Defense spending to be increased, but not much

Thursday, 18 June 2009

The Jakarta Post

The House of Representatives will likely increase Indonesia’s defense budget to Rp 36.5 trillion (US$3.6 billion) in 2010 from Rp 33.7 trillion allocated for this year.  A proposal to increase the defense budget by Rp 2.8 trillion was likely to be passed at the House plenary meeting, House Budgeting Committee member Azwar Anas told The Jakarta Post in Jakarta on Tuesday.

“The defense budget is likely to increase. A proposal has been brought to the working committee. Proposals usually get passed easily once they have been brought to the working committee,” Azwar said.  However, Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono said the increase was far less than he had expected.

“Ideally, we need an increase of between Rp 7 trillion and Rp 10 trillion, and we had reached an agreement with House Commission I on that,” Juwono said.  “Even if we had an extra Rp 7 trillion or Rp 10 trillion, the budget could only fund maintenance, not the provision of new military equipment,” he said.  A military expert from the University of Indonesia, Bantarto Bandoro, however, criticized Juwono’s statement, saying Indonesia’s military authority depended more heavily on the ministry’s capability to efficiently allocate its budget than the amount of its increase.

However, Bantarto also acknowledged that proportionally, the Indonesian defense budget was somewhat abnormal compared to that of neighboring countries such as Malaysia and Singapore.  “In proportion to its gross domestic product [GDP], Indonesia’s defense spending is far less than that of other countries in the Southeast Asia region,” he said.  “This is ironic because Indonesia is the largest country in the region with most of its archipelago consisting of maritime areas. Logically, we should have a much larger defense budget than Malaysia or Singapore. The ideal defense budget for Indonesia is between Rp 40 trillion and Rp 50 trillion,” he said.

Indonesia’s GDP amounted to around Rp 5,000 trillion in 2008. This means the country’s Rp 33.7 trillion defense budget is less than 1 percent of its GDP.  On the other hand, Singapore, a country whose 710 square-kilometer-area is smaller than Indonesia’s capital of Jakarta, allocates around Rp 80 trillion (6 percent of its GDP) to defense.

Recently, Indonesia accused Malaysian battleships of entering Indonesian territorial waters known as the Ambalat block.  Both Indonesia and Malaysia have claimed Ambalat waters as part of their territories.  The issue over the maritime block, believed to be rich in oil and gas reserves, has been a source of tension between Indonesia and Malaysia since the 1980s.

Experts say a string of tragedies, in which military aircraft have “fallen out of the sky like raindrops due to a lack of maintenance funding”, has degraded Indonesia’s defense authority, allowing Malaysia to test the country’s patience by continually breaching the Ambalat boundaries.  The Regional Representatives Council has said the defense budget needs to be increased to help the Defense Ministry renew obsolete military equipment and uphold the nation’s authority in the eyes of its neighboring countries.