The Philippine Army is currently training together with its counterparts in the United States Army Pacific as part of the second phase of this year’s Salaknib Exercise.

BGen. Danilo Benavides, Philippine Army Exercises Control Group, stressed the significance Salakanib exercise in bolstering the Army’s thrust to shift from internal security to territorial defense.

“Salaknib is in line with the implementation of the comprehensive archipelagic defense concept in which the competencies that our troops needed could be acquired from events that are being held under this exercise,” Benavides said in an interview.

These competencies include getting familiar with the usage of new combat technologies or weapon systems as well as improving the decision-making of the army’s key ground leaders during a series of bilateral combat drills.

Benavides said the second phase of the Salaknib Exercise, which started on 11 May, highlights the large-scale troop deployment in jungle operations.

“It is a brigade-to-brigade or force-on-force exercise. Before we were engaged at platoon level or company level but this time, we are employing two brigades each from the US Army and Philippine Army,” he explained.

“So the scale of this exercise is larger and they are being provided with the operational environment wherein the key leaders will be stressed to react to certain scenarios. That is the impact,” he added.

Benavides noted that the participants, which comprised 1,695 Filipino armies and 1,644 American armies, will undergo all tactical scenarios, including an attack as the final battle period, until 10 June.

“There will be several objectives on how they will seize or capture an army camp,” he said.

“It will involve decision-making among the leaders, battalion commanders, and then the brigade commanders,” he added.

Benavides said the application of different tactics into one combined arms brigade operation would further help the Philippine Army achieve a certain level of training analysis on the proficiency of armies to engage in a combat situation.

The annual Army-to-Army exercise, Salaknib (based on an Ilocano term), is geared at strengthening the interoperability of Filipino and American army soldiers.