Teodoro seeks defense budget hike to 4% of GDP amid WPS tensions

Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. on Friday said the government should realign some of its funding to boost defense spending to as much as 4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) amid the ongoing tensions in the West Philippine Sea.

Teodoro said this in an ambush interview on the sidelines of the event commemorating the 10th anniversary of the historic 2016 South China Sea Arbitral Award.

“We definitely need to realign. It’s not ‘might.’ We need to because the budget is a finite item, right? And so, more for one means less for another,” he said.

“All I'm saying is we need to increase. And there are several ways. We need to ramp up to at least 2 to 3 to 4 percent of GDP,” he added.

According to the Defense chief, the Philippines’ neighbors have ramped up their respective defense spending to almost 5%.

“Indonesia, which is not a claimant country and without any threat, has recently acquired 47 Rafale fighters, the latest variants of Rafale fighters,” he said.

He also stressed that the country’s deterrence efforts must entail actual spending to support the military.

“Deterrence means more than commitment. It means actual spending, and it means lessening an entitlement to the public and putting these entitlements into building a credible and resilient force,” Teodoro explained.

“That is why if we fail to cascade the value of standing up in the most granular of terms and public's awareness of the elements necessary to build a credible deterrence without a free rider problem as economists want to state, a free rider problem here taken to extreme probably is the worst enemy that we have in our journey to building a credible deterrent posture. And perhaps that is what strategies must articulate,” he continued.

Without that commitment, Teodoro said the country “cannot build a credible deterrent posture which at the end of the day is necessary for us to assert our rights.”

The Philippine government sued China before an international arbitral tribunal in The Hague in 2013. It ruled in favor of the Philippines in July 2016 when it junked China's nine-dash claim over the South China Sea.

China, however, rejected the Philippines' call to comply with the 2016 arbitration ruling, calling the decision "illegal and invalid." —LDF, GMA News