Teodoro asks business leaders: Help finance AFP upgrade

Department of National Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro—Senate PRIB

Defense Secretary Gilberto “Gibo” Teodoro Jr. has sought the help of business leaders in crafting “creative financing solutions” to ease the financial burden on the government in implementing the military’s modernization program.

Speaking before members of the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) in Taguig City on Wednesday, Teodoro highlighted the significant resources needed to fund the continuing modernization of the Armed Forces of the Philippines that must be balanced with the government’s mandate to spend for infrastructure, social services, education, and many other priorities.

“We need to find off-budget, nontraditional financing sources for modernization but not [based] on the model of the old BCDA (Bases Conversion and Development Authority), where land was traded for modernization,” he said.

READ: Zubiri: Modernizing AFP, Coast Guard ‘imperative’ amid tension on WPS

“Therefore, I ask your help for creative financing for us where we can spread out the terms of whatever financial arrangements we can make to limit the size of amortizations that the national government will make to make it more palatable,” he noted.

P2-trillion cost

President Marcos already approved an updated acquisition plan for the Re-Horizon 3, the last stage in the modernization program of the AFP, which is expected to cost about P2 trillion.

READ: Marcos OKs military’s P2-trillion wish list for weapons, equipment

A list of equipment under the updated acquisition plan was not readily available but multirole fighters, radars, frigates, missile systems, and rescue helicopters were included in the original Horizon 3.

According to Teodoro, the Re-Horizon 3 was anchored on a “comprehensive archipelagic defense concept” to allow the Philippines “to project power into areas where we must, by constitutional fiat and duty, protect and preserve our resources.”

During his visit to Batanes in February this year, Teodoro said the operational tempo for the AFP would be “higher” in the face of growing maritime tensions between Manila and Beijing in the South China Sea.

But on Wednesday, he dismissed “malicious insinuations” that the increase in the tempo of the AFP’s bilateral and multilateral training with other allied countries was a preparation for war or provoking conflict.

“No, that is not true. That is scaring our people,” he said.

Regional instability

The defense chief emphasized the need to build up the country’s defense posture in the face of “geopolitical problems worldwide,” including the heightening tension in the West Philippine Sea that has “affected the business cycles in the Philippines” and “caused some lack of confidence in the geopolitical stability of the region.”

He told the executives that the military has implemented the new Comprehensive Archipelagic Defense Concept, which would “project our defensive capabilities to secure not only the land base of the Philippines but its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) and other areas where we have jurisdiction.”

“We will project our strategic basing outwards to the baselines, which [are] the foundation of the measurement of our [EEZ], and try to protect these as best as we can from intrusion, and from illegal changing of narratives that these belong to anyone else but the Philippines,” he said.

Teodoro also stressed the importance of the support of the private sector in the quest to develop a self-reliant defense posture “in order to deter—in order to prevent—those that would poach or appropriate the resources that rightly belong to future generations of Filipinos, not only us.”

“We will need your support in the future because this is a continuing struggle for our territorial integrity, sovereignty, and sovereign rights amid significant challenges to try not only to make our EEZ and other areas where we have jurisdiction smaller, to constrict it, but also weaken our resolve to stand up and resist attempts to change the narrative of what international law is and what belongs to the Filipinos,” he told the MAP members.