Posted on 10/20/2025 10:30:02 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Philippine military chief Romeo Brawner Jnr has revealed he recently rebuffed a group of eight retired generals and colonels who urged him to tackle rampant corruption in the country, a call sources have described as a push for a “soft coup” to withdraw support from President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr and back Vice-President Sara Duterte-Carpio.
General Brawner, who spoke to This Week in Asia after a briefing with the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (Focap) on Friday, said the overture was made on September 20, on the eve of nationwide protests over the 1.9 trillion peso (US$33 billion) flood control corruption scandal.
The officers, led by retired air force major general Romeo Poquiz, delivered their request in person at Camp Aguinaldo, where Brawner was meeting his joint battle staff under a red alert.
The meeting offers a rare window into how the country’s top military leadership handled the most direct appeal yet to abandon the president amid his biggest political crisis to date.
But Brawner said the institution’s long memory of past military uprisings – including coups he personally witnessed – had made today’s armed forces more resistant than ever to political adventurism.
“I told them we are one with the people in our fight against corruption,” said Brawner, the armed forces’ chief of staff. “But I told them that we are different in the way we express, for instance, our dismay at what’s happening.”
He recalled telling the group: “When we took that oath, we gave up some of our rights. And one of the rights that we gave up is the right of self-expression, the right of freedom of speech.”
(Excerpt) Read more at scmp.com ...
General Brawner believes a “soft coup” today would fail not just because of reforms, but because the military has lived through what happens when loyalty to the chain of command breaks down.
He pointed to two episodes that left a lasting imprint on the institution – and on him.
In October 1990, renegade colonel Alexander Noble in the southern Philippines proclaimed a breakaway “Federal Republic of Mindanao” and seized two army camps, demanding the ousting of then president Corazon Aquino. The putsch collapsed without bloodshed, but not before highlighting the vulnerabilities of a military still recovering from dictatorship.
But it was the December 1989 uprising – the bloodiest coup attempt since the fall of Ferdinand Marcos Snr – that shaped Brawner most. He was a young lieutenant then, stationed at Fort Magsaysay, when troops from elite Scout Ranger units as well as battalion and division commanders defected and tried to join a siege on Camp Aguinaldo in Manila.
“I saw soldiers turn rifles on each other, taking the lives of comrades,” Brawner wrote in a commentary published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on September 23. “I stood in disbelief as the ideals we swore to uphold collapsed into violence, while Filipinos bore the cost of our military camps becoming battlegrounds.”
One especially tragic moment occurred when a marine officer fired upon a landing vehicle, only to discover that the rebel soldier inside was, in fact, his own brother. This harrowing incident was reported by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Manuel Mogato, who was on the ground covering the siege at the time.
Robert D. Kaplan wrote “American Grunts”. Something like that. The NCO is the backbone of our military, not theirs. The officers are in it for themselves and the enlisted know it. This Marcos couldn’t be any different from the other.
The whole country is corrupt. You’d need an invasion like the Japanese did to bring them together.
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