THE RECENT school shootings are the tip of an iceberg of a vast private-security industry, Filipinos recruited into foreign wars, expanding U.S. military access, and rising defense expenditure.
These converging phenomena intersect through poverty and violence, corruption and weak institutions.
The Philippines has experienced an unprecedented wave of campus gun violence in Tacloban and Zamboanga, occurring within a span of just two months. These school shootings have shattered the idyllic self-image of a peaceful nation.
Internationally, school violence has become increasingly linked to the Western online far-right through “764,” a faction of a decentralized, global extremist ecosystem known as “The COM” (The Community).
Targeting, grooming, sadism, neo-Nazism
These Western-based digital threat actors are actively targeting, grooming, and radicalizing vulnerable youth.
Emerging in the early 2020s, 764 is a decentralized, internationally operating online sextortion network with a penchant for sadism. In 2023, Bradley Cadenhead, who founded the network at 15, was sentenced to 80 years in prison. Presumably, 764 is part of the Order of Nine Angles, with decades of neo-Nazi ideology and activism.
Currently, the Philippine school violence incidents are few and their causes remain contested. But the public debate is already moving toward security responses: tighter school access, armed protection, digital surveillance, controls on violent online content and stronger police-school coordination.
Yet, more securitization does not resolve the challenge of excess securitization. What’s needed is addressing poverty, social exclusion, bullying, institutional corruption and the wide availability of firearms.
In international view, Philippine society already contains an extraordinary density of guards, police, firearms and surveillance.
A huge security ecosystem – and export engine
Ordinary Filipinos take the vast scale of security as given because it has become normalized. In an international perspective, it is typical of countries where poverty remains rampant.
Industry and government sources put licensed private security personnel at roughly 500,000, with industry estimates historically reaching about 700,000 employees when other security personnel are included.
This is a mass labor market, not a niche occupation. Guards protect condominiums, malls, banks, hospitals, schools, factories and private estates. The sector creates demand for firearms, uniforms, vehicles, CCTV, access systems, communications, training and security software.
Above it sits the formal state apparatus: police and an increasingly modernized Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP). Around it is a growing contractor ecosystem—logistics, maintenance, construction, maritime protection, intelligence, cybersecurity and defense IT.
Beyond the Philippines lies another layer: Filipinos working for foreign private military and security companies, including major Western contractors and specialized maritime and executive-protection networks. Digital platforms now openly advertise such work; “Silent Professionals,” for example, lists contract executive-protection positions in Manila.
The Philippines is not just importing security. It is increasingly exporting security labor.
From labor migration to covert military recruitment
The most disturbing extension is the recruitment of Filipinos into foreign conflicts. Philippine authorities warned in February that overseas employment offers were being used to lure Filipinos into foreign armed forces, including Russia’s war against Ukraine.
There is a fair amount of hypocrisy in this, however. For years, Filipino fighters have been recruited to the West’s post-9/11 wars.
In Empire’s Labor: The Global Army That Supports U.S. Wars (2019), geographer Adam Moore demonstrated how these U.S. overseas wars rely heavily on “third country nationals” recruited from nations like the Philippines and Bosnia.
Typically, military contractors pay Filipino workers significantly less than U.S. personnel, facilitating what is described as “war on the cheap.”
Ever since the failure of postwar industrialization, the Philippines has built one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated labor-export systems. Recruiters, overseas employment networks, remittance channels and millions of workers accustomed to migration have created infrastructure that is now exploited by military recruiters and traffickers.
Big contractor money, expansive US military footprint
The foreign contractor pipeline expanded dramatically after 2003, when the Iraq War created huge demand for third-country labor. KBR became the dominant U.S. logistics contractor, employing thousands of workers across Iraq. Subcontractors recruited Filipinos at strikingly low wages.
KBR remains a major U.S. government contractor: its 2025 revenue was about $7.8 billion. DynCorp, a major Iraq/Afghanistan contractor, was acquired by Amentum, whose 2025 revenue reached $14.4 billion.
Iraq/Afghanistan created mass demand. The post-2014 period shifted toward specialized security, maritime protection, intelligence and technical contracting. Ukraine and renewed Middle East tensions have reopened recruitment channels, increasingly through digital platforms.
The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) has expanded access to Philippine sites, with U.S. infrastructure investment already exceeding $80 million and further funding planned. This is not simply symbolic. Philippine defense modernization is accelerating.
Here’s the contradiction: Greater military capability can reduce vulnerability by strengthening deterrence. But it embeds the Philippines deeply in a permanent regional security architecture: bases, exercises, logistics, missiles, aircraft, intelligence, cybersecurity and foreign defense suppliers.
New conflicts must be generated to sustain the profit margins.
GDP, poverty and corruption: the vicious circle
The security economy is already substantial. Philippine GDP reached ₱28 trillion in 2025. Defense alone now equals roughly 1.5% of GDP in budgetary terms, although imported weapons do not translate one-for-one into domestic value added.
Public order, private security, defense logistics, construction, physical security and cybersecurity broaden the domestic ecosystem. A reasonable analytical estimate remains roughly 2.5–3% of GDP, or about $12–15 billion annually, for the identifiable domestic security economy and its immediate ecosystem.
Foreign security contractors may add perhaps $0.5–1 billion in Filipino earnings, a segment of the remittance income.
All these billions of dollars are away from ordinary Filipinos’ development, social transfers and welfare.
A deeper problem is political economy. Poverty supplies security labor. Insecurity creates security demand. Security spending creates contracts and employment. And weak procurement and political institutions create opportunities for rents.
The flood-control scandal—now involving hundreds of investigations—shows how genuine public needs become vehicles for political-business extraction.
Prosecutions matter, but trials alone do not reform procurement, political finance, contracting or patronage. And selective prosecutions make things even worse.
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Without structural reforms, corruption undermines development, perpetuates poverty and thereby reproduces insecurity.
As the Philippines is becoming more securitized, it is growing increasingly insecure.
Dr Dan Steinbock, an expert on the multipolar world, is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore).
