By Adolfo Quizon Paglinawan

 

Part 32: Where the Philippines sees War, China seeks diplomacy

General Romeo Brawner seems overdue for retirement nine months before the end of his term as chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

Brawner Jr., recently announced that the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) must “rely” on its own up to 30 days before reinforcements from the United States arrive in a wartime scenario, saying the holdout period was the marching order of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to the 160,000 active military troops nationwide.

The entire nation has been laughing since.

When his commander-in-chief says, “Brawnie jump!”, the chief of staff asks, “From what floor sir?” His canine obedience has so blinded him, he doesn’t even realize when he is already being taken for a ride.

With billions in intelligence funds for more than three years, has not our military verified if they are taking orders from a cocaine addict?

This 30-day hold period jumps out of what social media calls brain rot.

“Brain rot” is an internet slang for content that is trivial, simplistic, or of low quality, and the mental state of decline it may cause due to excessive consumption. It can lead to reduced attention span, mental fogginess, and difficulty concentrating, as well as negative cognitive effects like poor decision-making that escalates into tralala wars.

“Tralala wars” are of Italian origin. In October 2023, Internet users created various Italian memes about American actor and wrestler Dwayne Johnson in which he rhymes about absurd topics. In one video, Johnson would use the nonsense word “Tralalero tralala”, and would later rhyme it with “smerdo pure nell’aldilà” (“I shit even in the afterlife”). The phrase would later be used to create the basis of Italian brain rot.

Since then, it has gone viral to and morphed involving many nationalities American, South Korean, German, Polish, Indonesian, among others. Last May, Viktor Orban, Hungary’s prime minister posted this in his official Tiktok account.

@viktor_a_tiktokon

Tung tung tung tung sahur beugrott ebédszünetben #orbanviktor #miniszterelnok #follow #fyp #Magyarország #brainrot #tungtungtung #sahur

♬ TUNG SAHUR FUNK – TRXSHBXY & GAVORN

Domestic application

This series “Where the Philippines sees war, China seeks diplomacy” started with the article “Brawner launches new career as US talking head, war salesman” last April 4. We are on Part 32 of the general’s “tralala war”

Brawner also told troops that “Of course we will fight first, and then, we are also expecting reinforcements or help from our ally,” he said, noting that it is provided for under the Mutual Defense Treaty (MDT) of Manila and Washington that calls for each other’s defense in case of an “armed attack.”

What could be more deplorable than a leader who lies to his men?

Our Mutual Defense Treaty with the US does not guarantee what the Americans guarantee Japan today – an automatic, immediate and unconditional retaliatory attack on any enemy, in the event of an armed attack.

To start with, the Americans do not consider the South China Seas as part of the territorial coverage of the MDT, because they do not recognize any of our claims outside of the treaty limits that we inherited from them, which is limited only to anything within 118-degrees east longitude meridian up to 127-degree east longitude, and from the 20th parallel of north latitude.

Second, the last paragraph of Article IV of the MDT stipulates that the first step the Philippines has to take is to immediately report to the Security Council of the United Nations, any armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof.

Thirdly, the United States, for its part, would act to meet the common dangers in accordance with its constitutional processes. President Ferdinand Edralin Marcos told the National Press Club of New York on September 17,1982, “this means you will go to (your) Senate and (your) House of Representatives, that means delay while we are already dying there.”

            At the time of Brawner’s announcement, however,the US has entered into its second longest government shutdown in history. As a result, the most recent appropriations for the Department of Defense expired on September 30, 2025. Military personnel continue in a normal duty status, but without pay until such time as a continuing resolution or appropriations are passed by Congress and signed into law. Meanwhile, civilian personnel not engaged in excepted activities, have been furloughed.

            Given this scenario, I am not too optimistic about Brawner’s thinking process.

READ: https://asiancenturyph.com/2025/11/03/teodoros-task-force-philippines-is-just-more-megaphone-to-demonize-china/

World War II

            Japan began its armed attack on key installations of the United States in the Philippines on December 8, 1941 signaling its entry into World War II. General Masaharu Homma landed his 14^th Army of 45,000 men at Lingayen Gulf 14 days after on December 22, 1941. It took him another 12 days, to capture the City of Manila on January 2, 1942.

That had been 26 days and the capital was already taken. (That leaves Brawner only 4 days in a low-tech war to hold out.)

The Japanese Air Force continued its incessant bombings of the USAFFE forces that were holed in in Bataan and Corregidor. So, what Homma did meanwhile was to cool his heels. Because he had already strategically controlled Highway 3 (now called MacArthur Highway) from Pangasinan in the north all the way to Manila, he was able to isolate Bataan and Corregidor in the West from the food basket provinces in the East causing tens of thousands of our defense forces to die from starvation on top of the bombardments.

It took the Japanese Imperial Army 26 days to take Manila and seal off Philippine defenses applying low-tech warfare. It took not-so-bright Douglas MacArthur three months to figure out that he had already lost. On March 11, 1942, the much-celebrated general took a PT boat to a submarine in Mindanao to escape to Australia.

            On April 3, 1942, Homma sends his 21^st Division under Major-General Kameichiro Nagano, to Bataan.

After only five days, US Army Major General Edward P. King surrendered about 12,000 American and 64,000 Filipino fighters to Nagano’s 5,000 soldiers.

This is one of the “atrocities” the US will pin on Japan because on the same day, 76,000 prisoners-of-war had to negotiate a 4-day 66-kilometer walk from Lamao, Bataan to Capas, Tarlac. American propaganda will billet this as the infamous “Death March” as about 18,000 perished on the way.

But on the ground and studied closely, the surrender was actually an act of cowardice on the part of the American command because the Filipinos were willing to fight the Japanese invaders. MacArthur, who ordered King to surrender, also committed a monumental blunder because it did not anticipate that the Japanese did not have any facility in Bataan to hold and feed troops 15x its strength, nor the equipment and supplies, like trucks, food and medicine, to move them to the nearest Camp O’Donnel close to its supply lines 66-kilometers away.

About 27,000 more will die in concentration camps thereafter.

The surrenderers of Corregidor were lucky. After they gave up on May 6, one group was fetched by a boat from the island while rest were transferred to Bataan and from there brough by trucks to San Fernando and transferred by rail to Camp Pangatian in Nueva Ecija at the outskirts of Cabanatuan. Seventy-seven (77) members of the US Army Nurse and Navy Nurse Corps, who were separated from their male counterparts in service and moved the Santo Tomas and Los Banos Internment Camps to provide vital professional care to all Allied POWs held there. All of them survived the war.

Brain rot becomes new normal

It was only 3 years, 10 months and 12 days, on October 20,944, that the Americans landed at the Leyte Guld to start our liberation of the Philippines. It took the Japanese Imperial Army almost another year, on September 3, 1945, to surrender the Philippines to the Allied Forces.

By then, an estimated 1 million Filipinos, both military personnel and civilian, have died.

In contrast, less than 420,000 Americans died in the European and Pacific theaters of that same war.

Does Brawner not know how far war technology has gone for the last 84 years?

Brawner is the same madman who asked us eight months ago to prepare for war against China in the event of the latter’s invasion of Taiwan, an enlisted man who does policy, a task reserved for civilians, and foreign policy, a power reserved for the president of the Philippines.

This is the same fool who guards our “ghost” territories in the South China Seas.

This is the same moron who says the Typhon Weapon System can reach China, but does not say that its Tomahawk missile also threatens almost all of the ASEAN countries. The Philippines does not even have a single Tomahawk to arm the launcher, but does he realize that any Tomahawk launched outside the Philippines can turned over to a radial range of a system inside any EDCA base controlled by the Americans?

Does he know that Beidou3, China’s global navigation satellite system, is more superior to the Washington DC’s global positioning system (GPS), and can detect any hostile launch near instantaneouslyand trigger an intercept of the incoming missile and fire an appropriate response in less than 60 seconds?

Today in the event of a retaliatory attack (as China will not fire the first shot), The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force can obliterate the nine US EDCA bases and 16 other US facilities tagged by Senator Imee Marcos in a Senate hearing, in just 5 to 12 minutes using its Dong Feng 17 and 27 traveling at Mach 8 or eight times the speed of sound from Guandong, South China; any of its artificial islands in the South China Seas, or any of its submarines in the Pacific Ocean.  

This could mean wasting at least 100,000 Filipino lives without landing a single boot on the ground.

But I am worried less about China that I am about Russia. In a televised interview, President Vladimir Putin has warned that expanding US missile systems in other countries intended as “satellite-like status” has not only provoked of the resumption of Russia’s missile production and possibility of deploying missiles, but has already put the Philippines under his nuclear crosshairs.

The deployment of the Typhon Weapon System in the Philippines, rushed the signing of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership last June 2024, between North Korea and Russia, which unlike our MDT with the US, obligates both nations to provide immediate military assistance to the other if either is attacked, as even though the nearest Russian territory is more than 4,000 kilometers away, its treaty ally North Korea could be within Tomahawk’s range.

Russia’s state-of-the-art ICBM RS28 Sarmat or more popularly known as Satan II can carry a single 10 ton of payload, or ten payloads of 750 kiloton each, or sixteen (16) multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles that has speed of Mach 20, or 3 Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles, or a combination thereof.

In the case of the Avangard, the HGV is released at an altitude of about 100 kms after a few hundred seconds of flight to avert early detection of the enemy. From reentry, the glider can project to 6,000 kms traveling at Mach 27 speed capable of sharp high-speed horizontal and vertical evasive maneuvers in flight when approaching a target, carrying either a nuclear or conventional warhead.

So, what 30 days is Brawner talking about?

Conclusion

To start with, I do not think China will invade us or for that matter Taiwan.

But arguendo, why would China invade our beaches when it can fly paratroops from Hubei and special operations commandos from Guangdong to land straight into and secure our metropolitan areas simultaneously all over the country within another 3 hours. This country can be completely taken in just half a day given China’s logistics after the EDCA bases have been neutralized in the first quarter hour.

All it has to do is strangle our imports and exports the way China managed Donald Trump before the APEC summit, and a million of Filipinos will die of hunger and deprivation within Brawner’s 30 days.

The AFP chief of staff trained using World War I strategies and tactics, yet in his hands we entrust our lives and safety of our 160,000 active and 158,000 reservist armed forces?

Are any of them handang mamatay (ready to die)” for  Omet’s tralala war?

A reliable survey company has unearthed that only a negligible 4% in favor of defending the integrity of Philippine territory against foreigners.

Pulse Asia has correctly identified where the real warfront is – the people’s most urgent national concerns as of September 27 chart 54% for controlling inflation and 51% for fighting graft and corruption in government.

Only brain rots twist priorities.

   

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