THE road to the Philippine Navy’s modernization has been a long and winding one. Aside from severe budget shortages, it also faced delayed funding approvals caused by the country’s heavy focus on counterinsurgency operations. But emerging regional security concerns, however, saw the need to upgrade the navy’s aging fleet.
The Navy’s transformation is not simply a tale of buying newer ships. It is a story of our country gradually abandoning the assumption that national maritime defense can be sustained through donated, transferred or refurbished vessels from richer allies.
The South China Sea dispute — and particularly Beijing’s increasingly assertive “gray zone” operations inside our exclusive economic zone (EEZ) — has forced us to rethink what kind of navy an archipelagic state like ours actually needs.
From ‘legacy navy’ to ‘world-class’ Philippine Navy
For decades, the Philippine Navy depended heavily on United States Excess Defense Articles (EDA) and Foreign Military Sales. The former US Coast Guard Hamilton-class cutters were epitomes of valuable stopgaps: BRP Gregorio del Pilar arrived in 2011 and BRP Ramon Alcaraz in 2013. They gave our country a much-needed naval presence in the West Philippine Sea, but they were already old ships. And the problem was not merely age, but sustainment.
The realization that we cannot rely on aging vessels that are uneconomical to maintain prompted then-president Benigno Aquino III to enact in 2012 Republic Act 10349, or the Revised AFP Modernization Program. It led to the acquisition of BRP Tarlac in 2016 and BRP Davao del Sur in 2017 from PT PAL of Indonesia — two brand-new and the largest strategic sealift vessels ever commissioned in the Navy. They were explicitly intended for military operations and humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HADR).
In 2018, former president Rodrigo Duterte approved P300 billion in funding for major defense contracts under the multiyear Horizon 2 (2018–2022) of the military modernization program. He ordered the accelerated retirement of mostly World War II-vintage vessels like BRP Rajah Humabon, which was built in 1943 as USS Atherton before it was sold to the Philippines as EDA in 1978.
China alters the equation
A navy that was designed primarily to support internal security operations, coastal patrol and HADR has to undergo a capability upgrade when a major power uses its coast guard vessels, maritime militia, water cannons, dangerous maneuvers and other gray-zone tactics to challenge Philippine rights within our EEZ. Acts that have, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said, turned the seas around the country into “arenas of competition and of conflict,” which explains the movement from merely acquiring multirole vessels toward missile-capable frigates, corvettes, offshore patrol vessels, anti-ship missiles and networked surveillance.
The navy’s strategic move toward Horizon 2 of the AFP modernization program was punctuated by the acquisition and delivery of two Jose Rizal-class frigates with sensors and weapons capability to address surface, subsurface and aerial threats: BRP Jose Rizal was commissioned in July 2020 and BRP Antonio Luna in March 2021. But the next step has been even more consequential with the delivery of Miguel Malvar-class guided-missile frigates: BRP Miguel Malvar was commissioned in May 2025 and BRP Diego Silang in December of that year.
Meanwhile, six new South Korean offshore patrol vessels that are part of the P30-billion multiyear acquisition program under Horizon 2 are being delivered. The first, BRP Rajah Sulayman, arrived in January 2026 and was commissioned in February. And the second and most recent, BRP Rajah Lakandula, was commissioned in June 2026, in time for the Philippine Navy’s 128th founding anniversary.
Aside from these state-of-the-art warships, the Philippine Navy has in its inventory AW-159 Wildcat anti-submarine helicopters. The Navy has also acquired missile-armed fast attack craft and has received BrahMos anti-ship missile systems for the Philippine Marine Corps.
Demands of a modern navy
Having made a quantum leap toward modernization, these state-of-the-art vessels require sophisticated repair and maintenance facilities to cater to specialized inspection, calibration, software support and component replacement because the operational and strategic value of these warships is only as good as their presence and endurance at sea.
This is why the Navy’s basing architecture must evolve along with its fleet. There are reports of plans for a naval facility in Misamis Oriental’s Phividec Industrial Estate that envisions a Mindanao naval center with a dockyard for maintenance and a disaster-response function.
In the Visayas, Naval Base Rafael Ramos in Cebu is also reportedly being developed as an important naval hub. In 2026, a US-Philippine ship-repair exercise in Cebu demonstrated precisely the value of having forward repair capability rather than concentrating everything in Luzon.
This decentralization is not merely convenient but a survivability requirement. A geographically dispersed archipelago cannot afford to have its fleet, repair facilities, fuel and ammunition concentrated in one area.
Ultimately, the modernization of the Philippine Navy is not preparation for war with China much more than it is a demand to capacitate our country toward having a truly credible defense posture. It is in response to the need for us to protect our territorial integrity, sovereignty, and sovereign rights in the West Philippine Sea that have changed what “modernization” meant to us as a nation and as a people.
It is the Navy that every Filipino can be truly proud of.
atty.edarevalo@gmail.com
