Can the U.S. Rewrite Its Tortured History of Aid to the Philippines?

By the end of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s visit to the United States in May, U.S. President Joe Biden had reaffirmed Washington’s “ironclad” commitment to Philippine security, U.S. officials had initialed their support for the “modernization” of its military, and the man who once served in the administration of his disgraced father’s dictatorship had received full military honors at the Pentagon.

The Philippines is by far the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the Indo-Pacific, but this assistance has been controversial, to say the least. In the past, undiscriminating U.S. aid helped the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) become drastically more powerful than the civilian government, setting the stage for years of martial law and coups in the 1970s and 1980s, contributing to both human rights violations and the deterioration of democratic governance.

Not all types of aid are created equal, and the AFP remains plagued by problems that no amount of materiel or cash infusions alone can fix. If the United States continues to prioritize arms sales and expensive weapons deliveries over investments in personnel, its aid may not actually improve the efficacy of the Philippine military or its ability to push back against Chinese ambitions in the region. Instead, it will further empower those factions within the AFP’s ranks that are most likely to use U.S. assets for domestic suppression.

For much of its history, the AFP has seen internal security as its most pressing mission. It has designed its force structure accordingly, led by an Army whose size and influence dwarf those of the Navy and Air Force. Throughout most of the latter part of the 20th century, the Army and paramilitary forces received the lion’s share of Washington’s attention, funding, and prestige—all in an effort to maintain the security of a U.S.-friendly regime. It is no coincidence that current President Marcos, whose father relied on martial law for regime survival, trained with the Army’s Special Forces as a young man and retains warm connections to those units.

U.S. support for the Philippines continued even as the Marcos Sr. regime reversed democratic freedoms, co-opted the military into supporting its authoritarian rule, and turned its arms of counterinsurgency against domestic opponents. Even after the United States finally cut aid in 1985 to pressure for a democratic transition, the Philippines suffered at least a dozen separate coup attempts by military elements. This was the long-term consequence of the United States supporting an AFP racked with factionalism and populated by officers who no longer believed in the sanctity of elected government. Consequently, after Marcos was ousted in 1986, democratically elected Philippine presidents chose to keep the United States at arm’s length, seeing its military presence as part of a tortured history. Years of bad aid policy culminated in the United States’ eviction from its two most important military installations in the region, Clark Air Base and Naval Base Subic Bay, in 1991.

Despite losing its formal military presence in the country, the United States continued to funnel resources to the Philippines in the years following its democratic transition. From 2000 to 2022, the United States provided $1.5 billion in security sector assistance and $4.3 billion in arms sales to its ally as part of its counterinsurgency campaign against Islamist terrorism. Though this aid led to slight improvements in overall modernization, this immense sum did not produce the results Washington was hoping for. (It did, however, make the AFP highly effective at carrying out extrajudicial killings of government critics and leftists under the banner of President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.) The AFP’s counterinsurgency shortcomings were put on full display in 2017, when Islamic State-linked militants captured the provincial capital of Marawi. The Defense Ministry said it would retake the city in a week, but the operation became a grinding, five-month siege that left the city in ruins.

Since 2012, Philippine political and military leaders have signaled that they intend to retool the AFP into a force capable of and primarily interested in external defense. Accordingly, they also hope to revive the Philippines’s long-ignored Navy and Air Force—the branches most likely to see combat with China.

However, even as the military shifts its purpose from internal security to territorial defense, the Army still reigns supreme, dominating the ranks of AFP leadership and swallowing up resources intended for other branches. The strength of the Philippine Army has often come at the cost of long-term domestic stability. It continues to be implicated in violent policing operations, human rights abuses, and repeated rumors of potential coup plotting, such as in 2014, 2019, and earlier this year. A deep vein of politicization has failed to fully disappear within the AFP.

The process of transforming the AFP into a professional, externally focused force fully obedient to the country’s constitution will be an arduous project. From a self-interested perspective alone, Washington must consider how its aid will serve this goal. Otherwise, it risks that its investment merely bankrolls and arms a military that is no more capable of addressing external challenges but is still perfectly willing to engage in domestic suppression.

After decades of neglect, both the Navy and Air Force are riddled with issues that extend beyond materiel deficiencies. The Navy’s most obvious limitation is its aging and shrinking fleet, but it is also hobbled by significant institutional and personnel problems. In 2020, the then-head of the Navy said its biggest challenge would be to “modernize the mindsets” of a force whose operations, administration, and training are not yet capable of absorbing modern naval equipment. The Air Force, for its part, can’t seem to stop crashing aircraft and killing pilots, suggesting that it has a long way to go in improving training, leadership, and accountability within its ranks.

The AFP’s capabilities hinge on its human factor—the quality of its personnel, their professional intentions, and the training, education, and administrative structures that support them. The current U.S. aid strategy, with its emphasis on weapons transfers, does little to support or strengthen it. Fortunately, Washington has several options at its disposal to help reform the AFP in this respect in the short, medium, and long term.

In the medium term, the Defense Department must change its current system for monitoring the transfer of U.S. weapons. Among other problems, there are no policies in place for investigating how U.S. assets are actually used by their recipients. A scathing 2022 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office strongly recommended that the Pentagon develop new policies to track and stop the misuse of U.S. defense articles. If the United States wishes to increase its military assistance to the Philippines, at a minimum it needs to scale up its existing infrastructure for monitoring to ensure that aid is not appropriated for unsavory ends.

Ultimately, however, the most imperative opportunity for reform lies in the hands of Congress. Historically, Congress played a powerful role in scrutinizing foreign aid. When it suspected problems in how taxpayer dollars were being spent under the Eisenhower administration’s expanding military aid programs, Congress clawed back its foreign-policy powers through special committees, staff survey teams deployed to conduct investigations on the ground, and eventually legislation. After years of improving its ability to fact-check the Pentagon and the executive branch, by the early 1970s Congress was able to impose dramatic changes to security assistance, establishing a legislative basis for most military aid that has persisted for decades.

Today, however, Congress has almost no means of investigating how U.S. taxpayer dollars are used in security assistance, except for relying on reports from the Pentagon. Though Congress has sometimes requested that the executive branch more closely evaluate its security assistance, the efforts of the State and Defense departments have often been inadequate or only been made reluctantly. By authorizing staff survey teams to investigate military aid firsthand in the Philippines and elsewhere, and followed by special committees or legislation if necessary, Congress can move toward reclaiming a critical voice in U.S. foreign policy. The next time a leader with a dubious past comes to Washington asking for money and weapons, Congress must be in a stronger position to contest the narrative coming out of the executive branch.