Democracy and Military Oversight in Crisis: The Failed Civilianisation of Indonesia’s Ministry of Defence

Introduction

In November 2019, Indonesia’s newly appointed Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto appeared for the first time at a hearing with the parliamentary committee responsible for his portfolio. To the surprise of the legislators, Prabowo refused to answer questions about the budget, saying that this was a state secret (Sakina, 2019). Reminded that it was common practice to discuss the budget in such committee meetings, Prabowo agreed to disclose budget information to legislators, but not to the media and broader public. For Prabowo, this was only the first of many collisions with civilian authorities in charge of overseeing the defence establishment. Prabowo, a retired military officer who cultivated a large patronage network in the active officer corps and harboured well-known political ambitions, seemed determined to circumvent already weak civilian oversight bodies to establish the defence ministry as his personal power base. In January 2020, Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati reminded him publicly to coordinate his spending plans for defence equipment with her and the head of the armed forces (Azzura, 2020). This unusual reprimand came after Prabowo had travelled to seven countries (and was planning to visit an eighth) to negotiate deals for defence purchases. Normally, such purchases had to be integrated into long-term budget planning, cleared by the military services and approved by the executive and legislature before being implemented through the defence ministry. Clearly, Prabowo had no patience for such procedures, and he continued to negotiate with foreign governments independently even after Sri Mulyani’s reminder.

Prabowo’s entrenchment in the defence ministry (and his dismissal of civilian oversight mechanisms) marked the preliminary climax of a long process of de-civilianisation of the department that had begun in the mid-2010s. Between 1999 and 2014, ministers of defence had been civilian politicians, and while they often presided over a ministerial apparatus made up mostly of active military officers, their non-military status was seen as a symbol of the (however slow) civilianisation and democratisation of Indonesia’s defence establishment. In 2014, however, President Joko Widodo broke with this tradition, handing the ministry to a conservative retired military officer, Ryamizard Ryacudu. After that, any pretence that the government tried to empower civilians to lead the defence ministry was dropped, and full control reverted back to the active officer corps in the department, with a sympathetic retired general at its helm. Prabowo’s appointment to the ministry in 2019 accelerated this reversal: while Ryamizard had been seen as a military and political has-been, Prabowo brought an entirely new quality to the department’s re-militarisation and politicisation. As the former son-in-law of former long-time autocrat Suharto (in power from 1966 to 1998), a senior general himself and two-time presidential candidate (in 2014 and 2019), Prabowo’s move to the department was accompanied by a clique of active and retired military officers. One year later, the civilian deputy minister was replaced by an active military officer. On the conceptual spectrum, Indonesia’s defence ministry shifted to full military-dominant status, from an earlier position of moderately strong military dominance (Grant & Milenski, 2019).

The de-civilianisation of the defence department coincided with a notable process of democratic deconsolidation in Indonesia. While Indonesia’s electoral democracy remained formally intact, there were—especially since the second decade of the 21^st century—significant declines in the quality of political com- petitiveness, civil rights and equal access to information (Power & Warburton, 2020). This concurrence of weakening civilian control and eroding democratic qualities is of course not accidental. Indeed, a simultaneous reading of much of the existing civil–military relation literature and the scholarship of democratic backsliding would predict such a pattern. As democratic quality rises, we are more likely to find strong democratic civilian control of the armed forces, including a ministry of defence governed by democratically elected civilian officials (Croissant & Kühn, 2011). Conversely, with declining democratic quality, the likelihood of civilian supremacy decreases, and the ministry of defence is vulnerable to the risk of re-militarisation. The two processes mutually re-enforce each other but given the broader spectrum of the democratic decline dynamics, it is more plausible to view the latter as the cause of weakening civilian control. At the same time, this pattern emphasises that the post-2014 re-militarisation of the defence department was not historically path-dependent; that is, it was not the inseparable consequence of decades of military dominance over the ministry, but of the lack of commitment from democratic leaders and, subsequently, their willingness to treat the ministry as a political pawn to be exchanged for political favours.

This article discusses the history and role of the Indonesian defence ministry in the context of this conceptual nexus between the levels of democratic civilian control of the military and democratic quality (Bruneau et al., 2006). Combining the analytical lenses of civil–military relations and democratisation literatures, it finds that periods of civilian-controlled defence ministries invariably fell into phases of democratisation. This was true for the early post-colonial state as well as for the time between 1999 and 2014. In contrast, active military officers as defence ministers signalled periods of hardening autocracy (broadly, between 1959 and 1983, and again in 1998), while retired officers in the post indicated either greater power dispersal during autocracy or democratic decline trends in the post-1998 polity. The article develops these arguments in three steps. First, it provides an overview of the history of the Indonesian defence ministry. Second, it analyses the current role and structure of the ministry, explaining how it changed from the authoritarian period—but also how it re-militarised since the mid-2010s. Third, the article looks at the remaining arenas of civilian oversight of the armed forces, both inside and outside the defence ministry. The conclusion, finally, locates Indonesia on the scale of military dominance of the defence department, and integrates the discussion more broadly into the body of civil–military relations and democratic backsliding literatures.

The Indonesian Defence Ministry, 1945–1998

Democratising countries that have emerged from long periods of military-dominated authoritarianism face specific challenges when they try to reform their ministries of defence. In many such cases, their pre-democratic defence departments were fully controlled by the military—which, in turn, served its own institutional interests alongside that of autocratic presidents. This meant, in effect, that the military controlled itself, making the ministry near-redundant. Once these military-backed autocracies have ended, most reformers know that they must extract the generals from political institutions if they want democratisation to succeed (Pion-Berlin, 1992). Importantly, this includes reforming the defence ministry in a way that hands control to democratically elected officials while still retaining the military expertise necessary to run the department in a professional way (Ball, 2004). Thus, many scholars of civil–military relations have posited the placement of the defence ministry under civilian authority as one of the key preconditions for the establishment of democratic civilian supremacy in post-authoritarian states (Kühn, 2008). They have also highlighted the need for civilians to gain knowledge in defence management to counter the self-serving argument by military officers that they have to remain in charge of the armed forces because only they know how to manage defence affairs (Barton & Unger, 2009). Civilianisation of post-authoritarian defence departments, therefore, has to go hand-in-hand with appropriate training for civilian officials assuming the tasks previously carried out by military officials in the ministry. Military officers, at the same time, can remain in key positions at the ministry, but they cannot—as they did in the past—dominate it.

Long before these insights became part of the civil–military relation literature from the 1960s onwards, Indonesia’s post-colonial civilian leaders acted on them. When Indonesia’s military was founded in October 1945, senior politicians insisted on creating a civilian-led defence department (Sundhaussen, 1982). This was despite the fact that the newly independent state was just beginning an open war with the Dutch, its former colonial power. The Dutch government did not recognise Indonesia’s independence and was determined to re-occupy what it claimed to be its rightful territory. Against this background, the Indonesian military viewed the creation of a defence ministry as an unnecessary nuisance obstructing the war effort. Thus, the relationship between Indonesia’s first defence minister Amir Syarifuddin and the military leadership was fraught. Indeed, it was so tense that the military killed him—after he left office—in December 1948 for alleged involvement in a pro-communist coup. Nevertheless, the defence ministry remained in the hands of civilians until the end of the war in 1949, and throughout the subsequent period of parliamentary democracy from 1950 to 1959. The civilian control of the defence ministry became one of the grievances that the military harboured against democratic rule (Feith, 2009), and from the mid-1950s onwards, it began consultations with other political actors about putting an end to democracy. After reaching an agreement with founding president Sukarno—who had felt marginalised by parliamentary cabinets too—the military supported the latter’s autocratic power grab in 1959.

Hence, the army chief of staff was appointed as minister of defence immediately following Sukarno’s establishment of the Guided Democracy regime in 1959. The new minister, Abdul Haris Nasution, had been a leading military ideologue throughout the 1950s, and he had warned that the military needed to gain an institutional role in government if civilians wanted to avoid a coup (Penders & Sundhaussen, 1985). With his appointment as minister of defence, and military officers gaining non-elected seats in parliament, Nasution’s concept—which he called the ‘Middle Way’ between full military government and no political role for the military—became reality. ¹ After 14 years of civilian defence ministers, the military had gained control of the department, and it would not relinquish it until the end of authoritarianism in 1998 (in fact, it held on to the ministry a year longer, giving it up in 1999). But control over the defence ministry alone apparently did not satisfy the military’s ambitions in the first half of the 1960s. While Nasution may have been content with the status quo, other officers were not. They felt that Sukarno was moving Indonesia too far to the left, both in terms of domestic policy and international relations, and that he was giving too much power to the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Thus, by 1965 the military was preparing for a showdown with the PKI (Mackie, 1974, p. 310). Tensions boiled over in October 1965, with a pro-communist clique staging a coup and killing several senior generals—in response to which the armed forces under Suharto took control, launched an unprecedented purge of communists that left hundreds of thousands of people dead, and installed Suharto as the country’s new president by 1968 (Roosa, 2006).

In the early Suharto period, the defence ministry was not only integrated with military headquarters, but also with the presidency. As de facto ruler since March 1966, Suharto already held the positions of defence minister and army commander, but 1967 reforms further centralised power. Suharto became interim president, defence minister and head of the newly established armed forces command (which had the various services—including the police—under its control). While regulations stipulated different roles for the defence ministry and armed forces headquarters, the distinctions were academic in nature as the minister of defence and the commander of the armed forces were the same person. In 1968, Suharto became definitive president for his first regular five-year term, during which he held on to the positions of defence minister and armed forces commander. Thus, Suharto—only a two-star general at the time of the 1965 coup—had managed to create for himself a position of maximum political and coercive power. He used this authority to oversee the regime’s transformation from a conventional military junta into a more personalised autocracy—a process that not only stunned the public, but also many officers in the military itself (McDonald, 1981). In 1973, as Suharto felt that his power was increasingly entrenched, he began to give the combined position of defence minister and armed forces commander to other officers. Not coincidentally, he appointed first a Christian for the 1973–1978 period, and then a general from Sulawesi for the 1978–1983 term—knowing that neither of them could harbour presidential ambitions as the public would only accept a Muslim Javanese as president.

Suharto finally separated the defence ministry from the position of armed forces commander in 1983. A new defence and security law passed in 1982 had set out the different functions of the two institutions—but importantly, the armed forces were not functionally subordinated to the ministry. The armed forces commander continued to report directly to the president, with the ministry only given vaguely defined coordination roles. In short, real power over the armed forces remained concentrated in the commander—and the president who appointed him (Jenkins, 1984). This power imbalance also became clear in the way Suharto exploited appointments to the position of defence minister: that is, to either reward generals long past their prime or to punish others who he wanted removed from more senior posts. In 1988, for example, then armed forces commander Benny Moerdani quietly criticised the business empires of Suharto’s children. As a result, Moerdani found himself relieved of his command in 1988 and shifted to the office of defence minister—which was widely perceived as a demotion (Schwarz, 2004, p. 146). At the end of his presidency, as he was engulfed by an economic crisis and student demonstrations, Suharto decided to again combine the office of defence minister and commander of the armed forces to strengthen the chain of command. Suharto handed this job to his former adjutant Wiranto, hoping that he would use it to clamp down on the opposition. Wiranto initially tried to live up to this expectation but then concluded that Suharto’s position was unsalvageable; when he informed Suharto of this conclusion in May 1998, the president resigned the next day. Wiranto, however, retained his positions.

During his presidency, Suharto had further undermined the role of the defence ministry by creating the new post of coordinating minister of politics and security in 1978. This coordinating ministry oversaw several other ministries in the military, security and political realm—including the defence ministry (the technical name of which was ministry of defence and security, given that for Suharto, there was no real distinction between the two concepts). With the defence minister exercising little power over the armed forces (if he did not concurrently hold the commander position), placing another official above the weak minister did nothing to enhance the authority of the department. Suharto also did little, of course, to empower the position of coordinating minister itself. Equipped only with a small budget and body of staff, the coordinating minister had few instruments to lead the defence and security sector. Instead, the position became another patronage tool for Suharto: he moved ageing military officers who had served him well into this position (Salam, 1993). The holders of this office typically retired from active military service—as did most defence ministers after 1983. The military, therefore, could be sure that it was ‘overseen’ by ex-generals sympathetic to its vested interests but lacking the power to make significant changes even if they wanted to.

The story of the Indonesian defence ministry between 1959 and 1998 was thus one of systematic emasculations. The interest of Sukarno and Suharto era military leaders was not so much to control the development of a strong ministry that they could use to cement their position. Rather, it was to keep the department out of civilian hands (from which it had been wrestled in 1959) and to prevent it from emerging as a powerful, independent actor that could interfere with the armed forces’ affairs. For Suharto, for instance, holding the position of defence minister in the late 1960s and 1970s was not an indication of the department’s power—he drew his authority from the positions of president and armed forces commander. But occupying the defence ministry allowed him to obstruct the potential evolution of the department into a power base for a political rival. ² Later, he used the ministry to reward or punish generals with a cushy but mostly powerless position. Thus, as Indonesia started its democratic transition in 1998, the defence ministry had lost its institutional memory of what such a department was supposed to do: that is, controlling the operations of the armed forces. Nothing had been further from the minds of post-1959 power holders than imagining the defence ministry as a strong oversight body for the officer corps. In developing reform plans for the post-Suharto era, then, politicians had to re-connect with the tradition of the civilian-led Indonesian defence departments between 1945 and 1959—without repeating the mistakes that led to the subsequent loss of civilian supremacy.

The Post-Suharto Defence Ministry

Post-1998 reforms of the defence ministry started from a very low level. Just before his resignation, Suharto had re-combined the posts of defence minister and armed forces commander, returning the department to its pre-1983 status. Wiranto, holding this dual position, insisted on retaining it. B. J. Habibie, who succeeded Suharto because he had been his deputy, initially wanted to separate the two posts again, leaving Wiranto with the defence ministry (Wiranto, 2003). But Wiranto persuaded Habibie that he needed both positions to oversee military reforms. To some extent, he delivered: the police was separated from the armed forces in 1999 and thus removed from the auspices of the defence ministry; the military shelved its ‘dual function’ ideology, based on which it had a right to exercise both a defence and a political role; and the military saw its non-elected representation in parliament halved to 38 seats (Mietzner, 2006). But Wiranto also used his posts to build a post-military career in politics, eying the vice-presidency as a stepping-stone to the presidency itself. His manoeuvring only had limited success, however: after the 1999 election of Abdurrahman Wahid as president, Wiranto only obtained the coordinating ministry of politics and security, from which Wahid fired him just a year later. Wahid, for his part, appointed the first civilian defence minister since 1959. He chose the social science academic Juwono Sudarsono who—despite being politically conservative and thus well-regarded in military circles—was determined to develop the defence department into the country’s primary arena of designing national defence strategy and coordinating the necessary equipment purchases. ³

Juwono was the first of a series of civilian defence ministers who occupied the position between 1999 and 2014. During this time, ministers initiated important reform projects in the doctrinal and organisational arena of defence policy, without fundamentally changing the power balance between the armed forces and the department. For instance, in 2002, a new State Defence Law was passed, which the defence department had written in coordination with a team of civilian defence experts. ⁴ The law implemented an earlier decision of the year 2000 to clearly separate the domains of internal security and national defence. While arguably the most momentous legislative revision in post-Suharto civil–military relations, the law stopped short of subordinating the armed forces to the defence ministry and thus disappointed many reformers. In the law’s relevant article, the commander of the armed forces was to simply ‘work with’ the minister instead of reporting to him or her. ⁵ This meant that for all of the expanded authorities given to the ministry through the 2002 law—such as a greater role in determining what sort of weaponry was acquired—the defence minister still had no direct power over the commander. Both continued to sit at the cabinet table as equal subordinates of the president—but in real power terms, it was clear to everyone that the commander position carried significantly more weight. For instance, the defence minister had no power to move troops—this authority remained solely in the hands of the armed forces commander, in coordination with the president.

There was also some limited progress in the civilianisation of the defence bureaucracy in the department. Under Defence Minister Mahfud MD (2000–2001), a civilian became director-general of defence planning (see the organisational chart of the ministry in Figure 1), and several other key posts were given to civilians as well. Among them was the position of governor of the National Resilience Institute, a training agency in defence matters for government officials. A body of ideological indoctrination under Suharto, it gradually morphed into a more independent think tank (indeed, it was removed from the supervision by the ministry and subordinated directly to the president in 2001). Between 2001 and 2016, civilian academics held the position of governor, running a number of important research projects that promoted civilian control of the military. Even at the height of this civilianisation effort, however, the military remained deeply entrenched in the defence department. Holding the vast majority of the director-general positions as well as the key position of secretary-general, military officers in the department continued to tell jokes about the only civilian in the defence ministry being the minister. The civilian ministers, for their part, were well aware of their isolation and the ridicule which some of the officers directed at them. Interviewed in 2007, Juwono—then on his second stint as defence minister—described the position as one of the loneliest imaginable. Sitting in a chair in a vast empty room, Jowono did not project the aura of power that one typically associates with defence ministers. ⁶

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Source: Information drawn from the Ministry of Defence website (https://www.kemhan.go.id).

The difficulty of civilian defence ministers in trying to impose their directives on an unwilling military was particularly severe in the area of budget and procurement planning. To be sure, Juwono succeeded in having his concept of a Minimum Essential Force (MEF) adopted as a national policy. According to a 2008 presidential decree spearheaded by Juwono, at the core of the MEF approach was the idea to achieve ‘a force level that can guarantee the attainment of immediate strategic defence interests, where procurement priority [is] given to the improvement of minimum defence strength and/or the replacement of outdated main weapon systems/equipment’. ⁷ In essence, the MEF approach called for the modernisation of the Indonesian armed forces within its limited budget, making coordination of purchases across the various services crucial if wastage and incompatibility issues were to be avoided. But the reality of defence budgeting did not support the notion of a procurement mechanism centralised in the defence ministry. In practice, the various services listed their purchase wishes for every budget year, sent them to armed forces headquarters, which then conveyed these items to the defence ministry for approval. While the defence ministry sometimes managed to get its strategic purchase ideas realised, it also had to agree to a myriad of particularistic wishes from the army, navy and air force if it did not want to risk a breakdown in its relationship with leading generals. ⁸ As a result, defence purchasing has remained fragmented and the goal of a coherent MEF remote (Schreer, 2013).

The civilianisation of the defence ministry was not only obstructed by the military’s vested interests, however. There were severe bureaucratic and expertise constraints as well. Under Indonesia’s civil service regulations, each post in the bureaucracy is tied to a specific rank. Thus, when trying to fill a position, defence ministers can only choose from a pool of civil servants at a certain level of seniority. Military ranks are seen as equal to civilian levels, leading to a situation in which a lot more candidates with expertise in defence issues originate from the armed forces. Civilians with such expertise are mostly situated outside of the civil service, or if they are inside (as lecturers in universities, for instance), they lack the necessary seniority. Senior civil servants from other departments, on the other hand, lack knowledge of defence matters or have little interest in entering a department in which they know they will face a powerful network of military officers. Even during the times of civilian defence ministers, very little was done to rectify this problem through defence policy training for civilians. In hindsight, the period between 1999 and 2014, when civilian defence ministers had the resources to oversee such training programs, looks like a missed opportunity.

Thus, the weakness of the reform drive in the ministry between 1999 and 2014 was not so much the result of decades of military hegemony over the department (although that certainly made the task of reformers much harder). Rather, it was the consequence of lacking political will from presidents and other key political actors (often including defence ministers themselves) to invest much political capital into reforming a ministry that (a) the military was unwilling to see change, (b) would require a tremendous effort to structurally revamp and (c) did not pose—in the larger scheme of things—a major problem for governance in the post-Suharto polity. With the economy and the reform of the entire political system taking precedence, Indonesian policymakers put their attention elsewhere, leaving the defence ministry lingering with a civilian minister but few resources to launch meaningful reform. A bigger effort from all sides, from the president down, would have created a better chance of civilianising the ministry, despite the massive historical baggage discussed before.

There was also no historical path dependency in the return of the ministry to (retired) military officers in 2014. Instead, it indicated the inclination of the incumbent president, Joko Widodo, to subordinate the fate of the defence ministry to his political interests (and that of his allies). As such, the comeback of defence ministers with a military background reflected the decline of democratic quality under Widodo, who did not view civilian supremacy as an ideal worth defending. What is more, both retired officers appointed as defence ministers after 2014 have been archconservatives. Ryamizard Ryacudu, who Widodo appointed in 2014 as a favour to his patron Megawati Sukarnoputri, had been army chief of staff in the early 2000s, at which time he had openly rallied against the government’s peace negotiations with the Aceh rebel movement (Aspinall & Crouch, 2003). He also defended the officers who killed the political leader of the Papuan independence movement (on the way home from a social event at a military unit) as ‘heroes’. Prabowo Subianto, who was given the job by Widodo as compensation for his support of the government, had risen through the ranks of Suharto’s military as the latter’s son-in-law, presiding over the kidnapping of his opponents in 1998. In Prabowo’s case, he combined a deeply conservative view of civil–military relations with strong political ambitions (Aspinall, 2015). Thus, the return of the defence department into the hands of retired military officers highlighted three worrying trends: the end of civilian control of the ministry; the renaissance of figures and thinking associated with the autocratic past; and the use of the ministry as a political resource to be traded in return for support of the president.

Unsurprisingly, then, the post-2014 defence ministry underwent a systematic process of de-civilianisation. At the time of writing, none of the ministry’s director-generals is a civilian. The most senior civilian is the head of the research and development body. The leadership of the National Resilience Institute also temporarily returned to a retired military officer—albeit a reformer with critical views of both Ryamizard and Prabowo. Using his discretion, Prabowo inserted former military allies into the defence ministry as advisers—including the commander of the unit accused of the 1998 kidnappings (Yahya, 2020). As we noted at the beginning of this article, Prabowo began to challenge civilian institutions charged with the oversight of his ministry and the armed forces. In doing so, Prabowo tried to define the role of defence minister by expanding it to include actual control over the armed forces (and thus achieve a level of power no defence minister has had since Suharto relinquished it in 1973). As a result, he re-insulated both his ministry and the military from civilian scrutiny. ⁹ His superior, President Widodo, does not seem to mind: far from trying to constrain him, he has given Prabowo additional non-military tasks, such as the development of food estates to increase the country’s self-sufficiency in food supply. In other words, the defence ministry morphed from a laboratory of civilianisation attempts in the early reform era (that, as noted, involved external civilian experts in policy formulation, such as the 2002 law on national defence) into a department keen to both reject civilian influence and re-intrude into civilian arenas of governance.

Arenas of Civilian Control

Given the strength of the Indonesian military’s control over the defence ministry, especially since 2014, one has to look at areas outside of the department to identify mechanisms through which civilian influence is exerted. This section, therefore, analyses five areas in which civilians retain some power, and discusses how the ministry interacts with them. These five areas are military promotions, defence strategies, procurement planning, officer education and joint coordination of operations. As we will see, there are some civilian mechanisms of military oversight in place, but they are typically weak and fragmented—and have eroded further over time.

In the area of military promotions, the defence ministry plays no formal role at all. From an institutional perspective, military promotions remain the internal domain of the armed forces, with the commander signing off on appointments. The only exceptions are the position of armed forces commander, and the posts of army, navy and air force chief of staff. The armed forces commander is nominated by the president and confirmed by parliament, while the president directly appoints the three chiefs of staff. The exclusion of the defence ministry from these processes—both those at the top and in the regular ranks—is remarkable. In the appointment of an armed forces commander, for instance, it is the retiring commander who normally sends the president a list of possible replacements, which was drawn up by a high-level promotion council. A similar mechanism is in place for chiefs of staff, with the commander submitting a ranking endorsed by the council to the president for final selection (Silalahi, 2014). The promotion council composing these lists can include representatives from the National Intelligence Agency (BIN), the National Resilience Institute and the Coordinating Ministry of Politics, Law and Security, but strangely, it is rare for defence ministry officials to attend. These mechanisms have not changed much since Suharto’s fall—only the parliamentary confirmation of the president’s armed forces commander pick was added.

There are two patterns in contemporary military appointments that require special consideration. First, according to military insiders, Prabowo has succeeded in getting many of his allies in the armed forces promoted. ¹⁰ But to achieve this, he used his informal network in the military (that is, his connections with former subordinates from his time in command positions) rather than any formal appointment powers attached to the position of minister of defence. As minister, he can only leverage some of his other decision powers (such as his budget processing authority, which he widened) to lobby for particular candidates. Hence, Prabowo’s success in this area does not reflect an institutional strengthening of the defence ministry—let alone an enhanced civilian authority in determining military promotions. On the contrary, it points to Prabowo’s political colonisation of the ministry and the armed forces more broadly. The second issue to note is that while the ministry has no formal appointment powers vis-à-vis the armed forces, the reverse is true. Most positions in the defence ministry that are held by armed forces officers are de facto filled by the military commander. It is the commander who selects officers for particular posts, with the ministry expected to endorse them. As noted earlier, given the scarcity of qualified civilians, the military candidates often get almost automatically appointed. In short, far from being subjected to civilian appointment powers (with the exception of the absolute top brass), the military can place its appointees in the ministry asked to oversee it.

As far as the development of defence strategies is concerned, there is some civilian input—but it is limited, and very little comes from inside the defence ministry. Recall that none of the ministry’s current director-generals are civilians. Consequently, the director-generals for defence planning, defence potential, defence resources as well has the head of the agency for defence infrastructure are all military officers, and it is them who jointly design the ministry’s defence strategies. The head of the research body, a civilian, may be able to submit proposals, but it is hard to ascertain how much of their content is adopted. The same applies to the drafting of the Defence White Paper, which falls into the domain of the ministry. Even in periods when the minister and relevant director-generals were civilians, and academics were invited to join the drafting team, the end result was often a replication of military rhetoric. As one commentator argued in relation to the 2003 White Paper—which had arguably seen the most extensive civilian participation of all post-1998 papers—the output ‘still reflects the domination of military views and interests on defence issues’ (Perwita, 2004, p. 5). The only other arena in which some civilian influence on defence strategies occurs, then, is the parliamentary committee that cooperates with the defence ministry. Committee I, which covers defence, communications, international relations and intelligence, has the right to question defence ministry and armed forces officials on their long-term defence strategy, and it makes extensive use of that right (Rueland & Manea, 2012). But while nodding politely, military representatives have rarely made fundamental changes to their strategy based on this feedback.

In the area of procurement planning and acquisition, we already pointed out how difficult it has been for the defence ministry to realise its grand strategic plans through corresponding purchases. We also noted how Prabowo has tried to overcome these obstacles by simply ignoring reminders to stay within the institutional budget corridor of his ministry. It is too early to tell, however, whether he will succeed with this approach; thus far, only very few of the acquisition plans Prabowo initiated have turned into signed contracts and deliveries. But while Prabowo might be able to strongarm the finance minister and the armed forces, there is one civilian oversight body he will find harder to ignore or intimidate: that is, Committee I of parliament. Budgeting is the favourite legislative power of Indonesian parliamentarians, given its potential for patronage. Thus, members of Committee I have taken a keen interest in large defence projects. Without their approval, defence purchases cannot proceed. The downside of this civilian authority over defence procurement is that many decisions of legislators are guided by patronage interests rather than expertise in defence matters—which they often lack. They therefore tend to approve projects that benefit them—whether in the form of visits to foreign countries (such as Brazil and Spain in 2012) or, more blatantly, kickbacks. In 2018, for instance, one member of Committee I was sentenced to 8 years in prison because he had accepted almost $1 million in bribes for inserting additional drones and other equipment into the budget for the Indonesian Maritime Security Agency (Bakamla), which is typically managed by senior navy officers (Siddiq, 2018).

The institutions of Indonesia’s military education remain under the control of the military itself. Within the armed forces, there are the academy and various staff and command schools, all headed by senior officers. Civilians occasionally teach at these institutions, but the overall curriculum continues to be tied to military doctrine and ideology. In 2011, the government added a defence university to this system, and initially envisaged it to be less doctrinal in nature. The National Defence University (Unhan) was put under the education ministry for academic matters and the defence ministry for ‘guidance’, indicating a broader educational orientation. ¹¹ In reality, however, the university has turned into yet another military-controlled institution. All rectors since the university’s formation have been active military officers. Some highly qualified civilians with non-conformist views teach at Unhan, but the officers going through its curriculum are mostly exposed to conventional military teachings and materials. Hence, while created under a civilian defence minister (Purnomo Yusgiantoro, who was in office from 2009 to 2014 and later became a professor at the institution, together with President Yudhoyono), the university has since taken the same path of re-militarisation that the ministry itself has travelled—and that has coloured the rest of post-2014 society as well.

In regard to military operations, civilians typically do not get involved unless the operations are of a very large scale. The Armed Forces Law states that in cases of major security disturbances, the president is in charge of directing the military, but must seek the approval of the legislature beforehand. Under extreme conditions, the president can direct the armed forces without parliamentary approval for 48 hours but needs to stop the operation if the legislature does not endorse it within that timeframe. The context of such direct presidential command over a military operation is only vaguely described; presumably, it refers to an invasion by a foreign power or a similarly dire circumstance. Consequently, this stipulation is almost never used—it is much more common for the military to report a planned operation to the president (and, in some cases, to the parliament) and then get broad guidance for its conduct. General guidelines by the president could include remarks such as to exercise restraint—Yudhoyono, for instance, stated that he issued such an instruction to the military in Papua during his tenure. ¹² But while the military seems to have respected that directive in Papua’s urban centres (and the task of containing city protesters fell increasingly to the police), military operations in the remote parts of Indonesia’s most conflict-ridden province have been notoriously immune to civilian scrutiny. The defence ministry has—once again—only a very limited role to play. It only steps in when an operation touches directly on long-term aspects of procurement and strategy planning.

In sum, while arenas of civilian control over the military exist, they remain very limited—and have shrunk over time. The de-civilianisation of the defence department after 2014 contributed to this shrinkage. But even without that process, the defence ministry has suffered from severe institutional constraints—regardless of whether civilians have been in charge or not. Having no role in military promotions or operations, the defence department lacks the tools to exercise meaningful oversight of the armed forces. To be sure, Prabowo has tried to break through these barriers, but he has done so not in the interest of stronger civilian control of the military—rather, he intended to benefit his own military network and the political interests attached to it.

Conclusion

In a comparative and conceptual context, Indonesia’s current defence ministry fits into the military-dominated type, with the trend moving towards a particularly strong version of this phenomenon. Organisationally, the military remains largely autonomous, and it fills almost all top positions in the ministry. As we have seen, it has not always been like this. There were civilian defence ministers from 1945 to 1959 and from 1999 to 2014 who took measures to civilianise the department. In the latter period, these attempts had some limited success but ceased in 2014, when the post of defence minister returned to conservative retired officers. There were numerous reasons for this failed civilianisation. First, even under civilian ministers, the attempt of civilianisation was haphazard, as support from presidents and other actors was weak. There were no systematic efforts to train existing civilian officials in defence matters, or to groom new ones who could replace the department’s remaining military personnel. Second, presidents were reluctant to alienate the armed forces by putting them under the defence ministry. Consequently, the status quo since 1945—that is, that the ministry and the military exist parallel to each other rather than in a hierarchical relationship, with the armed forces as the real power centre—remained intact. And third, President Widodo dropped the principle of civilian defence ministers in 2014—not so much because he deliberately wanted to strengthen the armed forces, but because of political expediency. As we noted, in 2014, Megawati asked him to give the post to Ryacudu (Kusumadewi & Ahmad, 2014), while in 2019, Prabowo requested it as the price for his joining the government (Arifin, 2019).

The trajectory and typological patterns of the Indonesian defence ministry also point to a direct linkage between the level of civilianisation in the department and the degree of general democratisation. Recall that the defence ministry was handed to active military officers in 1959, coinciding with the end of parliamentary democracy. A similar link can be found in the contemporary era: the return of the defence ministry into the hands of conservative military officers fell into a period that observers have described as an (ongoing) phase of democratic decline. This decline has manifested itself in increasing illiberalism—as well as the president’s increasing subordination of democratic principles, such as civilian supremacy, to his political interests. Thus, neither the status of the defence ministry nor the backsliding of democracy can be studied in a vacuum—they are inseparably connected, with the latter creating the conditions that shape the former. These dynamics call for a better integration of the civil–military relations and democratic backsliding literatures; they often make important references to each other, but otherwise remain parallel rather than systematically combined (Bruneau et al., 2006). The Indonesian case suggests that the way the defence ministry is run can be a barometer of democratic quality in a broader sense, rather than ‘only’ indicating the state of civil–military relations in a particular country. From this perspective, a more civilianised or integrated model of managing the defence ministry requires much more than technical training programs or structural reforms—it needs a democratic context in which the defence department reforms almost as a byproduct of democratisation. Without such a context, efforts of launching change in this key institution of security sector governance are likely to be futile.

Finally, analysing the defence department through the lens of much broader democratic quality patterns also tells us something about the macro-political reasons for the weakness of the ministry’s civilianisation attempts even during periods of relative democratic strength. While between 1950 and 1959, and between 1999 and 2014, Indonesian democracy was stable and recorded, not coincidentally, civilian defence ministers in those phases, the quality of democracy remained low. Contrary to the claims of some authors, Indonesia never achieved the status of democratic consolidation, even during democratic peak points (Diamond, 2009); the fact that attempts at civilianisation took place in those periods but were superficial is an accurate reflection of the state of democracy in the 1950s and the early 2000s. Similarly, the end of such attempts, after 1959 and 2014 respectively, marked the turn of Indonesia’s regime from a weak but stable electoral democracy to much more overt patterns of illiberalism. In the former case, this trend climaxed in Sukarno’s autocracy and Suharto’s New Order; in the latter case, the final destination of the current democratic decline path remains uncertain.