Editorial | JDF’s move no big thing

The establishment of the separate Ministry of Defence with the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) seems to this newspaper a largely administrative move that ought to be uncontroversial. On its face, the move ought not to involve an expensive expansion of the public bureaucracy.

However, we also hope that the development implies, too, a deep shift of the Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) to being an institution of national development, and away from the growing perception of it as an auxiliary of the constabulary, with potential damage to its reputation.

While the reassignment of the JDF to the OPM is recognised in government’s Estimates of Expenditure for the 2026/27 fiscal, which were tabled in Parliament earlier this month, it was little noticed until Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness’ tweet on the matter this week on the social media platform X.

Previously, the JDF, administratively, fell under the ministry of national security (which was the case for the last half century), although Prime Minister Holness, like all previous prime ministers, remained the minister of defence.

“ We have now formally established a Ministry of Defence within the Office of the Prime Minister,” Dr Holness said in his tweet . “This means that the JDF is administered directly through that ministry to ensure stronger coordination at the highest level.”

Significantly, the prime minister noted that the shift was done during the initial phase of the Government’s response to Hurricane Melissa, suggesting that the decision was crystallised in the context of the JDF’s part in post-hurricane relief, and its expected role in Jamaica’s reconstruction from devastation caused by the Category 5 storm, especially in the island’s western parishes. He, at the same time, noted that the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) was also shifted to the OPM “so (that) disaster response and defence operations work in full alignment”.

The JDF has consistently emerged as the state institution in which Jamaicans have the greatest trust: better than the police, Parliament, politicians and even the judiciary – all of which tend to return confidence levels of below 50 per cent. In some cases, especially with Parliament and politicians, less than a quarter of the population have over the past decade-and-a-half declared trust in them.

Over the same period, the JDF, according to findings by Vanderbilt University’s LAPOP research laboratory, has generally enjoyed the trust of over 60 per cent of Jamaicans, reaching a high of 68.4 in the 2012 biennial survey on attitudes to democracy in the Americas.

Even when citizens’ trust in the military wasn’t specifically canvassed, a declared willingness among Jamaicans to tolerate a military coup to either address crime or corruption – as high as 65 per cent in 2018 – might be used as a proxy for people’s attitudes towards the JDF. However, even though surveys from different sources report that the vast majority of Jamaicans (over 70 per cent) continue to perceive a high level of corruption among public officials, there has been declining support for military intervention to deal with the problem. Forty-six per cent of Jamaicans held that view, according to the 2023 LAPOP report.

That is a good thing!

Except that there has been no offsetting perception of an improved quality in democratic governance, although the majority of Jamaicans support democracy.

There is likely no single explanation for these shifts, but one likely contributor is that more than a wee bit of the JDF’s sheen as an elite, sophisticated institution with highly trained, professional leadership has been rubbed off by its long-standing association with the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) in crime-fighting.

The JDF has been on the streets, on patrol with the police, since the 1970s. Which is understandable, given the JDF security mandate and (until the reductions of the last two years) Jamaica’s soaring crime rates over the period.

But the JDF has perhaps paid a bit of a reputational price of being perceived, when on the streets, as an appendage to the police, who enjoyed low levels of trust. Lower crime rates may help to change the negative perception of the constabulary, as well as allow the military more time and space to focus on potential external threats.

This as well as other contributions to national development in its 2006 and 2017 strategic defence reviews – such as the areas outlined by Prime Minister Holness and its training of young people under the Jamaica National Services Corps (JNSC).

Against this backdrop, a dedicated Ministry of Defence makes sense – and should be more efficient. In a sense, under the old arrangement, the Ministry of National Security and its minister were like service providers for the defence minister.

The new arrangement moves those operational services to the OPM, presumably under the permanent secretary in that office and the staff at the national security ministry, whose jobs were dedicated to the JDF. In that sense, it is largely a return, though at a different scale, to what existed in pre-Independence Jamaica and the early post-Independence period.

If we take Prime Minister Holness at his word, which we do, the increase in the JDF’s budget for the new fiscal year – from J$36.1 billion to J$52.7 billion – was only incidental to the administrative shift.

He said in his tweet: “ As we look to the new budget, the Government stands ready to support the JDF’s plans to strengthen maritime and airlift capabilities, because these are national assets that help to secure us and serve Jamaica.”