Philippine President Benigno Aquino vowed Monday to acquire fighter
jets, air defense radar and other equipment within three years to
bolster the country’s weak air force, amid a territorial dispute with
China.
“I assure you that before I step down from office, our
skies will be guarded by modern air assets,” he said in a speech during a
visit at an air base in Clark, north of Manila. The speech was
broadcast live on radio and television.
Among these are “lead-in
fighters, long-range patrol aircraft, close-air-support aircraft,” as
well as transport planes, attack- and multi-use helicopters, air defense
radar and flight simulators.
He gave no details of the aircraft and equipment, nor the terms for their acquisition.
In
January, an Aquino spokesman announced the government would buy 12
South Korean FA-50 fighter jets to be used for “training, interdiction
and disaster response.”
The Philippines, a former US colony, retired the last of its US-designed F-5 fighters in 2005 and lacks air defense.
Aquino,
whose six-year term ends in mid-2016, has set about modernizing the
military in his first three years in office as tensions rise with China
over overlapping territorial claims to islands and waters in the South
China Sea.
The main focus was initially the navy with the acquisition of two Hamilton-class cutters decommissioned by the US Coast Guard.
The
first of the two refurbished vessels became the Philippine Navy’s
flagship in 2011, replacing a warship initially built for the US Navy in
World War II.
The second cutter is set to arrive in the Philippines later this year.
Aquino
said Monday he was committed to reversing the under-spending on
military capability that he said had characterized the Philippines since
the early 1990s.
“Over the past decades the air force had its wings broken and we relied on old and rickety planes and equipment,” he said.
Parliament
has since authorized the defense department to spend 75 billion pesos
(US $1.7 billion) on modernizing the military over the next five years,
Aquino added.
This is on top the more than 19 billion pesos that it had spent over the past three years for this purpose.
Between 1992 and 2010, the Philippines spent just 33 billion pesos for military modernization, Aquino said.
