No ROTCs to help secure the ASEAN Summit!

I couldn’t help but notice a report coming from Philippine National Police (PNP) Regional Director Silverio Alarico Jr. who came up with the bright idea to tap some 200 students of criminology to assist in the security arrangements of the coming 12th ASEAN Summit. This is on top of the supposedly 3,000 additional PNP officers who are expected to arrive in Cebu as part of the ASEAN security contingent. I hate to say this, but isn’t anybody making a wish… hoping that they could tap the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) if there was any?

We’ve said it many times here before that the ROTC would have been the right people to tap in times like these. Whenever Cebu City holds its Sinulog Festival, the ROTC is usually tapped to help in the security arrangements and this is why for so many years, the Sinulog Festival has always been a marvelous peaceful success, thanks to the presence of the ROTC. Aside from providing our depleted military with the numbers to back them up as a reserve unit, the ROTC is always ready and prepared to help in times of calamities or disasters.

Alas, for the ASEAN Summit, the PNP can only tap some 200 criminology students whom I reckon only have a cursory subject on military discipline. But then, we are scraping the bottom of the barrel, aren’t we? That’s because all that disappeared when Republic Act 9163 aka the National Service Training Program was made into law in lieu of the ROTC. While it did not completely eradicate the ROTC, the law no longer made it compulsory, that is why our reserves have dried up to the bone.

Today, our military reserves are perilously so low for so many reasons. Aside from the absence of ROTC cadets, we already know that a security group called Blackwater USA has been recruiting ex-Filipino policemen or soldiers to do security duty in dangerous places like Iraq and Afghanistan. At $2,000 a month, that’s better pay for soldiers who risk their lives anyway! Sure, there’s a strong chance you’d be killed abroad.

If you ask, what’s the difference in being killed by an Iraqi RPG or an NPA bullet? As our friends would say… same die anyway! But at least the Pinoy soldier can earn dollars in the months you were kept alive… and that’s more than what we can pay our poor soldiers here at home!

I also heard that Australia is recruiting Filipino officers and a lot of our officers are thinking about grabbing this opportunity. This is not to mention that many of our officers, like the once brilliant former Army Scout Ranger chief Brig. Gen. Danilo Lim and his friends belonging to the Magdalo group are in the stockade. Here we are, declaring an all-out war against the communist insurgency and we are fast losing people to fight this war.

Thankfully, Rep. Eduardo Gullas has gone to the rescue and filed House Bill No. 5460 aimed to once more make the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) mandatory for all male tertiary students enrolled in all private and public colleges and universities. This bill seeks to repeal Republic Act 9163 aka the National Service Training Program Act of 2001 because anyway, this program hasn’t helped this nation a bit!

Actually, the problem why RA 9163 was made into law was due to some problems within the ROTC, like the hazing that happened in one of the schools in Manila. Even during our time, we had problems with corruption, where some rich kid would get away from marching in uniform because his rich dad would "fix" the problem with that corrupt sergeant. But instead of fixing the problems of the ROTC, they killed the ROTC. If you ask me, they should have removed or shot that corrupt Sarge!

Well, last June 30, during the Full Council meeting of the Regional Development Council (RDC-7) in Central Visayas in Tagbilaran, Bohol, the RDC overwhelmingly supported the call to restore the ROTC and adopted the Gullas Bill and issued a resolution asking the President to make this her priority bill. I thought that this resolution would meet stiff resistance in the Full Council, but I was amazed that no one questioned this resolution and everyone wholeheartedly supported it. One friend of mine even confided to me that even if this was only for Central Visayas, he is all for it!

At this point, we hope that President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo would fully support the return of the ROTC to its former glory. But of course, before we do this, I would like to see a renewed ROTC with better training than ever before. I must say that I went through the best years of the ROTC because it was just a few years before the declaration of Martial Law. Back then, the University of San Carlos (USC) and Cebu Institute of Technology (CIT) had the best equipped ROTC, complete with the best armory, rifles like Garands, including mortars and 105 howitzers.

But when Martial Law was declared, one of the first things that President Ferdinand E. Marcos did was to disarm the ROTC, because they were the only units not under his control and they were armed to the teeth. After things calmed down, the ROTC was put back into service but they were only issued wooden guns. ROTC then became a big joke! Actually, the joke is on us… if by chance we get into a war, the next people in line to fight that war would already be the ordinary people who are ill-prepared to fight any war!

I know that one of the problems in bringing back the ROTC is getting guns for them to use. Here again is another perennial Filipino problem. We’ve written it here before that Cebuanos are great gunmakers. Danao is famous for its paltik guns, made underground using poor quality metal, yet paltiks have become world-famous.

Just a couple of days ago, my good friend Pet Dakay drove me to visit another old friend, whom I have never seen in 20 years. He is no other than Romeo "Romy" Cortes who now runs the Safariland Arms Manufacturing Corp. in Umapad, Mandaue City, a legitimate gun manufacturer. This company makes the SAC MP9.A5, a 9mm submachine gun, which fires 800 rounds per minute with a muzzle rate of 1,083 ft. per second. It looks like Romy cross-bred the M-16 Armalite with an UZI submachine pistol and came up with the SAC MP9.A5 and it is just as deadly as it is accurate!

Of course, Mayor Ted Ouano purchased this firearm for the SWAT team of the City of Mandaue not only because they want to patronize their own products, but because Mandaue City is also known for making high-quality, world-renowned products. But somehow, the police and the military that are lacking in firearms would not purchase our locally made guns. What’s wrong with us? In Balamban, Cebu, FBMA Marine makes fastcraft for foreign navies, but the Philippine Navy isn’t buying locally.

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns in The Freeman can also be accessed through The Philippine STAR website (www.philstar.com). He also hosts a weekly talkshow, "Straight from the Sky," shown every Monday, 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.