OPINION | The Philippines is looking to develop an “expeditionary navy”

The US Navy dry cargo ammunition ship USNS Wally Schirra sails alongside the Philippine Navy guided-missile frigate BRP Antonio Luna during a replenishment-at-sea exercise in 2023.DVIDS/Keithan Perez

Vincent Kyle Parada

Not long ago, the Philippine Navy was considered one of the worst in Southeast Asia. Decades of severe underfunding, institutional neglect, and a predilection with internal security had left it far behind its neighbours.

Today, it has become one of the region’s fastest growing.

Backed by US funding and South Korean shipbuilding, the Philippine Navy has acquired a small yet modern fleet of guided-missile frigates and offshore patrol vessels to anchor its territorial defence strategy.

The introduction of the Comprehensive Archipelagic Defence Concept in 2024 – a blueprint for extending the Philippines’ defensive depth and projecting force past its littorals – framed this expansion mainly as an antidote to maritime incursions. However, recent pronouncements from the Department of National Defence seem to have expanded this initial vision. More than just achieving a credible deterrent capability in the South China Sea, Manila is now looking to develop an “expeditionary navy.”

Any nation whose critical industries depend entirely on access to the global commons must have the means to ensure that access or risk losing it.

What exactly is an “expeditionary navy?”

Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr. mentioned the term at least thrice in the past two months, most notably, in his remarks for several maritime forums throughout September. Behind it was a simple underlying logic: the navy must be able to protect Filipino seafarers and vessels in the high seas and secure the country’s maritime resources.

To this day, the Philippines remains the single largest contributor to the global maritime workforce. Roughly one in four seafarers is Filipino. In absolute terms, that is half a million citizens routinely exposed to hazards at sea – many, human induced.

At least five Filipino seafarers have died transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Its closure has led to record-high oil prices and an ongoing energy crisis in the Philippines. And thanks to harassment from Chinese vessels, there is little Manila can do to harness potential resources in the South China Sea and decrease its reliance on Middle Eastern imports.

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Any nation whose critical industries depend entirely on access to the global commons and freedom of navigation along vital sea lanes must have the means to ensure that access or risk losing it. In this case, having a navy with the capacity for sustained operations beyond your territorial waters becomes an overriding necessity.

Of course, the idea that the Philippine Navy could achieve a level of maritime power projection suitable for Teodoro’s goals does seem like a tall order. There are only a handful of blue-water navies in the world today, and even they face challenges in maintaining a sustained presence overseas.

Between the relative size of its fleet, the lack of robust logistical supply chains, and the immediate threat posed by the PLA Navy and China Coast Guard, diverting already limited resources from your core territorial interests simply detracts from your overall defence posture.

The biggest problem with conducting maritime security operations abroad is that you can never send just a single warship. Philippine Navy vessels have gone for joint exercises, goodwill visits, FONOPs, and other activities all across the Indo-Pacific. Whether they can deploy beyond the country’s littorals is not the issue. The true measure of an expeditionary capability is not how far your navy can operate but how long it can operate far from your coast.

Far from home, endurance is equally as important as performance.

Sustained naval deployments need to have some measure of self-sufficiency outside of land or shore-based logistics hubs. That is why in 2025, the PLA Navy flotilla that conducted live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea – thousands of kilometres from the Chinese mainland – included a dedicated oil tanker to allow for far-sea voyages.

Manila does not possess that capability. The Philippine Navy retired its sole replenishment vessel, the tanker BRP Lake Caliraya, back in 2020. It was sunk as part of the US-Philippine Balikatan exercises in 2024. And because capability development plans skew in favour of additional surface combatants and transport ships, it has yet to acquire a replacement.

Operating in contested environments like the Gulf of Aden or the Strait of Hormuz only adds to the considerations.

Navies today face asymmetric threats from state and non-state actors alike. Combined with anti-ship missiles and small attack craft, drone systems have allowed even comparatively inferior adversaries to overwhelm conventional maritime forces with precise mass.

Modern warships usually employ a mix of soft and hard-kill systems to defend themselves against such threats. However, budget constraints in the Philippines’ modernisation program meant that many new acquisitions were delivered fitted for but not with these critical sub-systems.

Four years since they were first commissioned, the navy’s Jose Rizal-class frigates have yet to be equipped with vertical launching and close-in weapon systems. This glaring omission leaves them especially vulnerable to the saturation attacks common in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf – and significantly limits the type of mission roles they can actually perform.

Given the substantial logistical and operational challenges, does this mean the Philippines should simply abandon its blue-water ambitions? Not quite. While a stand-alone expeditionary force is unlikely to materialise given competing priorities, the capacity for rapid overseas deployment is still a worthwhile – and more realistic – objective for naval development.

Either way, the lesson remains the same: far from home, endurance is equally as important as performance.

This story originally appeared on The Interpreter, published by the Lowy Institute for International Policy.