The prize causing military quarrels

From 1987 to 2007, the Philippines experienced periodic bouts of military adventurism abetted by the armed forces having formed part of the trinity of institutions—the military, the clergy, and civil society—that toppled the sclerotic and senile Marcos dictatorship in 1986. Three factors served to eventually wean the armed forces away from the dangerous delusion that it could govern better than civilian politicians. The first two were presidential stratagems that appealed to the cupidity and careerism of the officer corps: Military pensions were (and remain) lavishly and uniquely based on current salaries, guaranteeing constant raises for the retired; presidents resorted to a revolving-door policy concerning promotions to the top brass position of chief of staff, which accommodates the ambitions of more and not fewer classes of the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) from whose ranks most officers have sprung; and the Filipino people themselves, as a pragmatic electorate, has rewarded military adventurism with elected office, on the simple yet effective Peter Principle of promotions (raising ex-officers to their own level of civilian incompetence by making them senators: In its centennial year, the Senate had three senators who were ex-military rebels or participated in actual regime change).

There may be a fourth, often unheralded factor, all the more remarkable because accomplished under the watch of a former general: the abolition of the old Philippine Constabulary by President Fidel V. Ramos in 1991, despite his career in the Constabulary (or perhaps, because of it; the Constabulary was long considered the most corrupt service in the armed forces, not least because it originated, and served as, a branch of the military focused on the suppression of domestic challenges to the government’s authority). Even as it remained fabulously corrupt and highly incompetent, the police, now turned into a nominally civilian institution (dominated, however, by ex-military who chose to remain in the police even after it was civilianized), branched off on its own institutional, evolutionary path, tied root and branch to domestic political concerns while the armed forces increasingly focused on transnational threats such as terrorism and territorial defense.

If Ramos brokered breathing—and growing—room for the country’s newly restored democracy, through adroit peace negotiations with communist, Muslim, and military rebels, then Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, herself brought to power in a bout of people power in 2001, dexterously divided all three mandate-conferring institutions (the military, clergy, and civil society) so they could never again combine to achieve the toppling of an elected government through street demonstrations and backroom negotiations. Future historians might eventually date to her administration, a trend that bore fruit in the Duterte administration, which was the remilitarization of the police, something the police finally achieved with the restoration of military-style ranks, returning the prestige they keenly felt they’d lost when the Philippine National Police adopted police-style ranks. This underscores the quiet expectation of presidents from Arroyo to Duterte: that in times of doubtful military loyalty, the police could be groomed to somehow represent a blocking force to counter putschists.

If President Marcos Jr. is the first chief executive in a generation to boast some sort of military experience (which bears some qualification: it was as a junior commissioned officer in the Philippine Constabulary, which, combined with some supposed training by the SAS to place him in the ranks of the hawks during his father’s final crisis in 1986), his ties to the post-Marcos military seem slender at best. The President himself was “adopted” as many national politicians are, by the Philippine Military Academy’s Class of 1979. But the current generation of senior generals in the armed forces (which has a relatively young mandated retirement age of 56) are the PMA classes of 1988 and 1989.

Indeed, Mr. Marcos belongs to a curious subset of post-Marcos presidents: scions who achieved the highest office without the wide and deep network one would expect a successful presidential candidate to have and which was a feature of the presidencies of Ramos and Arroyo. Instead, like Benigno S. Aquino III and Duterte, the Junior Marcos seems to have a very small circle of political and social intimates, perhaps understandably so (as in the case of both the Aquino and Marcos scions, both lived through extended periods of political and social ostracism aimed at their families; Duterte as a provincial baron neither had a need for nor sought, a wider network, until unexpectedly catapulted to power in 2016).

Two decades of military adventurism primed all three to be wary of the military and to continue, in their own way, the all-carrot approach to pacifying the officer corps. Perhaps the freest and least apologetic about this was Duterte with his repeated forays into military camps to demonstrate liberality toward both officers and enlisted men; after his alliance with the Left was broken, he gave carte blanche to the military to go after communist rebels in a manner reminiscent of the way he actively encouraged the police to engage in drug-war-justified liquidations. The armed forces and diplomatic service also managed to convince Duterte to dial back some of his pro-Beijing rhetoric and save much of the country’s security relationship with Washington.

On May 16, 2022, a little over a month before his term ended, Duterte signed a bill into law instituting a fixed term for the position of armed forces chief of staff. A similar measure had been vetoed by Aquino back in 2011 on the basis of two objections: first, that the Philippine Constitution (responding to Ferdinand Marcos’ repeated deferment of the retirement of favored officers) disallowed the extension of service, and that the position is one that requires the full confidence of the chief executive. It was an apple of discord masquerading as a reform law (for the Greeks, “the phrase ‘apple of discord’ to refer to a much-desired object or person by two different people, which may result in a quarrel between them”).

At the time that Duterte signed the bill into law, then Secretary of National Defense Delfin Lorenzana pointed out it would reduce the number of generals from 196 to 153. This was alarming because this provision in itself has the potential to be a grudge-inducing poisoned pill. Aquino, in his veto message, suggested another problematic provision of the proposed law: presidents could fire chiefs of staff but only after they reached the compulsory retirement age: viewed from a different perspective, what the chief of staff term limit thus provides for is an extension in service. But where one is extended, everyone else, in turn, is denied a promotion. Bad enough there will be fewer general officers; fewer still, will have a chance at the top job while one, every three years, will have an outsized career advantage over his contemporaries. The only question now is if the President will brazen it out, or discreetly try to pacify all classes, while Congress figures out how to revoke the law while saving face.

Email: [email protected]; Twitter: @mlq3