No amount of money can improve our own security

FOR the current fiscal year, it was announced that our Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) would be getting a huge slice of our national budget to the tune of P40 billion for its “programmed appropriations,” a huge leap from the P27.5 billion allocation for the same budget item last year.

The “programmed appropriations” refer to those arms and military hardware whose contracts have been signed with our “allies,” mainly with our Hegemon, US Imperialism.

Never mind that we would again be getting ‘American junks,’ but hey, these junks are balm for the pride of our military generals and other national leaders who remain committed to the false belief that getting ‘hands-me-down’ military equipment would be enough for us to fight off the more advance armies in our region—and never mind China.

If we come to think about it, everything is wrong about our national security strategy of relying on our former oppressors-turned-allies, like the US and Japan, and including other US’ Western stooges, to help us when the going gets really tough or when our ‘Sinophobic baiting’ actually turns into a shooting war.

As the ongoing war in Ukraine also informed us—although we refuse to admit to it because of our national colonial mindset—turning over that gargantuan amount of P40 billion to the Western military industrial complex (MICs) in exchange for even their most modern weaponry is an exercise in stupidity.

For against a peer adversary like Russia, the rest of the world—except us Filipinos—have realized that the West’ much hyped military hardware—tanks, missiles, artillery, AFVs, the whole gamut of them– are no match against those of Russia. Or as President Putin puts it, “they burn beautifully.”

This brings us to the serious question of how do we go about spending all the billions being given by Congress each year to our AFP when, under modern warfare environment, the items we would be acquiring would only end up “burning beautifully?”

And why has it never occurred to any of our leaders that the only guarantee we can have for our own national security is the strategy of national self-reliance and independent economic development guided by an independent foreign and domestic policy?

Indeed, it would have been better if, instead of “subsidizing” the MICs of Western powers by purchasing from them weapons that have been proven worthless in the modern battlefield, we pour our scant resources into building up our industrial capacity.

For P40 billion, we are sure that we can put up a modern steel plant and truly modernize our own shipbuilding industry and our local arms industry, among others, possibly in two years’ time.

The ‘spillover effect’ of course would be the thousands of jobs this option can bring thereby minimizing our economic woes. And yes, we have the natural and human resources to make everything happen.

Unless we remove the fetters from our eyes that make us continuously beholden to US Imperialism and as pawns for its hegemonic designs that always result to wars and armed conflicts, no amount of expenditure can improve our national security situation.