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Wanted For The NTH Time: The Return of Rotc

The document argues that the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program should be mandatory in colleges again to strengthen national security and address issues like natural disasters, drug rehabilitation, and threats from communist and separatist groups. It notes that ROTC provided valuable discipline and love of country when it was mandatory. It suggests reforms like ensuring all students participate unless medically exempt, and providing live fire training to better prepare citizen soldiers.

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Ador Isip
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227 views2 pages

Wanted For The NTH Time: The Return of Rotc

The document argues that the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program should be mandatory in colleges again to strengthen national security and address issues like natural disasters, drug rehabilitation, and threats from communist and separatist groups. It notes that ROTC provided valuable discipline and love of country when it was mandatory. It suggests reforms like ensuring all students participate unless medically exempt, and providing live fire training to better prepare citizen soldiers.

Uploaded by

Ador Isip
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Wanted for the nth time: The return of

ROTC
During the 888 News Forums 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 countrys
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 Citizens 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 Peoples Republic of China a citizens 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 persons character and
that discipline can carry that person throughout the rest of his life. However, theres 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 schools 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 preMartial 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 Citizens Armed Forces when the cadet hasnt 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 Peoples Army (NPA) an ROTC cadet with a firearm can
prevent the NPAs 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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