rom our perspective, Sara Duterte has got it right when she says she wants to make military service compulsory for all Filipinos eighteen years and older if she becomes vice president. We have been saying the same thing for decades now. Military service is what our country desperately needs, more so now that we have a neighbor like China—a country that feels it has become powerful enough that it can bully and push around its weaker neighbors.

Will compulsory military service be easy to implement? No, of course not. Conscripting tens of millions of young citizens will require a significant amount of effort and resources, but the benefits will far outweigh the costs.

Look at two other Asian countries that have compulsory military service: Singapore and South Korea. It should come as no surprise that both those countries are highly developed and prosperous. We believe that military service played a significant role in the success of both. It is true that both have citizens who want to do away with the draft, but doing so would be a mistake.

Look at the United States. Since 1940 the Selective Training and Service Act drafted young men into military service. In the three succeeding decades, the country attained the pinnacle of its success. It became an economic powerhouse, led the world in science and technology, and put the first man on the moon. America ended the draft in 1973. We believe that this significantly contributed to its decline.

Israel, on the other hand, continues to draft its young men and women into military service, and although its population is less than one-tenth that of the Philippines, it is a military and economic powerhouse.

As anyone who has served in uniform knows, the military is more than just barking orders and playing soldier. The military instills discipline in individuals. They learn to follow orders, stay focused, and always look after and depend on their comrades. They learn lessons that they can never learn at home—lessons that young men and women carry with them throughout their lives.

Properly implemented, mandatory military service also levels the playing field. Where today, scions of the upper class live in gated enclaves and study in exclusive private schools, rarely if ever interacting with those beneath their social class, in the military, everyone is melded together and forced to interact with everyone else, no matter their economic or social standing.

Wearing the uniform also instills patriotism and love of country. It tells the world that you are serving your country. Unlike the attitude prevalent in the upper-class who simply pack-up and leave when times are hard, or depend on the "dispensable" lower classes to do the heavy-lifting like fighting and dying in times of conflict, citizens who served in the military know it is their duty to fight for and defend their country when necessary. This kind of patriotism cannot be adequately taught at home or in school.

So we believe Sara Duterte has it right. Make military service a requirement for youth over 18. It will take time and a lot of smart minds working on it to get it right. What we don't want is an improperly implemented endevour like the country's previous Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program.

If she is serious and committed to getting a draft implemented, it will go a long way in moving the country out of the morass it is in, by producing generations of Filipinos that are fully engaged, united, smart, disciplined, and focused on a better and stronger Philippines. We stand ready to fully support her candidacy for vice president if she promises to make the military draft a reality if elected.

Published 1/25/2022