The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), the Canadian Ministry of Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces began a five-day Defense Resource Management Course (DRMC) on Monday that aims to help the military to properly allocate its resources from manpower to equipment and funds.
The seminar-workshop will examine and discuss the management of resources within the government’s defense sector and works around four themes complementing each other, which are managing defense resources, military personnel and force deployment, preparing and employing military forces, and defense procurement.
“This course aims to teach its student officers from various participating countries the core economic management concepts utilized in the Western National Defense Headquarters,” said Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Education and Training Brig. Gen. Francisco Mendoza Jr.
The DRMC is being attended by 38 senior military officers and civilian staff in the defense sector from the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan, Mongolia, Bangladesh, Singapore and Nepal.
The course employs a building-block approach in learning and taps the prior knowledge of the students.
“This is an appropriate method in engaging our middle- and upper-level managers and key leaders. We are expecting that at the end of the course we will have a fuller grasp of the integrated and corporate nature of defense management at the strategic level,” Mendoza added.
The training was facilitated by highly experienced practitioners from Canada who offered firsthand knowledge and experience in training officers from various countries.
“I am certain that all armed forces involved in this endeavor, regardless of the national goals and objectives they embody, strive to become the most credible and most resilient. I encouraged participants to continue to help one another to develop competencies in having formal knowledge on defence budgeting processes and managing defense resources” Mendoza said.
The DRMC was the second of the high-level course that the Canadian Armed Forces has given to the Philippine military in two years, the first being the urban counter terrorism training.
The anti-terrorism training was accorded by Australia for Filipino soldiers following the Marawi siege in 2017, which forced the military to confront a different kind urban warfare against a combination of local and international terrorists in Marawi.