Officers should get a star not just for their battle scars but for their role in social development.

In a recent series of seminars on conflict management, Marine officers in Mindanao reached a consensus: the battlefield is now in the hearts and minds of people. Soldiers can no longer be mindless fighting machines but partners in social development and strengthening of governance in their communities.

Although it may not be easy to gauge the full scope of this trend in the military, this could give substance to a long-term vision of reforms spearheaded by the defense department, starting with the system of promotions in the Armed Forces.

The Philippine Defense Reform program aims to turn a military struggling with overlapping problems and inadequacies into a corporate structure of professionalism—“where you are dependent on a few good men and, despite the weakness of the organization, empower them, and make them a standard to follow,” said Rodel Cruz, who helped set up the PDR framework when he was undersecretary of defense.

And like in any corporation honing its best and brightest, the reforms have to build roadmaps for military education and to look into the promotion system.

From warriors to diplomats

About 70 percent of the requirements for promotion, from the rank of lieutenant up to full colonel, fall under a quantitative assessment of their performance against the “Order of Battle”: the body counts, the number of cleared guerrilla fronts, the amount of firearms recovered. A carry-over from the martial law era, this is how officers get their Medal of Valor or Distinguished Conduct Star medals. This is the premium they put into their careers, the incentive to get a star on their shoulder.

But since the early 1990s, there have been some changes in the parameters to give weight to the qualitative aspect of service reputation, their integrity and dedication to the job, and how they can handle stability under pressure. It also gives points to physical appearance (the current chief of staff, Gen. Alexander Yano, has made it clear that he wants his men to be in good form and shape if they want to be promoted).

Rear Admiral Emilio Marayag, who was assistant to the deputy chief of staff in charge of personnel (J-1), said the military has “the most stringent promotion system” compared to other countries in the region, so much so that “you have to be superman” to be able to skirt it.

If the promotion system is to be refined, he summarized the ideal stages of promotion for an officer: starting out as a “warrior” when he is a lieutenant up to captain, then becoming a “manager” as he reaches the senior level of lieutenant colonel, and elevated to “diplomat” when he becomes colonel.

Potentials a factor, too

From here on, Marayag explained, the promoted officers would form the “management of the elite” as it ought to be and patterned after corporations making a selection of their best men.

Being a general should take into account 50 percent of his “command estimated potential” or the ability to see things strategically, use logic and analysis, value interpersonal relationships, and have a sense of reality.

This will require the armed forces staff office for plans (J-5) to seriously re-evaluate how it measures success in the field, to determine new indicators that would capture the true picture of the peace and order situation of a given area and its social and economic climate.

“We were on that stage of planting the idea to J-5 to develop a new campaign plan [when we left the defense department],” said Cruz. “The old one can no longer be a way of measuring success and using it to promote officers. What measurement must we now use to hold a commander accountable?”

The likes of Ferrer

Cruz said the new assessment system “should be more sophisticated, and it begins with a plan of identifying elements. How do you identify the situation of ‘clear-hold-consolidate-develop’? Are there new businesses in the area? What about the attendance of schoolchildren? It does not have to be purely military!” He acknowledged that this requires policy discussion.

“If you rely on that ‘Order of Battle’ mindset, how can you measure the effectiveness of officers like Ferrer?” he said.

The former defense undersecretary was referring to Maj. Gen. Raymundo Ferrer, commander of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division whose leadership approach has been to strike a balance between the “hard” tack of launching offensives against rebels and the “soft” strategy of training his men in peace building and reaching out to the communities.

Defense Undersecretary Ernesto Carolina said the promotion system must also recognize an officer’s role in social development, not just the “body count” in the battlefield. Military units have taken on more civil-military operations, a lesson learned from fighting insurgencies for almost four decades.

Slowly steps are being taken, he said, citing the Gawad Sa Kaunlaran award for officers involved in civic action projects.

Finishing school for generals

The reforms will also establish a one-month finishing school for colonels before they are promoted to the next level of a one-star rank, a course that would “teach generals to think like generals,” Carolina said. They would delve into the subject matter of international defense, security relations, defense cooperation, and geopolitics to widen their perspective from the parochial focus on internal security operations.

The number of senior generals selected, two and three stars, is so limited at the top, usually not more than a dozen. The chief of staff holds a four-star rank and a law just passed gives him a fixed tenure of three years even if it goes beyond his retirement age of 56.

Previously, a succession of chiefs of staff had to serve a term of one year or so because retirement caught up on them and rarely did Presidents extend their duty. The revolving door system of changing leaderships limited their chances of undertaking major policies and programs.

The quota in the pyramid scale is determined by the number of soldiers—currently at 180,000 men—which in turn is determined by the budget approved by government. If, after 30 years of service, an officer has not acquired his first star, he is then forced into retirement by the rule of attrition; they call this “Up or out.”

But these proposed modifications in the promotion system are still being studied. Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro, who chairs the PDR board, has said that an officer who is at his best doing staff work in the headquarters does not have to be thrown in the combat field in order to fulfill his requirement for a promotion, or the other way around.

“A major challenge,” he said in an interview shortly after taking office last year, “is to get people out of the field into PDR staff jobs at the DND because it’s a disincentive for officers. They don’t get points for promotion by doing staff work. There’s a need to review the promotion system.”

Start at PMA

When the defense department was bringing the PDR wagon from camp to camp a few years ago, it discovered in its nascent stages that breeding good leaders also comes from education, molding them even before they join the service. At the premier Philippine Military Academy (PMA), where 10 percent of the armed forces officer corps come from, curriculum standards were deteriorating and the number of applicants had dropped.

Like the chiefs of staff coming and going, the superintendents of the PMA were staying for a term of at least six months only, using that position as a pit stop before getting promoted.

So in order to develop a roadmap for a better quality education and to restore PMA’s elite reputation, the matter of changing the status of the superintendent had to be done.

The institution had weakened and a leader had to stay longer, to give him enough time to effect changes and reforms and building on his successor for a continuity in maintaining a high level of standard. There were too many changes in the curriculum to suit the biases of the superintendents. A semester’s load of 20 units was too heavy. The attrition rate was too high.

Getting a superintendent to believe in a vision, he would also need an incentive to stay. The department then worked out a way in the promotion system to allow a superintendent to obtain a three-star rank while running the school for two or three years until his retirement, making his position a destination in his career. That went fairly well.

Lessen the clique’s hold

For positions higher than that, getting past the Board of Generals is currently considered an obstacle. The board is composed of the chief of staff and the chiefs of the major service commands—Army, Navy, and the Air Force. Billeting generals for positions tend to be highly personal, and it has been an unwritten practice that classmates (on the board) choose classmates (for promotion) to maintain a ruling PMA clique.

The PDR hopes to lessen this, with a civilian form of management in the defense department helping to create a better set of criteria for the sake of professionalism in the long run.

Most officers will say this is part of their culture from the academy days, but that they have gone a long way. In the time of the Marcos dictatorship, the system was worse, they say—getting a promotion was more like a “point system,” which meant that all the commander in chief had to do was to “point” to anyone to his liking regardless of rank, seniority, or merits.

This story is part of Newsbreak’s series on security sector reform funded by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung-Manila.

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