By Victor Robert Lee
Typhoon Haiyan revealed some glaring weaknesses in the Philippine military. Can it defend its own territory?
November’s Typhoon Haiyan (known in the Philippines as Typhoon Yolanda) tragically killed thousands of Filipinos and brought extreme hardship to hundreds of thousands more. It also wiped away any veneer from the country’s military, revealing the Philippines, a country of almost 100 million people, to be without any meaningful self-defense capabilities. This may not be news to the government of China, whose recent claims on the near-entirety of the South China Sea have placed it in an escalating dispute with the Philippines and its neighbors, but Beijing is undoubtedly making note of the sheer scale of the Philippines’ feebleness.
The day before the typhoon struck on November 8, Philippine president Benigno Aquino III sent his ministers of defense and interior to Leyte Island, which was to bear the brunt of the storm. But for crucial hours after the storm, according to reports in multiple national newspapers, neither of the two ministers could communicate with the president’s office because they were wholly reliant on cell phone communications, which had been knocked out by the typhoon. The lack of more resilient communications such as satellite phones and weather-safe radios extended beyond the Philippine military and interior department; the country’s disaster relief agency acknowledged that it did not have a single satellite phone, and was largely without communications in critical areas for days after the storm.
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