Cossack25A1
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2014
- Messages
- 2,566
- Reaction score
- 2
- Country
- Location
War in Mindanao
By: Jose Antonio A. Custodio
Special to InterAksyon.com
February 17, 2015 2:07 PM
-----
Part 1: How did Estrada's all-out war against the MILF fare?
Following the Battle of Mamasapano, there has been a very loud clamor by many individuals and some sectors for more decisive action to be taken against the secessionists. The manner in which the proposed action to be taken ranges from either limited punitive operations to an outright and more ambitious all out total war against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
The question that should be asked is if the Armed Forces of the Philippines is really up to the task of browbeating the MILF into submission or more ambitiously, eliminating it in an all-out total war effort. How effective is the government’s war-making tool?
A bit of a historical reminder is when the 2000 Abubakar Campaign concluded, it was proclaimed by the Estrada administration that it was a great victory. True enough, the MILF camps had been captured and the losses were high among the rebels.
However, the bulk of the MILF survived the government onslaught as it reverted to guerrilla warfare and a short time later began rebuilding its forces and ironically establishing new camps.
The Philippine military on the other hand was in possession of former MILF territory but it came at a price. With the AFP heavily concentrated at Mindanao and having stripped Luzon and the Visayas for deployment to Southern Command, the NPA took advantage by undertaking ambushes and operations further overstretching the military.
On Rizal Day of the year 2000, Al Qaeda-linked operatives carried out multiple bomb attacks against targets in Metro Manila causing numerous civilian casualties.
The operational levels of aircraft, vehicles, and equipment of the AFP plummeted to alarmingly low levels and the AFP Modernization Plan was eventually reprioritized to internal security operations just to rebuild the numbers of the depleted and worn out equipment of the military.
This would eventually lead to the total abandonment of external security in the years to come to the delight of the Chinese who were increasing their operations at the West Philippine Sea.
Of equally serious concern, the capture of the camps and the battles with the MILF did not leave the military unscathed and it sustained the highest level of casualties since the 1980s and as it turned out, operations against the MILF continued because the rebels did survive everything including the kitchen sink that the AFP threw at them.
The AFP then experienced something that everyone thought had gone away. It experienced the return of dissent - dissent that would lead to open rebellion against President Joseph Estrada in 2001 and mutinies against the Arroyo administration in 2003 and 2006.
The AFP strength
Can the AFP, 15 years after the inconclusive campaign against the MILF in 2000, do any better this time around should there be a resort to military means to deal with the secessionism?
From a manpower standpoint, the AFP today numbers a little over 120,000 men of which 85,000 are in the Philippine Army and 8,500 in the Philippine Marine Corps.
However, such numbers are misleading as there is a cardinal rule that in order to get the combat effectives of any army or ground force, one must divide by at least a third the total number of personnel.
So in the case of the Philippine Army the total number of men serving in the field in an actual combat capacity numbers at a little less than 30,000 scattered all over the Philippines. The rest are in various administrative capacities and frequently are too old to do anything else but stay in the camps and do office work. Now the same goes for the Philippine Marines and less than 50 percent of that force is in the front. So at most, the Philippine military has approximately 35,000 or so men with very few women serving in an actual frontline capacity.
The 148,000-strong Philippine National Police, which is projected to take over the primary responsibility of counterinsurgency should the internal security situation get any better, oftentimes attaches small units of the Special Action Force to the military. The majority of the police force is ill-equipped and not trained to take on rebels especially the heavily armed secessionists and the regular police already have their hands full tackling criminality in the country.
As a force multiplier, there is the Citizens Armed Forces Geographical Units or CAFGU which numbers 60,000, again scattered throughout the country, and whose reliability is spotty to say the least but useful in establishing a presence in areas threatened by rebels. Being indifferently trained and paid makes the reliability of this force suspect and when used in combat or in operations they may cause problems especially in areas concerning human rights.
Furthermore, given the convoluted nature of the situation in many rural areas, there is always that clear possibility that there are CAFGU units that have been compromised by rebel infiltration. Worse, there are cases that these CAFGU units are not under the supervision of the military but are the private armies of provincial warlords who themselves are the main causes of rebellion in the provinces due to their feudal ways that cause great socio-economic disparities and injustices.
Part 2: How prepared is the military?
In counterinsurgency, the rule of thumb is that the government side must have a very large numerical superiority over the rebels to overcome the latter’s flexibility in evading the military and in staging hit-and-run attacks. Five government soldiers to 1 rebel is considered to be the minimum but the larger the better. Such a large ratio in favor of the government also ensures coverage of territories thus defeating the “fish in water” strategy of the rebels.
If the Battle of Mamasapano is to provide any other lesson to be learned it is that the secessionists do enjoy the support of the community they are in when it comes to combat operations and thus the better trained battalion sized SAF force was routed by the sheer weight of the attack against them.
Estimate of secessionist strength is put at 11,000 for the MILF being the largest armed group as compared to the 500 or so strong Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters and the 300 or so Abu Sayyaf Group. Ironically, the remnants of the Moro National Liberation Front despite a peace agreement with the government still figured in a long drawn-out urban battle against government forces in 2013 and the City of Zamboanga has not fully recovered from it.
However as had been mentioned, these various groups can draw on local community support due to kinship reasons and gain rapid numerical strength during battles with government troops. These groups also sometimes have this habit of working side by side in temporary alliances of convenience when faced with military operations. They can also choose to be flexible and roll with the punches thrown by government force until personnel, materiel, and funding exhaustion affects the military and operations grind to a halt.
And there is also that problem posed by the 3,000 or so strong New People’s Army. The military has also to contend with this rebel formation that opportunistically takes advantage of government concentration in operations against the secessionists.
In short, if the Philippine government goes into large-scale military operations against the MILF and the BIFF, then it has to prepare against all eventualities in other fronts of the internal security situation of the country.
That pits approximately 35,000 up against various rebel formations one-third their number but able to draw on considerable community support thus managing to establish rebel supremacy in certain tactical situations.
Thus it is clear that the Philippine government does not have that decisive numerical advantage that is necessary to establish dominance in the battlefield and it runs the risk of seeing the military and police distracted and tied down by numerous operations conducted against it by Muslim secessionists and even communist rebels.
It is in these situations that the military should enjoy the advantage of possessing crew served equipment and weapons systems that are considered as force multipliers and should give them the flexibility and lethality against mainly foot slogging rebels.
Unfortunately since the above mentioned Abubakar Campaign of 2000, the same systems that saw service then and became quickly worn down by wear and tear are still in service. In the 15th Strike Wing of the Philippine Air Force which is the premier attack unit of that service, the same OV-10 Broncos and MG 520s still shoulder on more than a generation since they were purchased and are desperately in need of replacement.
To add some capability, light training aircraft such as the SF-260 are configured for ground attack roles. The 50-year-old UH-1H still remains the main utility helicopter of the PAF and there are approximately 60 to 70 depending on what open source is consulted but constant use will pare that down to 40 or so due to the advanced age of this type.
Attempts to replace this helicopter with later models have always fallen through due to one reason after another.
Furthermore, aside from combat use, the Huey is also a key asset in Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief which year in and year out happen in the Philippines and such natural calamities also have the habit of exercising their own pull on the military assets of the government.
However, there are the 17,000 men of the Philippine Air Force of whom many appear to be surplus to the needs of the service who can be utilized as a source of additional combat reserves as long as they are properly re-trained.
The Philippine Army’s state of equipment is at least better off than the situation in the PAF. As of now, the PA is in a transition as it is replacing its old M16 rifles with the new M4s which are totally manufactured in the United States.
The PA has approximately 500 armored vehicles of all types of which the bulk come from American military assistance. Majority of these armored vehicles are wheeled lightly armored and armed types like the V-150 Commando of Vietnam War vintage. The most numerous tracked vehicle is the M113 Armored Personnel Carrier also of Vietnam War vintage and although supposedly amphibious it remains to be seen if they still retain that capability in the PA having been in service for so long.
The PA as well as the Philippine Marine Corps rely on towed artillery of 1940s to 1960s technology and are rather slow and cumbersome to deploy as compared to self-propelled types. Interestingly enough, the PA has never seriously invested in Self Propelled Artillery even in the current modernization program.
Hence although the PA has benefited from the focus on internal security that the previous capability enhancement programs had undertaken in the years following Abubakar, it remains to be seen if it can undertake flexible and quick operations and not the slow ponderous campaign it did in the 2000 campaign that although causing large casualties to the MILF when the secessionists chose to fight it out, eventually allowed the bulk of the rebel army to survive when they chose to evade, fall back, disperse, and engage in guerrilla warfare.
Much of the territory in Central Mindanao would confine the armored assets to roads and good ground which would limit their effectiveness in supporting infantry in difficult terrain and marshes. In order to establish a great degree of flexibility, the PA would need the entire fleet of Hueys of the PAF concentrated solely in operations against the secessionists.
The problem is that the UH1H, which had been an army asset in the US Army and thus allowed for quicker infantry and airborne operations due to a single service handling the units, belongs to another service in the Philippine context and thus will require more coordination and probable delays as it will be an inter-service operation. Each delay allows the rebels greater opportunity to escape and survive.
The Philippine Navy will provide transport, fire support, and interdiction to the overall effort against the secessionists in areas where it is needed. However doing this may result in stripping assets away from other high priority areas of which the most important is the West Philippine Sea and the Kalayaan Island Group.
Part 3: What are the internal and external repercussions?
A key consideration here is to determine what is the objective of an all-out war? Is the objective to eliminate the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF)? Or is it to punish the MILF? Can such objectives be met without the risk of degenerating into full-scale conflict given the fact that it is difficult to distinguish the two secessionist groups from each other?
During the 2000 Abubakar Campaign, the objective of the AFP was simply to eject the MILF from the camps that they occupied and this was done during a period stretching from March to July 2000. However as the secessionist army managed to survive the assault, it made the government victory a hollow one as the MILF lived to fight another day.
Thus if the decision to utilize military force is used, the objective has to be determined. Launching retaliatory strikes or occupying camps will not destroy the secessionist’s capacity to resist. Launching an offensive to destroy the secessionist army will not be a quick affair, will drag on for a very extended period of time, will open up new fronts, exhaust ammunition stocks, create wear and tear on military equipment, will require the mobilization of the nation and the requisite political will to sustain it and ironically there is no guarantee of success, but the economic and human costs have already been estimated in studies of such a conflict occurring.
What would be the MILF strategy?
The secessionist strategy against a military offensive is simply to outlast the capacity of the government to conduct the operations.
Although in some areas MILF forces will try to engage the government forces, it is expected that they will eventually resort to guerrilla warfare to evade and tie down the military and launch terrorist operations against soft targets throughout the Philippines, possibly in Metro Manila.
Those terror operations will distract and divert the attention of the government as there will be a public clamor for protection.
Weathering, withstanding, and surviving the assaults of the government will be a victory for the secessionists even if they constantly lose in battles.
A bonus for the secessionists is if they can replicate their battlefield victory at Mamasapano against regular military formations. The longer the campaign drags on, the better the chances that a ceasefire will occur and negotiations will resume.
That is the reality today.
The secessionists realize that the world is different now and is more sympathetic to ethnic self-determination than before and they are taking advantage of it. They also know that the Philippine government will have great difficulty in sustaining operations as it will definitely affect the state of the economy and the stability of the nation, diminish the combat effectiveness of the military, and eventually there will be strong pressure to negotiate again.
All that they need to do is to survive the offensives and appear to be receptive to peace and that together with all the other previously mentioned factors will generate the local and international pressure to declare a ceasefire and to return to the negotiating table.
Internal repercussions
It needs to be emphasized that the internal security situation in the Philippines is composed of two elements: the threat of secession and the lingering communist insurgency.
Paradoxically, although the secessionist threat has the infinitely greater potential of tearing the country apart, there are some who still cling to the notion that the communist threat is the more serious one no matter how moribund and ineffective are their front organizations and how weak the NPA is.
Apparently, old Cold War habits die hard. There are times that these two threats do complement each other as both tie down military and police assets and the NPA takes advantage of government concentration on the secessionists especially when military units deployed against the communist rebels are stripped of personnel to reinforce operations in Mindanao.
Hence the government has to expect increased NPA activity once fighting breaks out against the secessionists.
Communal strife can rear its ugly head and have disastrous repercussions on the human rights situation in Mindanao as armed groups based on ethnic grounds on both sides may undertake indiscriminate reprisals against the innocent.
There is much chatter by some people in social media about the need to revitalize the Ilagas without really carefully thinking what the impact of such an armed group will have on the conflict.
Degeneration into ethnic communal conflict will surely bring in international attention and it will be immaterial if the Bangsamoro Basic Law is constitutional or not as the international community out of humanitarian concerns will impose a political solution that will see a division along ethnic lines to prevent the killings from continuing.
External effects
A general war in Mindanao given today’s situation in the Middle East carries with it the possibility of attracting all sorts of nut heads, lone wolves, and extremists into our shores with the declared intention of waging war against the infidels.
The government has to take into consideration an increased influx of such types into the Philippines and this will severely task the intelligence and security apparatus of the state.
Some will get through and if they manage to carry out their attacks against soft targets in Metro Manila and elsewhere it will add further damage to the social, political, and economic fiber of the country which would already be reeling from the conflict down south.
Lastly, it is to be expected that China will take advantage of our renewed internal focus on protracted operations against the secessionists and other rebels. They will correctly deduce that the internal focus of the Philippine government will derail the efforts to modernize the military and other security and maritime agencies as funds that had been earmarked for modernization will be diverted to the operations in Mindanao.
They will also deduce that the Philippines will not try to do anything more in the West Philippine Sea so as not to open up another front that will require it to take some form of action when it is already heavily involved in Mindanao.
In short, whatever window of opportunity that there is now to stave off China’s territorial ambitions will be lost, as by the time the government returns to paying attention to the WPS following a termination of hostilities with the secessionists, the situation will have changed as new Chinese bases constructed on reclaimed reefs will throttle Filipino installations in the Kalayaan Island Group and deny the Philippines of its own Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).
-----
Editor's note: Jose Antonio A. Custodio is a security and defense consultant and was a technical adviser for a US defense company working for the US Pacific Command. He also specializes in military history and has post-graduate studies in history from the University of the Philippines. He also teaches history and political science at several universities in Metro Manila.
-----
Part 1: War in Mindanao: How did Estrada's all-out war against the MILF fare? Part 1 of 3
Part 2: War in Mindanao: How prepared is the military? Part 2 of 3
Part 3: War in Mindanao: What are the internal and external repercussions? Last of 3 parts
Our politicians are busy fattening their bank accounts and amass wealth in illegal ways with a few marrying showbiz personalities in a way that rivals a royal couple wedding.
If they do get arrested, they will draw the "I Am Sick" card and ask for house or hospital arrest.
By: Jose Antonio A. Custodio
Special to InterAksyon.com
February 17, 2015 2:07 PM
-----
Part 1: How did Estrada's all-out war against the MILF fare?
Following the Battle of Mamasapano, there has been a very loud clamor by many individuals and some sectors for more decisive action to be taken against the secessionists. The manner in which the proposed action to be taken ranges from either limited punitive operations to an outright and more ambitious all out total war against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
The question that should be asked is if the Armed Forces of the Philippines is really up to the task of browbeating the MILF into submission or more ambitiously, eliminating it in an all-out total war effort. How effective is the government’s war-making tool?
A bit of a historical reminder is when the 2000 Abubakar Campaign concluded, it was proclaimed by the Estrada administration that it was a great victory. True enough, the MILF camps had been captured and the losses were high among the rebels.
However, the bulk of the MILF survived the government onslaught as it reverted to guerrilla warfare and a short time later began rebuilding its forces and ironically establishing new camps.
The Philippine military on the other hand was in possession of former MILF territory but it came at a price. With the AFP heavily concentrated at Mindanao and having stripped Luzon and the Visayas for deployment to Southern Command, the NPA took advantage by undertaking ambushes and operations further overstretching the military.
On Rizal Day of the year 2000, Al Qaeda-linked operatives carried out multiple bomb attacks against targets in Metro Manila causing numerous civilian casualties.
The operational levels of aircraft, vehicles, and equipment of the AFP plummeted to alarmingly low levels and the AFP Modernization Plan was eventually reprioritized to internal security operations just to rebuild the numbers of the depleted and worn out equipment of the military.
This would eventually lead to the total abandonment of external security in the years to come to the delight of the Chinese who were increasing their operations at the West Philippine Sea.
Of equally serious concern, the capture of the camps and the battles with the MILF did not leave the military unscathed and it sustained the highest level of casualties since the 1980s and as it turned out, operations against the MILF continued because the rebels did survive everything including the kitchen sink that the AFP threw at them.
The AFP then experienced something that everyone thought had gone away. It experienced the return of dissent - dissent that would lead to open rebellion against President Joseph Estrada in 2001 and mutinies against the Arroyo administration in 2003 and 2006.
The AFP strength
Can the AFP, 15 years after the inconclusive campaign against the MILF in 2000, do any better this time around should there be a resort to military means to deal with the secessionism?
From a manpower standpoint, the AFP today numbers a little over 120,000 men of which 85,000 are in the Philippine Army and 8,500 in the Philippine Marine Corps.
However, such numbers are misleading as there is a cardinal rule that in order to get the combat effectives of any army or ground force, one must divide by at least a third the total number of personnel.
So in the case of the Philippine Army the total number of men serving in the field in an actual combat capacity numbers at a little less than 30,000 scattered all over the Philippines. The rest are in various administrative capacities and frequently are too old to do anything else but stay in the camps and do office work. Now the same goes for the Philippine Marines and less than 50 percent of that force is in the front. So at most, the Philippine military has approximately 35,000 or so men with very few women serving in an actual frontline capacity.
The 148,000-strong Philippine National Police, which is projected to take over the primary responsibility of counterinsurgency should the internal security situation get any better, oftentimes attaches small units of the Special Action Force to the military. The majority of the police force is ill-equipped and not trained to take on rebels especially the heavily armed secessionists and the regular police already have their hands full tackling criminality in the country.
As a force multiplier, there is the Citizens Armed Forces Geographical Units or CAFGU which numbers 60,000, again scattered throughout the country, and whose reliability is spotty to say the least but useful in establishing a presence in areas threatened by rebels. Being indifferently trained and paid makes the reliability of this force suspect and when used in combat or in operations they may cause problems especially in areas concerning human rights.
Furthermore, given the convoluted nature of the situation in many rural areas, there is always that clear possibility that there are CAFGU units that have been compromised by rebel infiltration. Worse, there are cases that these CAFGU units are not under the supervision of the military but are the private armies of provincial warlords who themselves are the main causes of rebellion in the provinces due to their feudal ways that cause great socio-economic disparities and injustices.
Part 2: How prepared is the military?
In counterinsurgency, the rule of thumb is that the government side must have a very large numerical superiority over the rebels to overcome the latter’s flexibility in evading the military and in staging hit-and-run attacks. Five government soldiers to 1 rebel is considered to be the minimum but the larger the better. Such a large ratio in favor of the government also ensures coverage of territories thus defeating the “fish in water” strategy of the rebels.
If the Battle of Mamasapano is to provide any other lesson to be learned it is that the secessionists do enjoy the support of the community they are in when it comes to combat operations and thus the better trained battalion sized SAF force was routed by the sheer weight of the attack against them.
Estimate of secessionist strength is put at 11,000 for the MILF being the largest armed group as compared to the 500 or so strong Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters and the 300 or so Abu Sayyaf Group. Ironically, the remnants of the Moro National Liberation Front despite a peace agreement with the government still figured in a long drawn-out urban battle against government forces in 2013 and the City of Zamboanga has not fully recovered from it.
However as had been mentioned, these various groups can draw on local community support due to kinship reasons and gain rapid numerical strength during battles with government troops. These groups also sometimes have this habit of working side by side in temporary alliances of convenience when faced with military operations. They can also choose to be flexible and roll with the punches thrown by government force until personnel, materiel, and funding exhaustion affects the military and operations grind to a halt.
And there is also that problem posed by the 3,000 or so strong New People’s Army. The military has also to contend with this rebel formation that opportunistically takes advantage of government concentration in operations against the secessionists.
In short, if the Philippine government goes into large-scale military operations against the MILF and the BIFF, then it has to prepare against all eventualities in other fronts of the internal security situation of the country.
That pits approximately 35,000 up against various rebel formations one-third their number but able to draw on considerable community support thus managing to establish rebel supremacy in certain tactical situations.
Thus it is clear that the Philippine government does not have that decisive numerical advantage that is necessary to establish dominance in the battlefield and it runs the risk of seeing the military and police distracted and tied down by numerous operations conducted against it by Muslim secessionists and even communist rebels.
It is in these situations that the military should enjoy the advantage of possessing crew served equipment and weapons systems that are considered as force multipliers and should give them the flexibility and lethality against mainly foot slogging rebels.
Unfortunately since the above mentioned Abubakar Campaign of 2000, the same systems that saw service then and became quickly worn down by wear and tear are still in service. In the 15th Strike Wing of the Philippine Air Force which is the premier attack unit of that service, the same OV-10 Broncos and MG 520s still shoulder on more than a generation since they were purchased and are desperately in need of replacement.
To add some capability, light training aircraft such as the SF-260 are configured for ground attack roles. The 50-year-old UH-1H still remains the main utility helicopter of the PAF and there are approximately 60 to 70 depending on what open source is consulted but constant use will pare that down to 40 or so due to the advanced age of this type.
Attempts to replace this helicopter with later models have always fallen through due to one reason after another.
Furthermore, aside from combat use, the Huey is also a key asset in Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief which year in and year out happen in the Philippines and such natural calamities also have the habit of exercising their own pull on the military assets of the government.
However, there are the 17,000 men of the Philippine Air Force of whom many appear to be surplus to the needs of the service who can be utilized as a source of additional combat reserves as long as they are properly re-trained.
The Philippine Army’s state of equipment is at least better off than the situation in the PAF. As of now, the PA is in a transition as it is replacing its old M16 rifles with the new M4s which are totally manufactured in the United States.
The PA has approximately 500 armored vehicles of all types of which the bulk come from American military assistance. Majority of these armored vehicles are wheeled lightly armored and armed types like the V-150 Commando of Vietnam War vintage. The most numerous tracked vehicle is the M113 Armored Personnel Carrier also of Vietnam War vintage and although supposedly amphibious it remains to be seen if they still retain that capability in the PA having been in service for so long.
The PA as well as the Philippine Marine Corps rely on towed artillery of 1940s to 1960s technology and are rather slow and cumbersome to deploy as compared to self-propelled types. Interestingly enough, the PA has never seriously invested in Self Propelled Artillery even in the current modernization program.
Hence although the PA has benefited from the focus on internal security that the previous capability enhancement programs had undertaken in the years following Abubakar, it remains to be seen if it can undertake flexible and quick operations and not the slow ponderous campaign it did in the 2000 campaign that although causing large casualties to the MILF when the secessionists chose to fight it out, eventually allowed the bulk of the rebel army to survive when they chose to evade, fall back, disperse, and engage in guerrilla warfare.
Much of the territory in Central Mindanao would confine the armored assets to roads and good ground which would limit their effectiveness in supporting infantry in difficult terrain and marshes. In order to establish a great degree of flexibility, the PA would need the entire fleet of Hueys of the PAF concentrated solely in operations against the secessionists.
The problem is that the UH1H, which had been an army asset in the US Army and thus allowed for quicker infantry and airborne operations due to a single service handling the units, belongs to another service in the Philippine context and thus will require more coordination and probable delays as it will be an inter-service operation. Each delay allows the rebels greater opportunity to escape and survive.
The Philippine Navy will provide transport, fire support, and interdiction to the overall effort against the secessionists in areas where it is needed. However doing this may result in stripping assets away from other high priority areas of which the most important is the West Philippine Sea and the Kalayaan Island Group.
Part 3: What are the internal and external repercussions?
A key consideration here is to determine what is the objective of an all-out war? Is the objective to eliminate the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF)? Or is it to punish the MILF? Can such objectives be met without the risk of degenerating into full-scale conflict given the fact that it is difficult to distinguish the two secessionist groups from each other?
During the 2000 Abubakar Campaign, the objective of the AFP was simply to eject the MILF from the camps that they occupied and this was done during a period stretching from March to July 2000. However as the secessionist army managed to survive the assault, it made the government victory a hollow one as the MILF lived to fight another day.
Thus if the decision to utilize military force is used, the objective has to be determined. Launching retaliatory strikes or occupying camps will not destroy the secessionist’s capacity to resist. Launching an offensive to destroy the secessionist army will not be a quick affair, will drag on for a very extended period of time, will open up new fronts, exhaust ammunition stocks, create wear and tear on military equipment, will require the mobilization of the nation and the requisite political will to sustain it and ironically there is no guarantee of success, but the economic and human costs have already been estimated in studies of such a conflict occurring.
What would be the MILF strategy?
The secessionist strategy against a military offensive is simply to outlast the capacity of the government to conduct the operations.
Although in some areas MILF forces will try to engage the government forces, it is expected that they will eventually resort to guerrilla warfare to evade and tie down the military and launch terrorist operations against soft targets throughout the Philippines, possibly in Metro Manila.
Those terror operations will distract and divert the attention of the government as there will be a public clamor for protection.
Weathering, withstanding, and surviving the assaults of the government will be a victory for the secessionists even if they constantly lose in battles.
A bonus for the secessionists is if they can replicate their battlefield victory at Mamasapano against regular military formations. The longer the campaign drags on, the better the chances that a ceasefire will occur and negotiations will resume.
That is the reality today.
The secessionists realize that the world is different now and is more sympathetic to ethnic self-determination than before and they are taking advantage of it. They also know that the Philippine government will have great difficulty in sustaining operations as it will definitely affect the state of the economy and the stability of the nation, diminish the combat effectiveness of the military, and eventually there will be strong pressure to negotiate again.
All that they need to do is to survive the offensives and appear to be receptive to peace and that together with all the other previously mentioned factors will generate the local and international pressure to declare a ceasefire and to return to the negotiating table.
Internal repercussions
It needs to be emphasized that the internal security situation in the Philippines is composed of two elements: the threat of secession and the lingering communist insurgency.
Paradoxically, although the secessionist threat has the infinitely greater potential of tearing the country apart, there are some who still cling to the notion that the communist threat is the more serious one no matter how moribund and ineffective are their front organizations and how weak the NPA is.
Apparently, old Cold War habits die hard. There are times that these two threats do complement each other as both tie down military and police assets and the NPA takes advantage of government concentration on the secessionists especially when military units deployed against the communist rebels are stripped of personnel to reinforce operations in Mindanao.
Hence the government has to expect increased NPA activity once fighting breaks out against the secessionists.
Communal strife can rear its ugly head and have disastrous repercussions on the human rights situation in Mindanao as armed groups based on ethnic grounds on both sides may undertake indiscriminate reprisals against the innocent.
There is much chatter by some people in social media about the need to revitalize the Ilagas without really carefully thinking what the impact of such an armed group will have on the conflict.
Degeneration into ethnic communal conflict will surely bring in international attention and it will be immaterial if the Bangsamoro Basic Law is constitutional or not as the international community out of humanitarian concerns will impose a political solution that will see a division along ethnic lines to prevent the killings from continuing.
External effects
A general war in Mindanao given today’s situation in the Middle East carries with it the possibility of attracting all sorts of nut heads, lone wolves, and extremists into our shores with the declared intention of waging war against the infidels.
The government has to take into consideration an increased influx of such types into the Philippines and this will severely task the intelligence and security apparatus of the state.
Some will get through and if they manage to carry out their attacks against soft targets in Metro Manila and elsewhere it will add further damage to the social, political, and economic fiber of the country which would already be reeling from the conflict down south.
Lastly, it is to be expected that China will take advantage of our renewed internal focus on protracted operations against the secessionists and other rebels. They will correctly deduce that the internal focus of the Philippine government will derail the efforts to modernize the military and other security and maritime agencies as funds that had been earmarked for modernization will be diverted to the operations in Mindanao.
They will also deduce that the Philippines will not try to do anything more in the West Philippine Sea so as not to open up another front that will require it to take some form of action when it is already heavily involved in Mindanao.
In short, whatever window of opportunity that there is now to stave off China’s territorial ambitions will be lost, as by the time the government returns to paying attention to the WPS following a termination of hostilities with the secessionists, the situation will have changed as new Chinese bases constructed on reclaimed reefs will throttle Filipino installations in the Kalayaan Island Group and deny the Philippines of its own Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).
-----
Editor's note: Jose Antonio A. Custodio is a security and defense consultant and was a technical adviser for a US defense company working for the US Pacific Command. He also specializes in military history and has post-graduate studies in history from the University of the Philippines. He also teaches history and political science at several universities in Metro Manila.
-----
Part 1: War in Mindanao: How did Estrada's all-out war against the MILF fare? Part 1 of 3
Part 2: War in Mindanao: How prepared is the military? Part 2 of 3
Part 3: War in Mindanao: What are the internal and external repercussions? Last of 3 parts
Our politicians are busy fattening their bank accounts and amass wealth in illegal ways with a few marrying showbiz personalities in a way that rivals a royal couple wedding.
If they do get arrested, they will draw the "I Am Sick" card and ask for house or hospital arrest.
Last edited:
