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Poor budget planning is hurting weapons modernization: Experts
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A member of the military cycles past a Hercules aircraft at Halim Perdana Kusuma Air Base in Jakarta in 2018. (Antara/Galih Pradipta)
T
he government might face difficulties in modernizing the country’s primary weapons system (Alutsista) as much of its defense budget is allocated toward personnel expenses and maintenance of old equipment, defense analysts have said.
“We understand that the government has a desire to modernize weapons systems, but that has been, and may be, hard to achieve since a large portion of the defense budget has gone to other expenditures,” defense analyst Curie Maharani said in a webinar on Monday.
In a discussion hosted by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), she further pointed out how the plan had not been supported by sufficient spending on equipment.
Since 2009, the government has been running a 15-year program called Minimum Essential Force (MEF), which is aimed at modernizing 100 percent of the nation’s weapons systems by 2024. Yet, Indonesia’s spending on weapons has been steadily decreasing in recent years.
In 2016, for example, the Finance Ministry recorded that the government spent around 18 percent of the Rp 98.08 trillion (US$6.76 billion) defense budget to modernize weapons. Three years later, in 2019, arms spending decreased to 10.61 percent of the total defense budget of Rp 117.91 trillion.
As a result, the government has only reached 68.9 percent of the MEF target, falling short of its 2019 target of 72 percent, according to the 2020-2024 National Medium-Term Development Plan (RPJMN).
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