalion would cost P12 million and P4 million, respectively.
Unlike the Marines, which had a practice of literally pulling out an entire battalion from the field to put them on training for about six months, the Army has had to do it only by individuals or teams, thus losing the momentum of maintaining rigid standards. After a training period, “ideally the equipment will follow,” said Lt. Col. Teodoro, who was one of the mid-level officers involved in early stages of brainstorming for the reform program. “When you re-train a battalion you have to refurbish the unit with equipment, weapons, ordinance, supplies.”
Just a shopping list
“What the U.S. had in the 1960s, we had it here, everything was relatively new to us. They moved on and we didn’t. When they see us with the old jeeps and rifles, they wonder how we do it. We rebuild our tanks using our own ingenuity even without the basic spare parts. Our Navy’s LST (Landing Ship Tank) is from World War II. We decommission ships not because we have used its life span; we maintain it until we have outlived it to its last breath. Our Huey choppers are from the 1960s and Sikorsky from the ’70s and ’80s; they have a lifespan of 12 years supposedly.
“Our weapons are the old M-16s. Upgrading them to M-16A3s would be modest enough—same rifle but heavier barrel. Our radios should be the Harris encrypted military brand, not the Motoralas civilian use. And what about shelter? We don’t even have tents! The Marines build their kubo (nipa hut) on the spot. Before, the engineering battalions built our shelter, now we do it on our own using our mobility and operational expenses or what we have invented as ‘huts-ments.’
“If the battalions can’t be mission-capable, how much more the bigger units? Luckily we have had no external threats and that made us take things for granted,” he said.
It all goes back to the question of how the much touted modernization program—the buzz word in the armed forces in the mid-1990s when the insurgency was waning and it could finally put together a shopping list of new boats and choppers and decent radios and night vision goggles—has remained just a shopping list.
1992 standards
The program was hoping to get a share of the profits from the Bases Conversion Development Authority that oversaw that sale of huge tracts of the sprawling Fort Bonifacio at a whooping P30,000 per square kilometer, only to see the money used to shore up a flagging economy and all it got was spare change.
The armed forces was about to get, in late 1999, a windfall of P22 billion from the sale, out of which 35 percent was to be allocated for the modernization program. However, after some land disputes and bureaucracy at the treasury, that amount was whittled down to P5.2 billion in mid-2003, with an extra P251 million for the purchase of new squad automatic weapons.
It did not foresee the raw end of the deal. Fort Bonifacio was hectares of prime land housing the headquarters of the Philippine Army, now known as the upscale Global City of plush shops and condominiums. The government had sought to sell the land for a profitable enterprise instead of using it as a training ground when the Army could very well do that in Fort Magsaysay in Nueva Ecija province.
The list of new material the armed forces needs now is estimated at over P40 billion just to bring the military back to its standard of capability in 1992, before things went spiraling down. From that level, it hopes to start anew with an upgrading program harnessing on its capabilities rather than being driven by threats (where the impulse is to be overwhelmed by the need of having the state-of-the- art equipment when it has meager budget to buy them in the first place), according to Rodel Cruz, who was undersecretary of national defense when the program for reforms was in the making.
No missile-capable ships
“A threat-based planning is skewed,” he said. “The problem is the economy won’t grow without a stable security situation.” Security primarily starts from improving the lot of the men on the ground, thus upgrading their capability, which is more likely to work in incremental stages. The end goal is modernizing the army in its true sense.
As of June this year, several contracts had been approved for the standard needs of the military: automatic weapons, troop carrier, watercraft, armored personnel carrier, radio and communication system, night fighting system, combat helicopter, basic trainer aircraft, sniper rifle, Global Positioning System, Islander aircraft for the Navy, grenade launchers, mapping aerial cameras, and such.
This list also shows the country’s inadequacy in defending its territory from external threats. It does not, for basic defense requirement, have missile-capable ships which neighbors like Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia have. To acquire them would mean a pole vault for the Philippine armed forces.
The law has so far appropriated P10 billion pesos for modernization from a trust fund, according to Defense Undersecretary Ernesto Carolina. But the road to modernization could again be hampered by a new procurement law signed by Congress two years ago, a law that some say puts the defense department at equal basis with other agencies where “buying a paper clip is the same as buying an armored personnel carrier.”
Bottomline: Money
Carolina explained how the procurement law imposes on regular spending when in fact modernization requires long-term planning coupled with a tedious bidding process for contractors, mostly from overseas defense manufacturers.
The weakness of the law, he said, limits the defense from entering into multi-year contracts, as is usually the case. “It’s like shopping in the open market,” he said, “you have to show them you have the money.” Therefore, the trust fund for modernization will have to be continually increased and replenished as proof of confidence in any purchasing deal of major hardware, especially that of planes and ships that tend to take a longer process in terms of costing priorities.
Rear Admiral Emilio Marayag, commander of the Naval Forces in Mindanao where majority of the forces are deployed, says the military has been concentrating on ground operations, which constitute a heavy portion of the budget. If the military were to do “right-sizing,” such as reducing recruitment and streamlining the units, there could be more share of the modernization pie for the Air Force and Navy craft.
“The bottom line is money,” he said. “We could do more with it. For now we tend to be more reactive to immediate problems. We cannot aim for the moon and the stars.”