Insider Spotlight
The PCG’s professionalization must begin with strong internal systems for training, career development and merit-based promotion.
The experience of the PNP and AFP shows that external review alone cannot insulate senior appointments from political influence.
Clear qualifications, stronger selection boards and documented decisions should come first, giving future oversight a solid foundation to examine.
The PCG has grown from a few thousand personnel into an armed and uniformed service carrying sovereign responsibilities at sea, and nobody in government is accountable for its institutional development.
Careers are managed by whoever holds the position at the time. Standards shift with each administration. That is a real problem, and it has been one for a long time.
Where I part ways with him is on what would fix it.
Two different kinds of governance
The main issue is that the proposal treats two different aspects of governance as if they were the same. External governance and internal governance serve different purposes, and confusing the two can lead to reforms that create more structures without actually solving the underlying problem.
There is external governance, which is oversight: auditing, reviewing, sanctioning, holding an institution accountable.
And there is internal governance, which is what allows the organization to build and maintain its capabilities.
It includes the training and education pipeline, competency standards, qualifications for positions, career development, selection board procedures, and clear written rules that determine who is qualified for a particular position and why.
In simple terms, external governance asks whether an institution can be held accountable. Internal governance asks whether that institution has a system capable of producing competent people in the first place.
Professionalization, merit-based promotion, and career development—the very outcomes that the proposed commission is supposed to achieve—are primarily internal functions.
An outside body cannot simply create these systems for an organization. Oversight can identify weaknesses, but it cannot replace the systems that should already be there.
Command cannot create competence
There is a further distinction that gets lost in this discussion, and it may matter more than the first. Command is not governance, as the good Vice Admiral pointed out.
Command is operational. It is an infinitesimal line between mission accomplishment and failure, it closes the distance between a decision and its execution, and it works precisely because it is immediate and personal. Governance is administrative.
It works slowly, through written rules that outlast whoever signed them.
A commander can order a vessel to sea tonight. No commander can order an officer to become competent.
Competence accumulates across a career through schooling, assignment, evaluation and time, and the machinery that accumulates it has to keep running long after any particular commander has moved on.
Meritocracy works the same way.
It is not a decision someone makes once and announces. It is governance in motion, and it either runs continuously or it does not run at all.
I have no objection to oversight. All government agencies should answer to somebody outside itself. But oversight examines what an institution produces. It does not produce it.
The lesson of NAPOLCOM
The clearest evidence for this is the model the proposal borrows from.
The National Police Commission has existed since 1990 and was given real teeth by Republic Act No. 8551 in 1998, including authority over PNP recruitment, promotion and qualifying examinations. That is close to thirty years of the exact arrangement now being recommended for us.
If a statutory external body were enough to keep promotion insulated from politics, the PNP would be the country's model of merit-based advancement.
Instead, the question of political influence over senior police appointments comes up in Congress with some regularity.
I do not raise this to score a point against NAPOLCOM. I raise it because a proposal that leans on a precedent ought to look at how the precedent turned out.
An external gate cannot repair a weak system
There is a similar difficulty with the argument from the Commission on Appointments.
It is true that our flag officers do not go through confirmation the way AFP officers do, and true that nothing fills that space.
But the AFP does have that scrutiny, and nobody seriously claims its promotions are therefore free of political consideration.
Confirmation reviews whoever the internal system sends forward, and where that system is weak, an external gate does not repair the weakness. It approves it, now with the added authority of having looked at the file.
Build the standard before enforcing It
This brings me to the practical objection, which is really a question of sequence.
A commission holds an institution to a standard. If the standard does not exist in written form that somebody can audit, the commission has nothing to enforce.
Without documented competency requirements for each billet, without career tracks specifying what qualifies an officer for command, without board proceedings that record why a decision went the way it did, an oversight body reviewing our promotions would be reviewing personalities.
That is not oversight. It is discretion moved one level up, exercised by appointees whose own selection is subject to the same pressures we were trying to escape.
Qualification Before Trust
None of this means judgment should be removed from selection.
Command requires trust and confidence, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The trouble begins when trust and confidence replace qualification instead of sitting on top of it.
A healthy system produces a pool of officers who are all demonstrably qualified for a post, then lets the commander choose among them.
A degraded one skips the first step, and closeness becomes the criterion. Once that happens, competence erodes quietly, because there is no longer much reason to acquire it.
Strengthen what already exists
We already have proof that the internal route works. Republic Act No. 12122 set the Commandant's term and prescribed qualifications for the post, and it did so without creating a new bureaucracy.
Legislate clear standards. Strengthen and institutionalize selection boards. Make qualifications and criteria transparent. Keep records that can be reviewed.
Most importantly, invest in the education and training pipeline as a core part of the Coast Guard’s capabilities rather than treating it as simply another administrative expense.
What one generation leaves the next
The harder part I will say plainly. These systems should have been built years ago by officers who had the seniority to build them.
Every generation of officers leaves something behind for the next generation. Ideally, they leave behind systems, standards, and institutions. If they leave only discretion, then the next generation inherits the same uncertainty they experienced.
What is not written down does not survive a change in leadership, and what does not survive a change in leadership becomes someone else’s problem to solve.
The officers now moving into field grade and senior positions understand this clearly, because they have lived inside the consequences of it.
The Coast Guard does not need to be governed from outside before it can be professional from within. Build the architecture first. Oversight will then have something to examine.
COMMO DANN AUGUST A CARINO PCG (MNSA) is the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, CG3, Philippine Coast Guard. A proud member of the CG Officers Course Class 02 - 2001. A homegrown Coast Guard Officer.
The views expressed are the author's own in his personal capacity and do not represent the official position of this news publication, the Philippine Coast Guard, the Department of Transportation, or any other government agency.
