In April this year, the President ordered a review of numerous government positions for rightsizing to “upgrade and reskill the workforce in order to improve state services and programs.” The call emanated from the President’s 2022 State of the Nation Address. Consequently several legislators proposed a National Rightsizing Act that is well-aligned with the Revised Administrative Code. The review and the legislative proposal do not include the armed forces, teaching-related positions in public schools, medical and allied professional positions in government hospitals, and those under government-owned or -controlled corporations.

The latest government rightsizing directive offers an opportunity for non-affected agencies to institute parallel efforts to better improve their systems, processes and procedures to make their organizations more cost effective. With the rising cost of maintaining personnel and increasing pension liabilities, the initiative is well-timed and reflective of enhanced awareness of the resource limitations of the government.

While the President exempts the military from his rightsizing order, he mentioned two of its components – retooling and retraining during the graduation rites of the Philippine Army’s Officer Candidate Course in July. He said, “We continue to prioritize retooling and retraining to arm you with intellectual fortitude, with tactical prowess, and strategic acumen to thrive in the modern battlefield.”

The “rightsizing and retooling” of the  defense forces are guided by the AFP modernization law. This law is the centerpiece of military capability upgrade in five major areas:

• Human Resources;
• Doctrines;
• Materiel;
• Bases and bases support; and
• Force streamlining and restructuring.

The biggest slice of modernization funding is given to materiel because of many decrepit equipment, tools, and platforms in the AFP inventory, many of which come from foreign sources. This skewed allocation for materiel upgrade may necessitate calibration, as inferred by the President, to develop a defense force that is lethal, sustainable, resilient, survivable, agile, and responsive.

Rightsizing is “optimizing the allocation of resources like manpower, finances, and equipment to ensure effectiveness and efficiency.” The philosophy behind it is to have small, agile, mobile forces capable of waging military operations in the current and future defense environments. This would then allow resources for modernization, technological upgrades and reserve force, or additional human resource, development.

One popular guide worth citing to right-size the defense forces is one espoused by P.H Loitta and Richmond M. Lloyd –Strategy and Force Planning Framework. It is a top-down approach. It starts with assessments of current and future security landscapes and the clear statements of the country’s national interests and national objectives. One of the national objectives is the national security objective that is then translated to a national security strategy with due regard to the politico-economic-military and information culture. The national security strategy considers resource constraints, technology, threats, challenges, opportunities, vulnerabilities, allies, friendly nations, non-state actors and international institutions.

The national security strategy leads to the formulation of the defense strategy and subsequently the national military strategy. The national military strategy (NMS) takes into account the government’s Fiscal and Program Guidance and lists down current and desired capabilities. The NMS includes the operational challenges and operational concepts. It is then subjected to further assessment and identifies the deficiencies and risks that are inputted into the national security strategy.

The military deficiencies and risks generate alternatives on how best to structure the Force. Based on the selected option, programmed forces are listed. These program forces are designed to minimize the risks posed by the competitors but will not be available at once. The available forces are those currently funded and will the ones that will confront the competitors with associated risks. The Lloyd-Loitta framework provides the various variables that affect strategy and force planning to optimize resource allocation, minimize or reduce security risks and right-size and retool the Force.

Many nations have started to right-size and retool their forces. F. Wang-Diaz’ Retooling for the Future reveals how China has embarked to challenge the supremacy of the United States as world power. China and North Korea have started to enhance their special forces capabilities because they believe that the new concept of war necessitates new strategies, organizational restructuring, special skills, and creative use of current and emerging technologies.

China has increased the number of its marines, or expeditionary forces, while reducing its land forces by 300,000 men. On the other hand, North Korea has added the strength of its special operations forces to 17% of its entire armed forces for a variety of missions including becoming proxy forces of some countries. India is also rightsizing its border forces; while the U.S. has been  continuously testing its air-sea battle concept.  The U.S. Navy terms this new concept as fleet-in-dispersal.

This trend of force restructuring for maritime domain operations is triggered by a derivative concept of war (war being the continuation of politics with other means according to Carl von Clausewitz) advanced by Chinese PLA senior officers Quiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui in 2001 – Unrestricted Warfare (URW). This duo defines URW as “using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military or non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means, to compel the enemy to accept one’s interest.” They believed that in this kind of warfare there are “no rules with nothing forbidden.” URW is similar to centuries-old Chinese game of encirclement called “Weiqi” that Quiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui now define as “the art of strategic encirclement.”

URW supports China’s security objective of displacing the U.S. as the dominant power in East Asia and at the same time avoid direct confrontation. Its strategies comprise of

• cultivating appearance of good relations;
• building alternative regional institutions like Shanghai Cooperation Organization and ASEAN +3;
• stabilizing continental ‘rear areas’ in Central Asia and Russia’s Far East; and
• focusing on threats and opportunities in the maritime domain.

Unrestricted Warfare, according to F. Wang-Diaz, consists of numerous “types of warfare” collectively termed as “Beijing’s Cocktail.” These are:

• Trade warfare – embargoes, tariff barriers, most favored nation;
• Financial warfare – currency, banking, stock market manipulation, use of foundations;
• New Terror warfare – use of high technology equipment and platforms, weapons of mass destruction;
• Ecological warfare – influences natural state of rivers, oceans, crust of the earth, polar ice sheets, air circulation;
• Psychological warfare – perception management of strength and capabilities, intimidation, breaking the will of the enemy;
• Smuggling warfare – throwing markets into confusion with illegal goods and counterfeit products;
• Media warfare – media manipulation to influence opinions, attitudes and images and intimidation of journalists and media outlets;
• Drug warfare – profiteering for illegal drugs sales used to destabilize and weaken other nations;
• Network warfare – conducting non-attributable cyber-attacks;
• Technological warfare – manipulating critical nodes;
• Fabrication warfare – deception, lying, perception and narrative management to conceal one’s weakness and project false strength;
• Resources warfare – plundering the stores of natural resources by controlling access to them by other countries;
• Economic Aid warfare – providing aid to control and create dependency;
• Cultural warfare – influencing and shaping foreign culture, values and practices into accepting, absorbing and integrating as your own, leading cultural trend so yours will be adopted; and
• International Law warfare – controlling the legal and regulatory environment, using judicial system to advance your own agenda and defeat your adversary. U.S. Air Force Major General Charles Dunlop Jr is credited to have coined the term Lawfare, defined as “a strategy of using, or not using, law as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve operational objective.”

Nearly all types of warfare cited above have been exploited by China in pursuit of its objectives in South China Sea. China has succeeded in influencing many Filipino government officials, past and present, some academics, and the local media. These Filipinos parrot, and continue to parrot, the Chinese line of deception, lies, intimidation, illegal presence and manipulation, particularly in the resupply of a

naval ship in Ayungin Shoal, the 2016 Arbitral Ruling, and the exploitation of seabed resources in the Reed Bank. They justify their actions to suit the Chinese propaganda fully confident that they will be protected by the democratic ideals they aim to subvert.

China’s unrestricted warfare will continue. The best defense is public awareness and timely disclosure of China’s URW actions to generate local and international support. At the same time our defense forces must think along the lines of asymmetric warfare to counter URW actions.

But it is also necessary to right-size and retool our defense forces to address the challenges of unrestricted warfare by enhancing our operational readiness, providing a networked and integrated command and control system, acquiring lethal, precise, and highly mobile weapons, robust delivery platforms, and ensuring long term sustainability with the active participation of the local defense industries and our allies.  In addition, the nation should also organize, train, equip, and retool our reserve forces for territorial defense and their readiness status assessed after scheduled mobilization exercises.