The time for talking is over. It’s time to push buttons. 

In essence, that sums up Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro’s order last week to the military establishment to “operationalize” this administration’s Comprehensive Archipelagic Defense Concept. 

“Operationalize” the CADC means defense bosses have effectively dispensed with the decades-old internal defense posture of fighting insurgents and terror groups and switched to external defense. 

Strategically, Teodoro says under the CADC, “We are developing our capability to protect and secure our entire territory and exclusive economic zone.” 

It means the CADC isn’t only the defense establishment’s new strategy for protecting the country’s 7,600 islands but is also the strategic counter to China’s growing aggressiveness in the West Philippine Sea.

As it is, the CADC’s timely implementation is the correct response to the country’s present pressing national and geopolitical security challenges. 

Teodoro’s order is also doubly vital for the military brass and troops.

“I emphasize that this is a strategic action and will not need constant directives to carry out. I thus urge our commanders and units in the AFP to exert all efforts to operationalize the CADC,” Teodoro categorically said.

Teodoro’s order effectively tells us defense bosses won’t entertain strategic deviations from the field, only tactical, operational questions. 

At the same time, his order strongly emphasizes that the military brass and troops must immediately refocus their strategic mindsets and tactics away from internal security operations and towards territorial defense operations.

Generally, therefore, Filipino soldiers are now operating in a new military landscape. 

A changed military landscape which, as AFP Chief of Staff Romeo Brawner Jr. put it last year, demands “really reorganizing our organization and training our troops to address external threats.”

Quickly reorganizing the present AFP organization and structure, therefore, is the urgent task of the military brass and troops.

Particularly so since the AFP needs immediate weaning from its complete orientation of more than 50 years on internal security and counterinsurgency. 

An orientation which, for instance, subsumed the Philippine Air Force and Navy —  which would normally have been expected to bear most of the burden for the country’s external defense — into the counterinsurgency struggle, which gave the Army primacy in defense budget allocations. 

Nonetheless, if creating the new defense architecture — which requires the military brass to come together and set aside inter-service rivalry to operate as one coordinated body — needs some time, confident defense bosses believe it is speedily doable. 

Defense bosses, too, at this time, have reason to order coordination among the AFP’s various services as the CADC entails the acquisition of more ships, aircraft and radar systems, missile systems, and the development of Philippine-occupied features in the WPS.,  The administration plans to spend up to P2 trillion ($35 billion) over the next decade to modernize the country’s military capabilities.

On the ground, however, modernization is more than new weaponry. It is also about soldiers’ skill sets and about officers of the various services acting smoothly together in well-integrated joint command structures in designated theaters of operations. 

Joint command structures are needed since, for instance, “the army would likely control the surface-to-air missile batteries, the navy the coastal defense batteries, and the air force the surveillance aircraft, (and) having them seamlessly work together is of vital importance,” noted defense analyst Frank K. Chang more than a decade ago at the start of the AFP’s modernization efforts. 

Furthermore, “knitting together surveillance data from airborne platforms and providing targeting information and tasking to coastal defense batteries comprise just one area where secure data links and unified command and control would be critical,” Chang said.

“Another would be the coordination of surface-to-air missile batteries with fighters and surveillance aircraft to form an effective air defense network.” 

As such, “in the end, the creation of a joint theater command structure with a rotating service chief may be the best way to ensure that all Philippine combat assets would function as one,” he said.