Rethinking about Security for Peace, Prosperity, and People's Safety in a Multipolar World: Insights on the Policy History of the National Defense College of the Philippines (original) (raw)
NDCP President's Papers Vol 1: The Future of Philippine Warfare, 2021
For centuries, states and individuals all around the world have been in the business of understanding the enduring nature and changing character of war. Global defense forces of today scramble to identify, assess, and define the movers and shapers of their security landscape, and proceed to calculate and determine which conflicts they will most likely be involved in in the future, and how these wars will be conducted. For the Philippines, a nation faced with different security threats – both external and internal, traditional and nontraditional – it is only apt for the country’s defense establishment to define and contextualize the future of warfare according to the peculiarities of the Philippine strategic environment, operational space, and battle experience. There is a need to ‘reconceptualize warfare and reimagine conflict’ to ‘rehearse’ the future, for us to explore possibilities and trajectories in defense posturing, doctrine development, and force modernization vis-à-vis our country’s national interests. Given the resumption of Great-Power competition between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China, as well as the accelerated pace of developments in technology and geopolitics, a lot more attention is being paid to the probable future of warfare within the coming decades. 2030 is expected to see the maturation and induction of new capabilities to the arsenals of great powers, and even non-state actors can expect to leverage new technologies to amplify their power. This paper argues that the future of war in the coming decades will call into question longstanding Philippine assumptions about defense, security and warfare, and that there will be a need to rethink these concepts to ensure the Philippines’ defense.