Naval modernization in Southeast Asia: Under the shadow of army dominance?

• Author: Raymond, Gregory Vincent

Using a historical institutionalist approach, this article addresses the future of Southeast Asia's naval forces. Much analysis on this subject employs a linear Realist model in which Southeast Asia's navies are expected to be the beneficiaries of declining internal security challenges and a deteriorating external threat environment. However, to date neither of these factors, including increasing Chinese assertiveness in the maritime domain, appear to have significantly accelerated naval force development in Southeast Asia. While there have been some capability increases in areas such as submarines, growth has mainly been in patrol boat and fast attack craft classes. Numbers of larger offshore surface combatants like frigates have fallen. This article argues that in countries where army dominance has become institutionalized, and civil control of the military is weak, governments may be unwilling or unable to reallocate funding away from armies to maritime forces. In a funding environment in which national economic growth is moderate, and spending on defence is a lower priority, naval modernization and expansion can be blocked. This article examines the cases of Thailand, Indonesia and Myanmar to demonstrate how their armies became dominant and how this may have diminished the growth prospects of their navies.

Keywords: ASEAN, Southeast Asia, navies, armies, force structure.

Expectations of Southeast Asian naval development generally follow two lines of thought, both rooted in the Realist paradigm of International Relations. The first is that Southeast Asian nations will respond to a deteriorating threat environment--marked by China's increasing assertiveness in the South China Sea--by investing more in defence forces, including naval forces. For example, Australian strategist Hugh White argues that "Indonesia's growing economy will allow it to spend more on its armed forces, especially on sophisticated aircraft, ships and submarines, and it may feel compelled to do so as Asia's wider strategic environment changes." (1) The second view is that as Southeast Asian states overcome their internal security problems, they will seek to develop more externally oriented military forces, thus resulting in increased spending on naval forces. In the 1990s, observers believed that Southeast Asian nations were displaying increasing interest in sea control capabilities. (2) Thailand, it was thought, was typical of Southeast Asian countries that in the 1980s had begun to shift away from a focus on counterinsurgency capabilities to those required for conventional warfare. (3)

This article questions whether bigger and more powerful Southeast Asian navies are inevitable. Instead it proposes that institutionalized army dominance, in combination with weak civilian control and low economic growth, could significantly inhibit naval expansion in Southeast Asian states. The article begins by surveying the modest naval growth in Southeast Asia exhibited to date. It then offers an account of Southeast Asian force development that considers the effects of army dominance amidst weak civilian control. The article employs concepts from historical institutionalism to show how army dominance arose in the cases of Thailand, Indonesia and Myanmar, and what the consequences have been for their respective navies.

Why have these three countries been selected and not other regional states? It must be admitted that case selection for Southeast Asia is inherently problematic given the region's vast disparities in terms of population, political systems, levels of economic development and history. That aside, the author chose Thailand, Indonesia and Myanmar for the following reasons. Firstly, if an explanation based on institutionalized army-dominance does not apply to these three countries whose armies have played highly significant historical roles, the theory is unlikely to be useful for other countries. In other words, these cases will provide a useful first litmus test for the plausibility of historical institutionalism as a tool for understanding force structure phenomena. (4) Secondly, the author did not choose Vietnam and Singapore--both significant regional players--because Vietnam's communist party apparatus provides additional levers for control of the armed forces, while Singapore is a country with strong civilian control. These countries could, however, be the subject of future studies. Thirdly, Indonesia and Thailand are very significant Southeast Asian countries in their own right; Indonesia is the largest ASEAN country and widely regarded as a potential major power, while Thailand is the second largest economy in Southeast Asia, and has in the past evinced intentions to develop significant maritime power projection capabilities.

Southeast Asia's Modest Naval Growth

Over the last two decades, Southeast Asian naval expansion has been relatively modest, despite China's increasing maritime assertiveness. (5) Surveying the development of naval forces across five Southeast Asian states--Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam--from the 1980s, Bernard Loo found some capability enhancement, but also that navies were reducing their overall numbers of vessels. (6) Bob Nugent saw a similar stasis in quantity of vessels, but some increases in capability. (7) Data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies' (IISS) Military Balance over the last decade show that Southeast Asian nations (excluding landlocked Laos) did increase their patrol and coastal combat classes over the period 2008-16--from 354 to 524--but also reduced their principal surface combatants from 84 to 44. Only two countries--Vietnam and Indonesia--increased the number of naval personnel. (8)

Long-term procurement data supports this view. There is significant evidence that Southeast Asian navies are: first, not being given greater priority over time; and second, comparatively less well-favoured than their Western counterparts. Although budget data detailing individual service allocations is generally not publicly available, we can instead look at patterns of defence imports. Using the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's (SIPRI) database of arms trade data, we can compare the breakdown of defence imports of Southeast Asian countries against the five Anglophone countries--Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States--from 1950 to 2015. This data is a fair representation of overall procurement patterns since Southeast Asia only has a small indigenous defence industry. (9) Despite sporadic efforts to develop self-reliance in armaments over several decades, most Southeast Asia countries remain dependent on overseas imports for defence procurement. Sustained indigenous design and production is restricted to small arms, ammunition, artillery systems and light armoured vehicles. More advanced weapons systems are either imported or built locally under license.

The SIPRI data shows, unsurprisingly, that ASEAN armies on average receive a smaller proportion of the imported arms than navies--about 11 per cent compared with 26 per cent by value. (10) Because navies and air forces have a naturally much higher reliance on capital investment, this is not unexpected. An army is feasible with a large number of personnel equipped only with rifles, but an air force without aircraft or a navy without ships, is not. Moreover combat aircraft and surface and sub-surface vessels are very expensive by comparison with rifles. However, two aspects of the data suggest that these raw figures do not provide great comfort to Southeast Asian naval commanders hoping for more powerful navies.

First, if there was a determination to increase the build and expand naval capability, we would expect to see navies obtaining a progressively greater share of defence imports over time. However, when we survey foreign-sourced arms procurement for our three case studies--Indonesia, Myanmar and Thailand--over six decades between 1950 and 2015, we do not find sustained increases. (11) As shown in Figures 1 to 3, in all three cases the navy's share of imports by 2015 is either lower (Indonesia and Thailand) or about the same (Myanmar) as it was in 1950. That is not to say that there have not been peaks, such as the 1990s for Indonesia and Thailand, and the 1980s for Myanmar. But for all three countries, the navy's most recent share of imports is significantly less than earlier periods of strong investment. In contrast, the armies are doing progressively better. In all three cases, the share of the army has risen over the same sixty-five-year period, by almost 20 per cent in the case of Myanmar and Thailand, and by almost 10 per cent in the case of Indonesia. Moreover, this is likely to be a conservative estimate of army procurement, since SIPRI data does not include small arms and light weapons. As armies are the largest consumer of small and light arms, army procurement shares are likely to be systematically under-represented.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Secondly, if our hypothesis that Southeast Asian navies are, relatively speaking, more impacted by the shadow of army dominance is correct, we would expect to see Southeast Asian armies receiving a greater proportion of the total defence imports than their Western counterparts, and conversely, their navies less so. A comparison of Southeast Asian countries (excluding landlocked Laos) against the five Anglophone countries shows that Southeast Asian army procurement as a proportion of total procurement is over twice as high, about 12 per cent by comparison with the average of 5 per cent for Anglophone countries. This statistically significant result is also stronger than might be expected considering that Anglophone countries such as Australia and the United States are prominent navy ship-builders, and hence could be expected to spend proportionally more on imports for their armies. (12)

Another data point...