by: BONO BUDI PRIAMBODO
Introduction: The vacuum of power
For over half a century, the political imagination of the Republic of Indonesia has been trapped in a state of arrested development. The contemporary domestic political landscape presents a bleak choice between short-sighted oligarchs—scoundrels whose statecraft extends no further than the fattening of personal and dynastic purses—and reactive bureaucrats paralyzed by a post-colonial inferiority complex. The structural tragedy of the modern Indonesian state is that it sits upon the world’s most critical maritime crossroads, possessing the geography of an empire but the stomach of a client state.
This was not always the case. The territory that comprises modern Indonesia was once the seat of formidable thalassocracies—empires built upon the absolute command of the seas. From the rapid, amphibious power-grabs of Dapunta Hyang Sri Jayanasa’s Srivijaya in the seventh century, which weaponized the sea nomads to monopolize global trade between China and India, to King Kretanegara of Singasari in the thirteenth century, who launched the aggressive Pamalayu Expedition to establish a forward defense against the Mongol Empire, the ancestors of Indonesia understood the ocean as a weapon of raw geopolitical projection.
Following a long, humiliating interlude of European colonialism, this world-shaping vision briefly flickered back to life during the founding era of the Republic. In figures like Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta, Indonesia found intellectual giants capable of navigating global storms. Even the architects of the New Order, despite their internal brutality, possessed a cold, hyper-competent understanding of institutional man-management. Yet, following the dissolution of these defining leadership eras, Indonesia has been left with a risk-averse bureaucracy that has turned the nation inward.
To break this cycle of domestic decay and external dependency, Indonesia requires a radical, cold-blooded blueprint for the twenty-first century: Vision Indonesia XXI. This manifesto demands a total reorganization of Indonesian statecraft, a dismantling of post-colonial cultural rot, and the forging of an unbreakable, sovereign partnership with the rising global hegemon in Beijing.
The historical paradox of western aid and civil cockpits
To understand how Indonesia arrived at its current state of geopolitical timidity, one must dismantle the prevailing myths surrounding Western military assistance during the Cold War. It is a well-traveled historical narrative that the Western Bloc was inherently ungenerous to the young republic, forcing Jakarta into the arms of the Soviet Union. The reality, however, is far more transactional: the flow of Western arms was never a matter of simple stinginess, but a calculated response to Indonesia’s revolutionary stance on resource nationalism and non-alignment.
In the post-independence era of the 1950s, the Indonesian National Armed Forces (TNI) initially relied on World War II-era leftovers inherited from the Imperial Japanese Army and the Dutch colonial forces (KNIL). While the West did provide operational hardware—including American P-51 Mustangs, B-25 Mitchells, and eight British DH-115 Vampire jets that introduced the Indonesian Air Force (AURI) to the jet age—this aid was abruptly terminated whenever Jakarta threatened Western colonial interests.
The turning point occurred during the West Irian (Papua) dispute and the subsequent PRRI/Permesta regional rebellions of 1957–1958. Fearing that Sukarno was leaning too close to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), the United States covertly backed the rebels, supplying them with an entire covert air force (AUREV). When the Indonesian military crushed the rebellion and captured CIA pilot Allen Pope, Washington realized its strategy of external subversion had backfired.
The American response was a masterstroke of internal containment. Recognizing that they could not openly arm Sukarno’s government without fueling his anti-imperialist campaigns (“Amerika kita seterika, Inggris kita linggis”), the US bypassed the state and directly befriended the Indonesian Army (TNI-AD). Through the loophole of “Civic Action” programs, Washington flooded the Army with communications gear, trucks, and heavy engineering equipment under the guise of infrastructure building.
The true objective was to keep the Army mobile, connected, and popular as an anti-communist counterweight to the PKI, while simultaneously pulling hundreds of promising officers—including the future elite of the New Order—into the intellectual pipeline of the US Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.
This created a nation dangerously divided against itself. While the Air Force under Air Marshal Omar Dani became deeply politicized, full of fiery, left-leaning kleine Soekarnotjes (little Sukarnos) flying supersonic Soviet MiGs, and the Navy (ALRI) under Admiral R.E. Martadinata operated heavy Soviet cruisers for the West Irian campaign, the Army was quietly being groomed by Western intelligence. When the political cataclysm of October 1, 1965 erupted, the Western-leaning network within the Army took absolute control of the state, reversing Indonesia’s global alignment overnight.
The inward turn: Infantry doctrine and the hollowing of Deplu
When General Suharto assumed power, he operated with the distinct mindset of an ex-KNIL infantry officer whose primary operational experience consisted of crushing internal rebellions with shock-and-awe tactics. Consequently, he systematically restructured the armed forces to serve as domestic counter-insurgency (COIN) units, fundamentally breaking Indonesia’s capacity to act as an outward-looking thalassocracy.
Suharto viewed the Air Force not as a tool for strategic power projection, but as an extension of the infantry. He rebuilt the branch around tactical transport—specifically the C-130 Hercules fleet, which could rapidly deploy special forces across the archipelago—and light, ground-strafing COIN aircraft like the OV-10 Bronco and the A-4 Skyhawk. Air superiority fighters were reduced to mere “extras”—small prestige purchases to maintain basic regional respect.
His approach to the Navy was defined by an even deeper strategic neglect and historical distrust, stemming from the navy’s early loyalty to Sukarno. Suharto reduced the world’s largest archipelagic fleet to a glorified floating trucking company. The naval doctrine was stripped down to Satfib (Amphibious Type Force) and Kolinlamil (Military Sealift Command).
The Navy’s primary mission was no longer to command the blue waters or contest maritime space against foreign powers, but to pack Army infantry battalions and tanks into World War II-era landing ships to suppress regional uprisings in Sumatra, Kalimantan, or East Timor.
Simultaneously, the New Order executed a deliberate political castration of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Kemlu, formerly Deplu). While Suharto was a grandmaster of man-management who knew exactly how to use the right cards for the right era, his utilization of diplomatic heavyweights was strictly transactional.
