On Thursday 8 September 2005, Dr Tim Huxley (IISS Senior Fellow for Asia-Pacific Security, Editor of Adelphi Paper, Corresponding Director of IISS-Asia) addressed Members of the Institute on “Modernising Southeast Asia’s Armed Forces”. Organised by IISS-Asia, the event took place at Paperchase Room, 9 Raffles Place, Level 58 Republic Plaza.
Synopsis:
Because of their diversity in terms of population size, wealth, the security challenges they face, and their armed forces' scale, organisation, doctrine and equipment, it is difficult to generalise about Southeast Asian states' military modernisation programmes, which have evidently been driven by equally diverse influences ranging from external threat perceptions to domestic defence-industrial motivations. Nevertheless, it is clear that the regional financial crisis of the late 1990s severely undermined the ability of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand to fund their projected military procurement, leaving Singapore - which has increasingly been committed to military transformation as opposed to mere modernisation - as the only Southeast Asian state allocating substantial resources for purchasing new equipment. With economic recovery during the present decade, however, defence spending has begun to increase again in the larger ‘core’ ASEAN members, allowing a resumption of stalled modernisation plans. While military modernisation has focused mainly on improving conventional military capacity, several Southeast Asian states - Myanmar as well as Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand - have also needed to take into account continuing or elevated internal security challenges as they modernise their armed forces. At the same time, maritime threats - potentially from seaborne terrorism as well as boundary disputes, piracy, people- and narcotics-trafficking, resource-poaching and smuggling - are increasingly influencing the shape of some Southeast Asian armed forces. But modernisation has not simply equated to developing new capabilities. In Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand it has involved efforts to institutionalize civilian control over the military. One key question now concerns the extent to which the military’s reinforced internal security role in some Southeast Asian countries may complicate the process of withdrawal from political, social and economic life.
Dr Huxley was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, the University of Wales Aberystwyth and the Australian National University. He has worked for many years in the overlap between strategic studies and Asian area studies, his research focusing particularly on Southeast Asian states’ security and defence policies. He has held research and teaching posts at universities in the UK and Australia, and worked for several years at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. Before joining the IISS, he was Reader in South-East Asian Politics and Director of the Centre for South-East Asian Studies at the University of Hull. His recent publications include Defending the Lion City: The Armed Forces of Singapore (Allen & Unwin, 2000) and Disintegrating Indonesia? Implications for Regional Security (Adelphi Paper 349, July 2002). Since joining the IISS, he has contributed analysis of recent security-related developments in Southeast Asia and Australasia to Strategic Survey 2002/3, The Military Balance 2003/4, and the Strategic Comments series.
