A sharp political dispute has erupted over the planned pause of Trinidad and Tobago’s Military-Led Academic Training Programme (MiLAT), after a senior opposition parliamentarian publicly condemned the government’s decision and pushed back against the official justification for the move.
Christian Birchwood, opposition MP for Laventille East/Morvant, leveled criticism at Defence Minister Wayne Sturge during an opposition press briefing on Wednesday, rejecting Sturge’s core claim that the program was suspended due to unsustainable economic costs. Sturge had first confirmed the temporary suspension publicly on Tuesday, emphasizing that the initiative had not been permanently terminated, and that the government was carrying out a full-scale restructuring of MiLAT before any potential relaunch.
Birchwood argued that Sturge had fundamentally misinterpreted the core mission of the program. In blunt remarks, he said: “It is my opinion had the minister done some research or some homework, he would understand that these programmes were designed to be socially viable, and there is a major difference there.” Birchwood dismissed Sturge’s framing of the suspension as nonsensical, noting that MiLAT was created explicitly to serve and uplift the most marginalized and vulnerable groups in Trinidad and Tobago’s society. He called the minister’s justification for the pause “extremely punitive and insensitive at the very least.”
The opposition MP also pushed back against Sturge’s implication that MiLAT had failed to reduce rising violent crime rates, a line of argument the defence minister had advanced to support the suspension. Birchwood called this claim “unadulterated nonsense,” noting that Sturge was incorrectly holding the standalone program responsible for stopping all violent crime across the country. He further challenged the minister’s cost-based reasoning, drawing a parallel to the country’s national police service: if rising crime amid high public spending justified suspending a program, Birchwood argued, the government would have to suspend the Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) by the same flawed logic.
To back up his claim that MiLAT has delivered meaningful results, Birchwood highlighted recent academic performance data from the initiative. The 2024 cohort of MiLAT participants achieved an 86% pass rate in English Language and a 66.3% pass rate in mathematics, results he said demonstrated the program’s on-the-ground success. He closed by pressing the government to outline what support will replace MiLAT for vulnerable communities, noting that just like existing public employment and support programs CEPEP and URP, MiLAT disproportionately serves low-income and marginalized groups that will bear the brunt of its absence.