Developing Indonesia’s Basic Defense Forces

The national resources of Indonesia have a major influence in developing the nation’s basic defense forces. The state’s capacity to provide budgetary and human resources is a major determining factor in building the nation’s basic defense forces. Indonesia is currently not able to leapfrog into the development of ideal defense forces directly due to constraints on national resources. Thus, the first step is to focus on developing basic defense forces until the national resources are sufficiently able to support the development of ideal defense forces. Basic defense forces should be able to counteract not only fundamental threats (e.g. open warfare), but also increasingly non-traditional threats, current and potential, to the nation. An assessment of these non-traditional threats, namely terrorism, cyber attacks, maritime security and internal disturbances, is important in order to design basic defense forces, and it begins with a look at the dynamics of the strategic environment that results in changes in the shape and spectrum of threats. A key geopolitical concern is that the development of basic defense forces is not meant to bring the region into an arms race situation. Rather, pursuing multilateralism and building regional security architecture through international bodies such as ASEAN are crucial to designing basic defense forces to successfully eliminate non-traditional threats, as these are increasingly racing to the forefront of not just national, but also regional, security concerns. This paper will explore how Indonesia builds its basic defense forces with a focus on countering common non-threat traditional threats. In order to build basic defense forces, the strategic environment, the state’s budgetary constraints, the progress of regional defense cooperation and the anatomy of common threats must be understood first.