With only 220,000 frontline troops, the AFP is one of the smallest standing armies in Southeast Asia and one of the most underequipped, having relied for so many years on hand-me-down weaponry from the United States. It has had its hands full battling several major insurgencies. Given its current strength, plus the fact that insurgencies demand principally political, not military solutions, the best it has been able to do is battle these insurgent movements to a stalemate, not eliminate them. Its failure over the last month to retake Marawi City from what some say are scarcely more than a hundred Muslim irregular fighters has drawn attention to its woeful fighting capabilities, with incidents like friendly fire from Philippine Air Force planes killing Philippine Army troops drawing universal dismay.
Even as the army is being outfought by Maute irregulars in Marawi, its commander in chief has added a massive new task, which is to perform police functions in a whole region, in preparation for exercising police functions nationwide in his design to establish a nation-wide dictatorial regime. Duterte, say some analysts, has provided a gift to the Communist New People's Army and the different insurgent Muslim groups by releasing AFP units now containing them to assume police functions regionally. This will simply encourage these groups to assume more offensive operations, leading to more AFP casualties.
The surest way to demoralize the military is to overextend it by pushing it to assume political and police functions for which it is ill-equipped. A politicized military that exercises police powers is a plague on the people, but it also stirs discontent and rebellion in its ranks, as happened during the Marcos dictatorship. Duterte fancies himself a general, but he may actually be unintentionally sowing the ground for future coup d'etat's. Like Marcos, he thinks he is riding the tiger, and like him, he may well end up inside it.
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