AFP mulls Japan model for new military command

Metro Manila, Philippines - The Philippines is looking at Japan as one of its models for a new military command that Manila hopes to make operational later this year, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) said on Wednesday, April 30.

The new AFP Strategic Command will govern the country’s joint military exercises with its allies as Manila beefs up its defences against “external threats.”

The announcement comes midway through the annual Balikatan exercises between the US and the Philippines that saw Filipino and American forces test-firing new air missile interceptors or MADIS in the West Philippine Sea, and deploying ship killer NMESIS weapon systems for the first time in Batanes, a Philippine island closest to Taiwan.

“We need… to address some crucial gaps in command and control,” Balikatan spokesperson and exercise director Brigadier General Michael Logico told a press briefing on Wednesday night in Camp Aguinaldo.

“And these are things that have led to the decision to organize or start up a command with a unique mission that will directly deal with external threats instead of the defense of the archipelago piecemeal,” he pointed out.

The AFP will not start from scratch, as it reviews the Japanese Joint Operation Command (JOC), which was just established last March at a time when Washington announced that it is reorganizing the US Forces Japan into a warfighting headquarters.

“The overarching premise is we do not reinvent the wheel… Yung Japan nakita natin na maganda (we saw that it was good) so we will also take that as a model,” AFP Spokesperson Col. Francel Margareth Padilla told reporters on the sidelines of an event at Camp Aguinaldo, while noting that other nations’ military command structures will also be factored in.

But at least one analyst said that if the Philippines is doing it the Japanese way – especially as the JOC is being placed under the command structure of the US Indo-Pacific Command – the AFP’s new military command could be a step towards deterring a China-Taiwan contingency.

AFP Chief General Romeo Brawner, Jr. earlier called on troops of the Northern Luzon Command to prepare for a Taiwan invasion contingency.

Over the weekend, American troops have rehearsed how its anti-ship missile NMESIS could deter hostile naval forces from the coastlines of Batanes, the northern tip of Luzon facing Taiwan.

Lt. General Michael Cederholm, the commanding general of the US Marine Expeditionary Force, said the US Marines’ second expeditionary force in Lejeune, North Carolina and the third expeditionary force in Okinawa, Japan, will be getting the NMESIS missile systems too.

“So we are placing these missiles with our formation,” Cederholm told a press briefing.

Asked on whether those missile systems and other defense assets will stay in Luzon after Balikatan, he said: “Where our formations go, where we are ordered to go, we will take those capabilities, great capabilities with us.”