Inventory is not deterrence
Congress should pass a modernization law with financing that survives annual budget fights, not one that expires alongside them.
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Congress should pass a modernization law with financing that survives annual budget fights, not one that expires alongside them.
In late August, the Philippine Air Force took delivery of the last of 32 new Black Hawk helicopters it had ordered, giving Manila the largest operational fleet of that aircraft in the world: 47 in service out of a total 48 purchased — tone was lost in a crash years ago.
That asterisk is worth dwelling on. A modern military isn’t measured by units bought; it’s measured by what a country can keep flying and fighting with over time. By that higher standard, the Philippines’ ambitious defense buildup looks far shakier than its price tag suggests.
The stakes are real. Manila faces near-daily confrontations with Chinese vessels around shoals and reefs within its own exclusive economic zone. In 2024, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. approved a revised 10-year modernization plan worth roughly $30 billion, or P1.9 trillion, meant to give the archipelago a credible deterrent by 2034.
The arithmetic doesn’t add up. A $30 billion plan spread over a decade requires roughly $3 billion, or about P190 billion, a year. The government’s guaranteed modernization appropriation for 2027 is P50 billion — roughly a quarter of what is needed, even counting supplemental funds with a poor record of actually being released.
Worse, the 2027 defense budget request was cut 43 percent by budget planners to P324.6 billion, and the capital-outlay line — the money that buys hardware rather than pays salaries — was slashed roughly 86 percent, from the requested P240 billion to just P33 billion.
Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro has said as much publicly, warning lawmakers that the infrastructure to sustain new capability is “sadly lacking” in the budget.
Compounding the uncertainty, the law authorizing the entire modernization program expires in 2027, and Congress has not passed a successor. Teodoro himself wants it scrapped for something more flexible, arguing that 15-year planning horizons make no sense when drones and jamming systems can be obsolete within months.
He’s not wrong — but a lapse arriving just as Manila tries to fund secure communications, networked sensors, and more missile corvettes is a risk of its own making.
None of this is an argument against modernization. It’s an argument for Washington and Filipino taxpayers alike to know whether the money is real. The Philippines is the only US treaty ally with territory contested by China in the South China Sea. Whether the country can field and sustain an actual deterrent there is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is the whole point.
Congress should pass a modernization law with financing that survives annual budget fights, not one that expires alongside them. The Department of National Defense should publish, project by project, what has been funded, delivered and made operational — not merely announced.
And the next time officials cite a helicopter fleet as a proof of progress, they should give the total number — not 48 bought, but 47 flying. Precision, not inventory, is what deterrence actually requires.
