Indonesia’s navy chief dropped a bombshell when he stopped to speak to reporters ahead of a meeting with his top brass earlier this month. “It seems”, he began tentatively, “that we need an aircraft-carrier for non-war military operations.” If this pitch was not entirely convincing, it is because the idea was probably not his own. Most big decisions about which military kit to buy in Indonesia these days are made by Prabowo Subianto, the former special-forces commander and defence minister who was elected president last year.
In fact, an aircraft-carrier is the last thing that Indonesia’s struggling navy needs. Its ageing fleet can claim only eight vessels with a range of more than 5,000km (3,000 miles). They patrol an archipelago wider than Europe, which sits astride key sea lanes for commerce and the geopolitical contest between America and China. Even more than ships, Indonesia lacks bases to sustain the navy’s operations and technology to help it understand what—and who—might be in its waters.
Carrier operations are among the hardest things that a navy can attempt. America makes launching and recovering aircraft on a pitching deck look routine. But it has been doing it for more than a century and still sustained high casualties well into the cold war. Moreover, carriers require escort ships and air-defence capabilities that Indonesia does not have. China is still working through the challenges of operating aircraft-carriers, more than two decades after buying its first one.
And carriers are expensive. Indonesia might look to buy a used item; China’s maiden carrier came from Ukraine. Speculation in Jakarta, the capital, has focused on a recently decommissioned Italian carrier, Garibaldi. Even this would not come cheap—and costs would soon pile up. The navy would need to acquire carrier-capable jets for the ship and train its pilots. It would be impossible to do all of this within the navy’s modest budget of just over $1bn a year.
You might wonder how Mr Prabowo, whose political programme has long been tied to his military reputation, could make such a blunder. But a retired general who served with him says that even in the army, his decisions were “very rarely based on a firm concept of operations”. He acted on instinct, and with an eye to politics as much as strategy. An aircraft-carrier would give Mr Prabowo something that he and many of his supporters crave more than military might: prestige.
Thailand offers a cautionary tale. The only other South-East Asian navy to boast an aircraft-carrier, it ordered a ship based on a Spanish design. Fully equipped when Thailand took possession of it in 1997, its Matador fighter jets were withdrawn from service in 2006, and it rarely goes to sea. It now sits alongside a pier south of Bangkok, the capital, where Thais can tour what was once intended to be a symbol of national greatness.
If Mr Prabowo’s Top Gun dreams are getting ahead of the navy, then his plans for the army risk taking it back to the “dual-function” military and civil role that it performed under his then-father-in-law, the late dictator Suharto. The defence ministry has announced plans to add new units to mirror the structure of the civilian government in each province and district. Meanwhile, a bill in the legislature would allow active-duty officers to serve as ministers. Both steps reverse important reforms made following the army’s return to the barracks in 1998, during the restoration of democracy. Civil-society activists say these moves degrade democracy; security analysts worry that they distract the government from more urgent national defence priorities.
These debates about the structure of the army and navy go back to the 1980s, when Mr Prabowo was a young major. His early mentor was General Benny Moerdani, a visionary strategist, who argued for a smaller, more professional force. Moerdani fought prestige acquisitions and sought to roll back the army’s civil role.
But Moerdani and Mr Prabowo had a falling out. Moerdani recalled Mr Prabowo from his role of leading patrols in East Timor, accusing him of disobeying orders. In response, Mr Prabowo set about undermining his former patron. Mr Prabowo’s father-in-law dismissed Moerdani, and his career once again took off. Now, the maverick officer is president himself. There is no one to stop him from reversing Moerdani’s legacy, or chasing the trappings of military glory. ■
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