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Defending Indonesia: A forward strategy
The future is the era of brain war, where the thinking and innovative nation will gain global competitive advantages and significantly increase its chances to win a war.
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ast January, the Defense Ministry issued a state defense policy that is still anchored in the 2009-2024 defense strategy and posture development, released in 2008. However, such a policy will be meaningless if the ministry fails to reexamine and remedy a set of established assumptions inherent in this policy.
As strategy is about getting to the next stage rather than some ultimate destination, immediate remedies are to be made within the timeframe of 2020-2024 if Indonesia is going to reap the expected strategic objectives from 2024 onward.
Correspondingly, with the timeframe of no less than four years and not more than 25 years (2020-2045), the defense strategy in 2020 shall be reviewed from five strategic dimensions: the root of Indonesia’s national security interests; the international system; global trends; how, when and where to develop, deploy and employ the Indonesian armed forces; and how to strategically synchronize nonmilitary dimensions of war (political, economic, psychological, technological and cybernetic) into overall national defense capability especially in the peaceful, interwar period.
Of these five strategic dimensions, the 2020 defense strategy shall futuristically and methodologically reexamine assumptions about five policy options: control option; foreign policy option; force development option; resource allocation option and force employment option.
The first assumption pertains to how the civil-military relationship is being shaped and how it corresponds to future states. Since the 1998 tension has brewed between the Indonesian Military (TNI) headquarters and the Ministry of Defense and tended to impede a wide spectrum of issues, from political control on one end to defense procurement on the other.
This situation has not improved, even though, for the last six years, the defense minister post has been occupied by two retired Army generals. In other words, the effectual implementation of defense strategy for the next 25 years will be largely determined by how this civil-military relationship is settled from 2020-2024.
The second assumption is how well the national defense strategy predicts possible global and domestic political scenarios, followed by a corresponding combination of military and nonmilitary instruments of power. Unexpected scenarios to be considered are the possible clash of great powers in the region, less ASEAN support and a less favorable environments for Indonesian defense interests, a failure to defend national ideology, intensifying unconventional warfare including but not limited to insurgency, terrorism and biological warfare, and incoherent interagency working relationships within the government that exacerbate a number of other unexpected security scenarios.
The third assumption is about force development, where the combination of superior strategy and quality manpower will be followed by quantity and force multipliers. There are at least four aspects to be considered to challenge our assumptions in this matter: the future proportions of strength between the Army, Navy and Air Force; the quality of minds of TNI personnel; the combination and strategic necessity of defense reserve components and the quality of technology being used.
Of particular importance underlying this third assumption is how well the Defense Ministry revamps the TNI education system from the tactical all the way up to the strategic level with a more professional world-class education system by incorporating future operational engagements within interagency, intergovernmental and multinational environments in times of peace, crisis and war.
As the defense minister, since his appointment in October 2019, has been so concerned with the strategic necessity of improving the welfare and quality of human military assets, the starting point to address his concern is by rethinking the value of human assets within the TNI establishment.
The main starting point to modernize and contextualize Indonesia’s people-based total defense system shall be by seriously treating people as the main asset (J-1) as opposed to intelligence (J-2) and operations (J-3). Any creative ways to leverage the quality of Indonesian people (military and civilian) for national defense interests and for improving the unity between Indonesian Military, its civilian counterparts and citizens must be done at any costs.
The future is the era of brain war, where the thinking and innovative nation will gain global competitive advantages and significantly increase its chances to win a war.
The Fourth assumption pertains to resource allocation, which particularly depends on three inter-related factors: efficiency in terms of saving national resources from unnecessary human, operational, and procurement-related spending; the suppression of corruption in the defense and military bureaucracy to the lowest level possible; and the investment and accelerated building of a visionary defense industry to become a global trendsetter in selective global niche markets.
Based on this assumption, Indonesia’s plan to procure Russian Su-35s and US Bell Boeing MV-22B Block C Opsreys must be based on the very tough policy justification based on the four underlying sub-assumptions: the defense strategic objectives; the kind of wars we anticipate and the TNI roles; its expected military operations; and its appropriated capability to conduct such futuristic operations. Capability itself is not only about the weapon system but is also about building, maintenance, costs and the proper synchronization of such a system with human factors and related weapon systems.
The fifth assumption is about the way the national defense strategy picks employment options, whether it leans toward more offensive, defensive or merely deterrent approaches throughout the warfare domains available. So far, since 2008, the Indonesian defense posture is developed based on military operations for war and military operations for other than war, with specific priorities given to global peacekeeping forces and conventional and nonconventional engagement in the domains of land, sea and air.
Subsequently, the Defense Ministry for the next four years shall seriously lay a strong foundation for the military employment in the area of cyberspace, which is currently treated by superpowers and regional powers as a warfare domain.
Last but not the latest, strategy is like a story that consists of adjustable plots along the way. The main characters, defense policymakers and all citizens, shall be looking forward positively to the future to achieve the result of comedy with satisfactory resolution as opposed to the tragedy.
Although the risk of ending up with tragedy is still inherent in any strategy, the offs of its occurrence are lowered if we dare to continuously review our established, inherent assumptions and turn such institutional biases into excellent foresight to shape and generate the future we envision.
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Adjunct faculty member at the Indonesian Defense University and senior fellow at the Democracy, Integrity and Peace (DIP) Center with a PhD from the University of Exeter, UK. This is a personal view.
