The Department of National Defense came up with a cute statement this week that, if we’re on a playground, would be the equivalent of something like this, “I have a new toy coming, but I’m not telling just yet what it is.”

You see, the DND, under the Marcos administration, has made it very clear that it would not be boxed in by the Horizons 1, 2 and 3 programs of past administrations, dating back to the late President Noynoy Aquino.

The gradual acquisition of weapons, from small arms, to tanks, sea and air patrol crafts, was supposed to extend under Horizon 3 to cover the Marcos administration.

But no, immediately after assuming the defense portfolio, Secretary Gibo Teodoro, announced the “re-horizoning” of the AFP Modernization Program, immediately drawing representatives of arms-selling nations.

Those merchants, towed in most cases by their ambassadors to the Philippines, made a beeline to Camp Aguinaldo to pitch their latest submarines or missile systems, or whatever may be on the DND’s and AFP’s combined shopping list.

Going back to that quaint DND statement, it said that it would be prioritizing the development of the Philippine Navy so it would be best equipped, despite budgetary constraints, to protect the country’s territorial waters.

That role, of course, also belongs to the Philippine Coast Guard, thus a parallel modernization program for the latter is surely on the drawing board. Modernization, we have to remember, is a never-ending pursuit, and what is state of the art today may be obsolete in a few years.

The DND emphasized that only the President and itself, meaning Secretary Teodoro, can speak with authority (read: everything else is speculation) about the nitty-gritty of the AFP Modernization Plan.

From where we sit, that may be the DND’s way of putting in their proper places personalities or parties who may be trying to ride or project themselves as capable of brokering this or that deal. A fair enough warning, if we may say so.

Now, they are talking of cruise missiles and submarines that could give the Philippines a credible defensive stance in the face of China’s increasing belligerence in laying claim to the West Philippine Sea.

If there’s one country that should aspire for a formidable navy, it is no other than the Philippines, with its archipelago of over 7,000 islands that need the most modern Navy and Coast Guard.

The Philippines cannot have too many sea and air assets to defend itself against external aggression and, here, submarines, with the uncertainty of where they are at any given moment, would certainly be very attractive acquisitions, even if only as defensive platforms on coastal and internal waters.

Many may not know that one of the largest, if not the largest, naval battles in history happened in the Philippines during World War 2 in the famed Battle of Leyte Gulf, which saw American and Japanese fleets playing a cat-and-mouse game in four distinct engagements.

The battle saw the crippling of the combined Japanese fleet, marking a strategic shift in the Pacific War, pushing America closer to inevitable victory. The last battleship-on-battleship clash happened at the Surigao Strait, redrawing naval doctrine and ultimately rendering battleships, with their big guns, obsolete.

The re-horizoning program of the AFP is a prudent strategy to take because the defense and security needs of nations evolve and change overnight, and so must the manpower and logistics that are made available to address them.

Prudence must also play a big role in ensuring that our defense capabilities are tailor-made to our needs and our unique circumstances as an archipelagic nation, with a budget that must be properly apportioned to meet other pressing needs like keeping the economy growing.