Knowing left from right: The irrationality of Indonesia's security architecture
- Jeremy W. P. Sitorus
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
“It is not possible,” reads the English translation of the Fundamentals of Guerrilla Warfare, “to ensure the success of political, psychological, and socioeconomic measures by means of military actions alone, for success depends on the quality of the political leadership.”
When he wrote this, General A. H. Nasution, father of the Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI) as a political actor, was making a point about the need to synergize military success as a guerrilla combatant with strong political infrastructure if objectives are to be achieved and upheld, in the same vein as Mao not long prior. But he inadvertently touched on another truth (perhaps standing in contradiction, and definitely painfully relevant) about Indonesia’s security posture. Not only is it not possible to achieve nonmilitary objectives with excessive reference to military means, but it is actively harmful to attempt as much.
TNI interests have encroached ever further on ordinarily civilian policy realms since President Prabowo Subianto took office. Soldiers are increasingly involved in his flagship Free Nutritious Meals program, the military has taken a prominent role in major food estate developments in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) and West New Guinea, and since August 2025, the TNI-AD (Army) has established over a hundred “Territorial Development Infantry Battalions” (Yonifs TP). Each Yonif TP, astonishingly, features one company for civil engineering, one for the provision of healthcare, one for farming, and one for animal husbandry—more companies for miscellaneous “development” purposes than combat companies. There are plans to establish a jaw-dropping 150 more Yonifs TP a year.
All in all, the TNI is on course to become the most systematically and overtly embroiled in civilian policy areas of any regular military in the world.
Much has been said by scores of political scientists, activists, and pundits about the problems that increasing military involvement in civilian realms pose for the health of Indonesian democracy. It would be understandable to worry about adding nothing to that particular conversation that has yet to be said, to sound like a broken record. What many commentators wrongfully overlook is the grave risk that this increasing entanglement also poses for Indonesia’s security posture.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 called attention to the fact that the emperor had no clothes when it came to European grand strategy, countries all over the world have rediscovered a holistic understanding of security and readiness. Leaders have been falling over themselves to do everything from pursuing energy independence and bolstering defense supply chains to rewilding border regions to make them more defensible, and as a side bonus, more biodiverse. Indonesia has followed global trends in that regard under the guise of confronting “nontraditional” security issues, especially food security. Novel though the TNI’s “new” approach may seem, however, nontraditional security is deeply traditional for Indonesia, and silly “traditional” concerns like power projection or air superiority or operations in the information environment are in fact the real novelties.
Events abroad are giving Cilangkap the opportunity to gleefully validate outdated and, frankly, primitive prior thinking. The military philosophy of Total Defense of the People’s Security (Hankamrata), in place by statute law since 2004, not only demands consolidation of all human and economic resources, but envisions the basic outline of a likely Indonesian war as a defensive, three-stage, guerilla (read: land-based, i.e. Army-centric) war against a foreign, conventional, imperialist aggressor, with broad, Mao-style civilian-military integration. In that “holistic” spirit of war, the TNI has been mixed up in civilian affairs since well before Prabowo’s administration, from undertaking infrastructural projects and running point on disaster management to educating the public about the “evils” of homosexuality.
This is in no small part because of the circumstances under which Indonesia was founded. The impetus for guerrilla-style thinking has all the weight of revolutionary, anti-imperialist nostalgia for the National Revolution of 1945-1949, during which Indonesian rebels successfully defeated Dutch forces in a protracted guerrilla war, and that national myth is is difficult to dislodge. Indeed, Nasution’s Fundamentals was published just four years after peace was agreed between Indonesia and the Netherlands.
The Yonifs TP, and the many other aspects of the increasing militarization of Indonesian life, lend themselves very well to this vision of warfare. The sad part is that this vision of warfare is terrifyingly out of step with reality in the 21st century. The West eventually fell into the trap of thinking that security is all about power projection and lethality and so on, and neglected the more out-of-the-way corners of grand strategy: food security, energy independence, and infrastructural resiliency. Our trap is the inverse.
This vision has led to more than just distractions and misplaced priorities. The TNI-AD has long attracted more of the military budget than the other branches combined and its continued concern with “nontraditional” security will only worsen this problem. The privileging of the TNI-AD in this respect and others in turn led to our failure to achieve even the most pessimistic naval procurement targets under the Minimum Essential Force (MEF) plan, and what progress we have made on bolstering the TNI-AL (Navy) seems deeply misguided; buying the Italian aircraft carrier Giuseppe Garibaldi is an interesting idea, but it will almost certainly be a colossal waste if the military follows through on mainly using it for “military operations other than war”, meaning humanitarian operations and disaster relief.
Meanwhile, for all of our enthusiastic expansion in an increasingly eclectic fleet of combat aircraft for the TNI-AU (Air Force), there appears to be no progress on buying early warning and control aircraft to provide basic monitoring capabilities to our airspace and waters (aircraft which even Singapore has taken care to obtain—even though Singapore has less territory to patrol than there is land in the Special Region of Yogyakarta alone). Despite being an island nation, we therefore are extremely constrained in our ability to assert control over our own seas.
While we would certainly crush the Dutch if for some mysterious reason they decided to recolonize Indonesia, it is clear that we would fall flat on our face attempting to confront any conflict in which we might plausibly be embroiled, especially in the South China Sea. Proportional to its size, Indonesia is perhaps the least prepared of any country on earth for a realistic conflict—and the black heart of this rot lies in our doctrine, in our inability to distinguish dated from modern, left from right, old and new. Our sad state of affairs, though, persists because it is politically expedient for the current administration.
The Yudhoyono administration was a break in this chronic slide further and further into delusion, when we were beginning to distinguish left from right. The MEF plan was set in place, the annual Garuda Shield joint exercises with the United States began, and the TNI-AL took on an actually meaningful commitment for once, with the initiation of multilateral antipiracy patrols. We showed that we can start down the road of transitioning to a professional, modern fighting force able fulfill modern missions in a modern security environment. We can do it again.
But that requires not just reversing the creation of the Yonifs TP and the slew of other programs in which the TNI has been wrapped up, but also stricter civilian-military separation, rebalancing the budget at the expense of the TNI-AD, laying out an “MEF plan 2.0” as part of a broader effort to help the TNI-AL and TNI-AU achieve their full potential, and making a genuine effort to fulfill it. All of this has to be supported by radical doctrinal reform and serious planning for actual regional security flashpoints. Sadly, given the nature of our current political moment, it seems unlikely that anybody will have the courage to demand that Cilangkap get back on track.
This article written by Jeremy W. P. Sitorus, a first-year student at Wheaton College in Illinois, where he studies Political Science and is considering a concentration in International Relations. He is a member of the Aequitas Fellows Program in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, and the founder of the college’s Model United Nations club. His research interests focus on Indonesian security policy, civil–military relations, and strategic doctrine.