| Summary/Abstract |
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.
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