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Plan to create one military command in each province faces pushback
A government plan to expand the Army’s territorial structure by establishing a regional military command (Kodam) in each province has faced pushback, sparking concerns that more bureaucratic layers in the military would slow the chain of command and undermine force readiness.
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Local arms: Soldiers from the Indonesian Army’s Raider 112 infantry battalion train with the SM2 light machine-gun produced by state-owned weapons manufacturer PT Pindad, on June 11, 2019 at their base in Banda Aceh.
(AFP/Chaideer Mahyuddin)
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government plan to expand the Army’s territorial structure by establishing a regional military command (Kodam) in each province has faced pushback, sparking concern that more bureaucratic layers in the military would slow the chain of command and undermine force readiness instead.
The country currently only has 15 regional military commands across all 38 provinces, including two formations that cover four new provinces in Papua and West Papua. Some of the commands cover only one province while some others work in two to five provinces.
Army chief Gen. Dudung Abdurachman is looking to establish one military command in each province, at the instruction of Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto who said the military needed to work closely with local governments and the expansion had been part of the country’s defense grand strategy.
Indonesia’s military operations rely on a well-developed doctrine of national security called the Total People’s Defense (Hankamrata), which requires a closed bond between citizens and soldiers to be maintained to garner support from the entire population and manage war-related resources.
Dudung said he would table the proposal this year to the Indonesian Military (TNI) commander Adm. Yudo Margono, whom Dudung said had also backed the plan.
Prabowo’s spokesman Dahnil Azhar Simanjuntak told The Jakarta Post that the proposal is still currently being processed within the Defense Ministry. “What the Army chief has put forward is in line with the defense minister’s goal in strengthening and adding the number of territorial commands,” said Dahnil.
Made Supriatma, a visiting fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, said the plan was “out of touch with reality,” stressing that the addition of unnecessary layers of bureaucracy would not solve the sluggish coordination hampering the military.
