DEFENDING INDONESIA: A FORWARD STRATEGY
Last January, the Defense Ministry issued a state defense policy that is still anchored in the 2009-2024 defense strategy and posture development, released in 2008. However, such a policy will be meaningless if the ministry fails to reexamine and remedy a set of established assumptions inherent in this policy.
As strategy is about getting to the next stage rather than some ultimate destination, immediate remedies are to be made within the timeframe of 2020-2024 if Indonesia is going to reap the expected strategic objectives from 2024 onward. Correspondingly, with the timeframe of no less than four years and not more than 25 years (2020-2045), the defense strategy in 2020 shall be reviewed from five strategic dimensions: the root of Indonesia’s national security interests; the international system; global trends; how, when and where to develop, deploy and employ the Indonesian armed forces; and how to strategically synchronize nonmilitary dimensions of war (political, economic, psychological, technological and cybernetic) into overall national defense capability especially in the peaceful, interwar period. Of these five strategic dimensions, the 2020 defense strategy shall futuristically and methodologically reexamine assumptions about five policy options: control option; foreign policy option; force development option; resource allocation option and force employment option.
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This article was published in thejakartapost.com with the title “Defending Indonesia: A forward strategy”. Click to read: https://www.thejakartapost.com/paper/2020/08/03/defending-indonesia-a-forward-strategy.html.