[OPINION] What the revised Philippine Coast Guard law must get right

Senate Bill 2116 has passed third reading. But two of its provisions will quietly shape this institution long after everyone who voted on them has left public life, and they did not get the scrutiny they deserved on the way through. I joined the Philippine Coast Guard when it was still under the Navy. I served through the transfer to the civilian side in 1998, through the long fight for our own charter that finally produced Republic Act 9993 in 2010, and through the years when our entire fleet could be counted without taking off your shoes. I retired with more than three decades in the service and no further ambition in it. That is the only credential I bring to this argument, and it is also the reason I can make it plainly: I have nothing left to lose, and the officers who do have something to lose are in no position to say what I am about to say. Senate Bill 2116, the Revised Philippine Coast Guard Law, has now passed third reading in the Senate. Most of it is overdue and worth passing, and I say so without reservation. But two of its provisions will quietly shape this institution long after everyone who voted on them has left public life, and they did not get the scrutiny they deserved on the way through. What remains is reconciliation with the House version — and bicameral conference committees are where the country's most consequential legislative details are settled with the fewest people watching. That is precisely why this needs saying now, while the text is still open. We are still recruiting generalists for a service of specialists The oldest misconception about the Coast Guard — one I spent my whole career arguing against, usually in rooms where it did not help my career — is that we are a smaller, friendlier navy. We are not. We do three technical things no other agency in this country is mandated to do: Keep ships and seafarers safe. Protect the marine environment. Enforce the law at sea. Maritime safety is naval architecture, vessel inspection, port state control, search and rescue doctrine. Marine environmental protection is spill response chemistry, contingency planning, pollution investigation, damage assessment. Maritime security is law enforcement — boarding procedure, evidence handling, chain of custody, and now sovereign patrol under sustained coercion short of war. Those are not three flavors of one job. They are three professions. And we still develop our people as though they were interchangeable. I watched this happen to good officers for 30 years. A lieutenant spends two years becoming genuinely useful at marine casualty investigation. Just as the knowledge sets, he is moved to environmental protection. Then to a patrol vessel. Then to headquarters. By the time he is a captain he has been everywhere and mastered nothing, and we call this a well-rounded coast guardsman. It is not well-rounded. It is thinly spread. Meanwhile the shipowners we regulate field real naval architects, the polluters we prosecute hire real environmental lawyers, and the foreign coast guards we sit across from send career specialists who have done one thing for 20 years. The charter should establish the three functional services — maritime safety, marine environmental protection, maritime security — as exclusive career paths. A recruit chooses one at entry and stays in it to retirement. Separate recruitment standards, separate training pipelines, separate promotion criteria. A safety officer is recruited, trained, and promoted as a safety officer. I know the objection because I made it myself as a young officer: we are too undermanned to give up flexibility. I was wrong. Flexibility bought with expertise is not flexibility, it is fragility. We do not ask a submariner to fly a helicopter because the squadron is short. A nation that expects us to certify the seaworthiness of the ferries its people ride, and to hold the line at Bajo de Masinloc, is entitled to professionals in both. The command-at-sea badge is the wrong test for commandant Section 6 of the Senate version makes the command-at-sea badge a qualification for appointment as commandant. I understand the instinct. It looks like insurance against a desk-bound chief. I wore that badge. And I am telling you it is the wrong instrument. Sea duty is not the whole mission. If the charter itself creates three functional services, it cannot then rule that only one of them produces leaders. The officer who built our oil spill response capability from nothing served this mandate as fully as any cutter commander. Long command afloat narrows competence as much as it builds it. Years at sea make superb ship handlers. They do not by themselves prepare anyone to run an organization of tens of thousands, defend a budget before Congress, negotiate with foreign counterparts, or manage a national information environment during a crisis at sea. That is the actual job. The requirement is structurally unfair, and everyone inside knows it. We have never had enough hulls to give every deserving officer a real shot at command. Assignments are decided at headquarters, often for reasons that have nothing to do with merit. Writing the badge into law converts a hardware shortage and an assignment lottery into a permanent legal ceiling on careers. No coast guard we benchmark against does this. Neither Japan nor the United States imposes a command-at-sea requirement on its top post. Both are far more capable than we are. Neither has suffered for it. There is a sound version of the same instinct. Require a minimum junior sea billet of three years aboard ship. That ensures every future commandant has stood watch, taken weather, and knows in his body what he is asking of a crew — without pretending one track holds a monopoly on fitness to command. There is talk of using this measure as the vehicle for elevating the Philippine Ocean and Maritime Council into a Department of Maritime. Whatever the merits of that idea, and it deserves its own serious hearing, it does not belong here — least of all now, inserted in conference into a measure that has already cleared the Senate on its own terms. Creating an executive department is a separate legislative undertaking with its own constitutional, fiscal, and organizational questions. Attach it at this stage and you risk two bad outcomes at once: a rushed department and a charter sent back to the starting line. Let this bill be about the Coast Guard. What we are actually writing RA 9993 has governed this service for 16 years. The officers who will live under whatever passes now are, most of them, still in school. So the question before the conferees is not how to organize the PCG for the crisis in front of us. It is what institution we want standing at the waterline in 2050 — three deep professions with leadership open to all of them, or capable generalists led by a narrowing pool. There is still time. Not much, and not in public view, but there is still time. The men and women who will inherit that answer cannot argue for it publicly. Those of us who have already turned in our shoulder boards should. – Rappler.com Vice Admiral Joseph M. Coyme, PCG (Ret.), PhD, is chairman and founding director of the Philippine Archipelagic Sea Lanes Center Inc. (PASLCI), and a member of the Philippine Military Academy 'Bantay-Laya' Class of 1994. He capped a 35-year Philippine Coast Guard career as the 28th commander of the Maritime Safety Services Command.