AS geopolitics change rapidly, Malaysia faces new security and defence challenges such as the increasing importance of maritime concerns, great power rivalry between China and the United States and the emergence of non-traditional threats.
We will have to conceive a future force to meet those challenges.
The change of government in May last year has provided Malaysia with a rare opportunity to revisit some old assumptions and make new ones to move forward.
One of the earliest major decisions that will have huge long-term impact by Defence Minister Mohamad Sabu was to commit the new government to present a Defence White Paper to chart the future.
One of the things I have learned at the Defence Ministry is that one has to think of the long term, as decisions made today will still have consequences in the future, beyond the annual budget cycle and the five-yearly Malaysia Plan time frame.
For instance, some not-very-useful weapon systems or ships bought at the whims of a general or minister, sometimes at the prodding of some defence traders trying to enrich themselves, may still be in use decades down the road even if they may not be the most suitable ones.
Likewise, how the Armed Forces is currently structured has a lot to do with legacies that happened a while ago. Understanding the history helps us to see things in a better perspective.
Defending Malaysia is very much about safeguarding three important waters — the Straits of Malacca, South China Sea and the Sulu Sea — and two land masses — the peninsula and Borneo regions of Sabah and Sarawak.
Admittedly, due to counter-insurgency during the Cold War, previously most attention was given to the peninsula, with significant focus on jungle warfare.
Historically, the Malays are a maritime people from around the Nusantara, or the Malay Archipelago, where people and goods move freely in the region. During the Malacca Sultanate, the most important military position was the Laksamana (admiral). Most state capitals in Malaysia are situated at the river mouth or sea front.
An amusing tweet from Twitter personality Sir Zayn (@bingregory) reads: “America has the Homeland, Germans the Fatherland, Russia the Motherland. Only the Malays have ‘Waterland’. #tanahair”. The term “tanah air” clearly demonstrates our inherently maritime conceptualisation of nationhood and the notion of inseparability of both our land and waters.
The borders of contemporary independent Malaysia and Indonesia were actually decided by the British and Dutch in 1824. Within the sea borders defined and controlled by colonial masters, and after the 1874 Pangkor Engagement, the fragmented Malay states essentially turned towards agriculture and plantation for the consumption of colonial metropolitans.
The war against the Malayan Communist Party was mostly jungle guerrilla warfare which shaped the structure of the Malaysian Armed Forces in a number of ways, such as army-dominant and excellent in tropical jungle warfare.
Today we are faced with different demographics and unpredictable geopolitical scenarios. Assuming that over the next decade, the size of the Armed Forces remains at the current level of around 123,000, shaping the future force will have to take into account the following considerations:
First, we have to realise that Malaysia is a maritime nation and the seas are our lifeline, with many resources coming from the waters, and many strategic water spaces to protect in an increasingly complex security environment. We will need clarity on how to govern our oceans, and to safeguard it against any potential incidents and conflicts in the context of strategic competition between China and the US, as well as other non-security threats like maritime thefts such as piracy and sea robbery. In short, we need greater “maritime domain awareness”.
Recently I hosted a talk by the Vietnamese Ambassador to Malaysia, His Excellency Lê Quý Quỳnh, who is also a maritime expert. I was very impressed that Vietnam aspires to be a “powerful maritime nation”, with a clear goal of increasing maritime contribution to the economy (oil and gas, tourism, fishery) from the current 30 per cent to
50 per cent.
Malaysia will need a clear policy goal like the Vietnamese in order to get everyone on the same page that maritime is the future for both the economy and security/defence. (According to the Maritime Institute of Malaysia, the contribution of our maritime sector is estimated to be around 23 per cent in 2015, but the number should have been greater if the potential of our oceans are fully realised).
With a clear policy goal, the Armed Forces and other security agencies, such as the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency, will have to make changes to meet the objective.
Being a maritime nation however, doesn’t necessarily mean more and bigger ships and a significantly greater navy. I had an interesting chat with Chief of Defence Force Tan Sri Zulkifli Zainal Abidin who said that a maritime nation may also mean “the army has to swim”, meaning we may need to consider establishing an amphibious marine force within the Armed Forces.
What is really needed is agility and jointness between the three services — Army, Navy and Air Force — to conduct multi-domain operations. To be honest, the idea of jointness is easier said than done. Conventionally, each of the services raise, train and maintain its troops. But single-service centric operations clearly won’t meet the needs of our time.
I was on board an Australian helicopter carrier, the HMAS Canberra, in April when she docked in Port Klang. The naval expedition, “Indo-Pacific Endeavour 2019”, was commanded by an Air Force Commodore. HMAS Canberra was a tri-service which included the navy, army and air force personnel permanently.
Interestingly, a civilian policy advisor from the Australian Defence Department and another officer from the Foreign Department sailed with the three-month expedition. Most military medical personnel on board the ship were reservists. Not only was there jointness in the armed forces, the whole-of-government character was clearly visible.
Therefore, apart from more jointness in our operation, we would need to be able to fully realise the two-theatre mirror operations between the peninsula and Sabah/Sarawak in order to effectively safeguard the Straits of Malacca, South China Sea and the Sulu Sea.
Second, we are now a very urbanised nation, with 76 per cent of the population residing in urban areas. Insurgencies that used to happen in the jungles could very well happen in an urban setting. The seige of Marawi is a case in point.
The question of resilience against any attacks must be taken into consideration in our urban planning while our defence planning must prepare for the possibility of urban warfare, taking into considerations non-traditional threats such as terrorism.
Moving forward, we can’t run away from the cyber domain, where the notion of “border” is even harder to define and the line between “cyber attack” and “cyber war” is blurred. If we don’t up our game, the domain will overpower us.
The Armed Forces is very much aware of the challenges of maritime, jointness, mirror theatre, urban and other non-traditional threats, terrorism, and cyber defence. It has also tried various initiatives to deal with some of the challenges to various extent.
But what is needed now is a national awareness of these challenges and the political consensus to take on these challenges with rigour. If we maintain the same force size of 123,000, the current roles of many will have to be re-purposed and upgraded to a more supplicated level.
Many of the current roles in the Armed Forces can be handled through the adoption of technologies such as artificial intelligence, drones, and other surveillance tools. Some of the non-combatant roles can be handled by non-military personnel. This would include revisiting the role of reservists so that we can tap into the potential of civilian expertise and experience. This is particularly true for the professional groups such as doctors, engineers, computer scientists and cyber security experts.
These are the many subjects that the Defence White Paper attempts to deal with in the hope to provide directions for the future. The Defence White Paper is not going to be able to provide precise answers to each of these long-term questions.
What it aims to do is to ask the relevant questions for the next decade so that there are directions for subsequent details to be worked out with greater national consensus for a great Future Force to serve and meet the nation’s new needs and challenges.
The writer is deputy defence minister