PH, Malaysia end military, disaster response exercises

CAPAS, Tarlac — The Philippines and Malaysia ended their two-week annual exercise aimed at enhancing the interoperability of both countries.

“The training went very well,” Army chief Lt. Gen. Eduardo Año told reporters after the closing ceremonies on Monday.

“We were able to share our best practices in humanitarian assistance and disaster response with Malaysian counterparts,” he added.

“The exercises with Malaysian Army were held from Sept. 9 to 21. The series of Training Activity Land Malaysia-Philippines (MALPHI) focused on a combined Army operations through a command post exercise dealing with a scenario on humanitarian assistance and disaster response operations,” Año said.

The exercises next year are expected to be held in Malaysia.

Año said they are also eyeing to include other countries as observers or participants.

“In our next MALPHI we are going to put different scenarios that may require additional skills from participants and the probability of conducting the activity with other countries as an observer or participant,” he said.

The additional scenarios would still be related to disaster response and would be a combination of man-made and natural calamities.

There were 76 personnel from  the Philippine Army and 30 from Malaysian Army who joined the bilateral exercises held at the Peacekeeping Operations Center here.