Will to fight

Undermining our “will to fight” against China is the poison that retired senior military officials are inadvertently injecting into us with their currently circulating social media narratives regarding the West Philippine Sea (WPS) dispute.

It’s no wonder then that the present military brass collectively had their stomachs turned last week and were visibly puking over their once fellow uniformed confreres.

In a rare and bristling public scolding, for example, Rear Admiral Vincent Trinidad said last Thursday that the retirees’ recent public arguments, which somewhat favored China, “are defeatist and alarmist.”

“They send the wrong message, especially to the Filipino people and even to the former men and women of the Armed Forces who served under these retired senior officers,” said Trinidad, the AFP spokesperson for the WPS.

Even more stingingly cold, the UP and PMA-educated Trinidad charged: “There are still a few mouthpieces in the Philippines, Filipino mouthpieces, that have been speaking out the discourse or narrative of the Chinese Communist Party. This is very unbecoming of a Filipino.”

As expected, the retirees bristled at Trinidad’s rebuke, prompting one relatively obscure retired Air Force general to rejoin “that’s not defeatism. That’s called strategic foresight — something our tactically-minded generals and admirals seem to severely lack.”

But the retired general had it backward. He was the one actually caught with a tactical rather than strategic mindset with his muddled claim that the Marcos government’s approach to the WPS was making the country a US pawn and risked “another Ukraine” scenario.

What then makes our retired general and those who think like him essentially wrong and what makes the active senior military officials strategically correct? It’s the aforementioned “will to fight.”

In the annals of modern warfare and strategic defense, military experts are all agreed that the “will to fight,” compared to military hardware, plays a crucial pivotal role in any conflict. It is also often underestimated.

What that generally means is that if during an armed conflict, for instance, one party has no “will to fight,” all the tactical missiles, tanks, fighters, frigates, and other weaponry the party has ends up being useless.

Modern warfare has many recent pointed examples of that fact, with the Ukraine War being the latest and best example and which our retired generals fondly cite in bolstering their claims.

Russia, with all its sheer military strength, was expected to have it easy when it invaded Ukraine. But Russia is currently having battlefield difficulties in the face of Ukrainian resolve.

At any rate, as one US Army think piece has it, the “will to fight” is “a composite of psychological resilience, physical capability and capacity, and ideological conviction.”

For our present purposes, our psychological resilience counts for more than our admittedly small military capabilities in resisting an ambitious socialist imperialist hegemon 32 times larger than us.

But our mental tenacity, our fragile morale, and our sense of purpose that we are in the right are exactly what are being weakened and constantly assaulted.

And the retired generals are lending themselves to those attacks.

It is high time, therefore, to call on our retired generals to do some serious soul-searching if they truly don’t want to sacrifice the bullied Filipino’s “will to fight.”

Otherwise, they end up being used. It is no small matter when Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tariela points out: “It is interesting that the Global Times (a Chinese controlled newspaper) dedicated editorial space to amplify the defeatist views of a retired AFP officer, which conveniently echoed the PRC’s propaganda.”