President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. on Thursday assured the new bilateral defense guidelines affirmed between Manila and Washington will respond to the security challenges faced by both allies.

The guidelines, which include an emphasis on defending against threats in cyberspace, aims to “guide priority areas of defense cooperation to address both conventional and non-conventional security challenges of shared concern to the United States and the Philippines.”

According to Marcos, “security and defense can no longer be isolated as one issue.”
“There are attendant and ancillary issues that hope — that helped solved the problem and that are part of the solution and so again we must really be looking towards the… for example, on the economic side, we must be looking to adjust our relationship as we all our trying to adjust and to transform our economies,” Marcos said during a question-and-answer session at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.

Marcos also stressed the need to focus on the new economy emerging from the post-pandemic world.

“And with the impacting forces of the war in the Ukraine and those are some things — these are elements, these are issues that we never really had to deal before,” the chief executive said.

In a meeting at Pentagon on Wednesday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to bolstering the Philippines’ defense capabilities as the allies develop a Security Sector Assistance Roadmap to guide shared defense modernization investments over the next five to 10 years. (PND)