Republic of the Philippines (RP) Secretary of National Defense Orlando S. Mercado delivers the keynote address to the 1st RP-Australia-U.S. Trilateral Seminar Game on Disaster Relief, known as SAGIP 99. Seated are: Air Commodore Christopher G. Spence, Chief of Staff, Support Command, Australia; Brig. Gen. Rodolfo G. Garcia, Director for Operations, Armed Forces of the Philippines; and the game director Emmanuel De Guzman, Deputy Administrator of the Philippines Office of Civil Defense.

The Republic of the Philippines is no stranger to disaster. Recent memories include the July 1990 Baguio earthquake, the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo that devastated central Luzon and buried Clark Air Base under tons of volcanic ash turned to mud, and too many typhoons to count.

To better prepare for an uncertain future in which natural disasters are a near certainty, the Philippine Government hosted the 1st Republic of the Philippines - Australia - U.S. Trilateral Seminar Game on Disaster Relief, also known as SAGIP 99. It was held at the Armed Forces of the Philippines General Headquarters, Camp General Emilio Aquinaldo, Quezon City, Philippines, in February 1999. The seminar game on disaster response planning was aimed at enhancing the Philippine capability to respond to disaster. Such events are certainly not unusual, and in fact regularly take place in the U.S. and most Asian nations. What was unusual about this event was that it involved two other nations, Australia and the United States.

Maj. Gen. Felix V. Dueñas, Jr. (author) is Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans, J5, Armed Forces of the Philippines, and seminar game host and co-moderator.

"Sagip" is a Tagalog word which roughly translates as "to lend assistance." Appropriately, SAGIP 99 was designed not only to enhance civil-military cooperation, but also to highlight areas in which nations of the Asia-Pacific region could assist one another in responding when calamity strikes.

The game used a realistic scenario modeled on the devastating July 1990 earthquake in Baguio City that killed more than 2,000 people and left over a million homeless. The central purpose of the game was to examine the cooperative planning and coordination mechanisms between the three countries and their armed forces.

SAGIP 99 was significant in several respects. First, while bilateral pre-crisis military-to-military interactions are the norm, SAGIP 99 brought together participants from different nations. Second, the game highlighted the importance of coordination, especially before the fact, as a tool for saving lives. Finally, through military interaction in humanitarian assistance operations, the game served as a model to increase military transparency, confidence, and understanding.

Retired Brig. Gen. Thomas J. Fleming, USAF, Chief Facilitator, briefs participants. To his left are Maj. Gen. Felix V. Dueñas, Jr.; Air Commodore Christopher G. Spence, and Brig. Gen. Herbert L. Altschuler, USAR, Commander, 351st Civil Affairs Command.

Although the SAGIP 99 scenario was loosely based on the actual Baguio earthquake of 1990, much has changed since that time. Most significantly, the U.S. military no longer maintains a large force based in the Philippines. The presence of these forces in 1990 facilitated a rapid and robust U.S. military response to the crisis, a response that included over 100 helicopters and aircraft, three field hospitals, considerable heavy engineering equipment, and thousands of American military personnel, many deployed literally within hours of the disaster. With these assets no longer immediately available, SAGIP 99 participants had to identify the implications of a less timely U.S. response and look for appropriate workarounds.

A second area of considerable change involves the Philippine national civil defense organization. In 1990, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) worked directly with local authorities in Baguio to coordinate virtually the entire response. Today, under the leadership of the Secretary of National Defense, Orlando S. Mercado, a comprehensive national organization has been created, the National Disaster Coordination Council, headed by Secretary Mercado himself. It is this body that will coordinate the response to future disasters.

The seminar-game identified a number of areas for further work. Potentially most significant was the need to do timely and effective preplanning. As one participant succinctly noted, "pre-planning saves time and time saves lives." The opportunities resulting from increased preplanned cooperation range from building shared databases of equipment locations and prospective response times to creating lists of the most likely needs in a particular disaster based upon previous experience. For instance, earthquakes typically produce a need for bandages, splints, x-ray machines, heavy engineering equipment, and generators. While the exact quantities needed will vary with the nature and severity of the disaster, an estimated quantity could be assembled before the actual event to facilitate a faster response.

A second issue the game identified was the need for coordinated planning mechanisms. These run the gamut from those that should exist before a disaster ever occurs to facilitate the preplanning discussed above, to the conduct of assessments of pre-deployment initial needs, to final execution planning, to the eventual turnover of military missions to civilian organizations and, finally, the redeployment of disaster response military forces. It isn't enough to simply say organization "A" will liaise with organization "B." The specific points of interaction, planning processes, information sharing mechanisms, and decision points all must be identified for the total response to be effective. The bottom line for a coordination planning mechanism is that it produces effectiveness-ensuring we are doing the "right things," and efficiency-doing them the "right way."

The trinational game players hope this gathering will encourage future combined planning for possible disaster relief operations in the Philippines.

A key output of an effective planning process should be what participants called "gap analysis," the integration of needs with existing capabilities to meet those needs. The concept of "comparative advantage" recognizes the fact that each national participant will have particular strengths that make that country's forces best suited for certain mission requirements compared to other participants. These relative strengths may derive from technical capabilities (for example, U.S. overhead imagery), or location (a Philippine Army unit's proximity to the disaster site), or functional (Australian rapidly deployable parachute surgical teams). Clearly, the "host nation"-the Philippines in this case-would enjoy a comparative advantage in its knowledge of the area and its people. The gap analysis process is intended to rapidly match the capabilities of all participants with the overall requirements the disaster poses. While the mechanisms to effectively do this are not fully in place today, SAGIP 99 was useful in sketching out what the mechanisms would do and how they might work.

Another important issue that the participants examined was that of supporting the disaster response force. There are a host of tradeoffs between a self-supporting military force and one that is lighter and deploys faster, but which requires local support in such areas as food, shelter, transportation, and security. The key point here is the opportunity to shorten response times by using lighter forces, which would rely on support within the host nation. Such support requires pre-planning. It requires the existence of mechanisms, such as support agreements and centralized contracting, that will provide services to all response forces at the lowest possible cost. In a situation where minutes and hours mean additional lives can be saved, there simply is not enough time to negotiate agreements; by then, it is
too late.

During the game, an interesting shift in missions assigned to the foreign military units occurred. Originally, Philippine civil defense authorities asked U.S. and Australian military units to focus their efforts directly on saving lives. Discussions soon revealed, however, that these forces simply couldn't get sufficient equipment to the relatively remote location of the earthquake in the 12 to 48 hours needed to "make a difference." Consequently, the principal focus of the outside forces shifted from directly saving lives through search and rescue actions to restoring essential services and stabilizing the situation.

If an appreciation of the relationship between capability and the time that capability can be in place is not done at the outset of planning, we run the risk of tying up precious airlift in moving people and equipment that will arrive too late to make a difference, while other much-needed assets wait in the queue.

This "tyranny of distance" factor was underscored in the following diagram assembled by game analysts. The key point of this diagram is that a "capability" is more than just the ability of an organization to do something-it also includes the ability to get that capability to where it is needed and the time required to do so.

Secondly, the diagram highlights the basic steps of a response force deployment, from identifying and sourcing a needed capability (in this case, through the National Disaster Coordination Council) to deploying into the country and moving on to the site where it is actually needed. Finally, the diagram underlines again the concept of comparative advantage, not only between capabilities of different countries, but also, for instance, between a U.S. capability based in Japan and one coming from Hawaii or the continental U.S.

The question now is where does this SAGIP "process" lead. Hopefully, the lessons learned from the game have taught the participants how to cooperatively respond to disaster, while building bridges of understanding among our nations. Nature destroys and man intervenes to rebuild. The greatest disaster, however, is that of unpreparedness.