Department of National Defense (DND) Secretary Gilberto “Gibo” C. Teodoro has called on the private sector to devise “creative financing solutions” to help in funding the modernization of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) amid global geopolitical problems.
In his speech before the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) general meeting on Wednesday, July 10, Teodoro emphasized the need to seek off-budget, non-traditional financing sources for modernization, avoiding the old BCDA (Bases Conversion and Development Authority) model that involved trading land for modernization.
“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,” said the DND chief.
Teodoro discussed the importance of securing resources to bolster the nation’s defense amid "geopolitical problems worldwide," such as the conflicts in Ukraine, the Red Sea, and the West Philippine Sea tensions, which “have affected the business cycles in the Philippines” and “caused some lack of confidence in the geopolitical stability of the region.”
“These are realities that we need to face, we need to address, as a country. Volatility is the only constant in geopolitics and the world will continue to be that way,” he noted.
“The only way we will be able to steel ourselves and to deal with it is to harden our own credible deterrent posture, which we are very busy doing,” he went on.
Under the new Comprehensive Archipelagic Defense Concept, he said, the Philippines “will project our defensive capabilities to secure not only the land base of the Philippines but its exclusive economic zone 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 exclusive economic zone (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,” said Teodoro.
Meanwhile, the Defense chief dismissed speculations implying that the rise in AFP's bilateral and multilateral training activities was geared towards war preparations or provoking conflict.
“No, that is not true. That is scaring our people. The truth is the Armed Forces of the Philippines has never trained to the level that it should train,” he said.
“It has never used or tested the equipment that it has bought in the level that will make you determine whether what you bought is effective for you or not.”
Teodoro underscored 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 amidst 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 stated.