Wanted for the nth time: The return of ROTC

During the 888 News Forum’s 10th anniversary at the Marco Polo Plaza Hotel last Tuesday, a few officers and cadets from the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) were on hand to recruit cadets for the country’s most prestigious military school at the Southwestern University (SWU) this Sunday. Their appearance reminded me of one of the campaign promises of Pres. Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte for the return of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) which somehow gave me the best years of my college life.

Today the ROTC is merely an option under the National Service Training Program (NSTP) and no longer compulsory. Call it timely that I read an article that came out of BusinessWorld last Tuesday entitled, “Urgent National Need: A Credible Citizen’s Armed Force” by Jaime de los Santos. Indeed for a nation that is under threat internally by a communist underground movement or Moro separatists or an external threat by the People’s Republic of China… a citizen’s armed force is something that the Duterte administration should fast track and consider as urgent.

I have pointed out in so many previous columns that the only subject that we took in college that taught us love of country is when we took the ROTC. Thus for a nation under all sorts of military threat… it was reckless for Congress to pass RA 9163 that relegated the ROTC from compulsory to optional and thus rendered the Philippines militarily weak.

In my book the only thing wrong with the ROTC then was that it focused too much on the military aspect which is not necessarily a bad thing. For me, the discipline of the ROTC moulds a person’s character and that discipline can carry that person throughout the rest of his life. However, there’s more to ROTC than just military training.

Over the weekend, Metro Manila and large parts of Luzon were once against inundated by floods brought about by a tropical depression and since we are a nation visited by typhoons almost every month of the year… we can have the ROTC cadets trained on search and rescue missions, just like what they do in the Coast Guard. They also come in handy when there are national disasters like earthquakes when we need warm bodies to look for survivors quickly who are buried in landslides in remote areas.

If you folks did not notice, the war against illegal drugs waged by the Duterte administration has resulted in hundreds of thousands of our youth who are hooked in illegal drugs surrender to authorities, and the biggest problem we are facing today is how to rehabilitate them. In my book, the decision by the Duterte administration to use the military camps as rehabilitation centers is a step in the right direction. These youth drug offenders need the discipline of the ROTC if they truly want to return back to mainstream society.

So the question is, when will the Department of Education (DepEd) bring back the ROTC into compulsory curriculum? While they are finalizing this  let us strengthen the ROTC to make it vibrant and corrupt-free. Yes one of the problems of the ROTC in the past was that the rich and the well-heeled more often than not get “exempted” from serving in the ROTC. This was due to the fact that all one needs to do is get a medical certificate for a particular ailment… and voila! The fellow gets an exemption.

But it is a fact that family doctors often sign the medical certificate for various reasons and one of them is family ties. What really needs to be done is for the ROTC not just to rely on a certificate by a family doctor, but the school’s official doctor and a military doctor. So if the three doctors see that a youth has a problematic medical history, then he or she can be exempted from serving in the ROTC, otherwise everyone must serve in the ROTC!

Perhaps the most important change that I would like to see in the ROTC is for cadets to experience live fire exercises. During our ROTC days, only the officers were given this privilege, while most of us pre-Martial Law ROTC carry World War I and World War II era Springfield or Enfield rifles… but we never got to fire those rifles! Thankfully we were already gun crazy in those days so we went to the firing range to practice shooting.

After Martial Law was declared the Marcos Dictatorship scared of an armed ROTC was trained with wooden guns. How can we expect to create a Citizen’s Armed Forces when the cadet hasn’t even fired a gun? Cadets must also be trained on how to drive a military vehicle and use other types of military ordnance so we can have an effective trainable fighting force.

It is a fact that in many encounters with the New People’s Army (NPA) an ROTC cadet with a firearm can prevent the NPA’s from overrunning a town because these ROTC cadets are trained to fight back. We should never forget that the bulk of the guerrilla movement that gave the Japanese Imperial Army who occupied our nation so many problems during World War II were ROTC graduates. So the battle cry is bring back the ROTC!

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