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Indonesia National Defense and Internal Security
Total People's Defense
ABRI's military operations relied on a well-developed
doctrine of national defense called Total People's
Defense, based
on experiences during the struggle for independence. This
doctrine proclaimed that Indonesia could neither afford to
maintain a large military apparatus nor would it
compromise its
hard-won independence by sacrificing its nonaligned status
and
depending on other nations to provide its defense.
Instead, the
nation would defend itself through a strategy of
territorial
guerrilla warfare in which the armed forces, deployed
throughout
the nation, would serve as a cadre force to rally and lead
the
entire population in a people's war of defense. Military
planners
envisioned a three-stage war, comprising a short initial
period
in which an invader would defeat conventional Indonesian
resistance and establish its own control, a long period of
unconventional, regionally based fighting, and a final
phase in
which the invaders would eventually be repelled.
The success of this strategy, according to the
doctrine,
required that a close bond be maintained between citizen
and
soldier to encourage the support of the entire population
and
enable the military to manage all war-related resources.
In this
scenario, the people would provide logistical support,
intelligence, and upkeep, and, as resources permitted,
some
civilians would be organized, trained, and armed to join
the
guerrilla struggle. In trying to attain these goals, ABRI
maintained a territorial organization, run largely by the
army,
to support public order. This group exercised considerable
influence over local decisions regarding such matters as
population redistribution, the production of food and
strategic
materials, and the development of air and sea
transportation.
Armed forces personnel also continued to engage in
large-scale
civic action projects involving community and rural
development
in order to draw closer to the people, to ensure the
continued
support of the populace, and to develop among military
personnel
a detailed knowledge of the region to which they were
assigned.
The largest of these programs, the Armed Forces Enters the
Village (AMD) began in 1983 and was to continue
indefinitely. It
consisted of nationwide civic action campaigns held
roughly three
times a year to provide assistance in planning and
constructing
rural and urban projects selected by local villagers.
The Total People's Defense strategy did not apply in
some of
the major actions Indonesia had engaged in since
independence.
For example, during the Confrontation with Malaysia from
1963 to
1966, ABRI engaged Malaysian forces in guerrilla warfare
without
the support of the border peoples of Sarawak and Sabah; in
the
dispute with the Dutch over West New Guinea in the
mid-1960s,
ABRI fought against Dutch troops. These conflicts were
fought in
territory outside the effective jurisdiction of the
national
government where the Indonesian armed forces lacked the
support
of the civilian population and where the concept of Total
People's Defense could not be implemented. However,
because the
framers of the 1945 constitution had declared these areas
as
naturally belonging to Indonesia, national authorities
declared
that these conflicts were anticolonial wars and in fact
represented the completion of the war of independence
begun in
1945
(see Sukarno's Foreign Policy
, ch. 1;
The Constitutional Framework
, ch. 4).
Data as of November 1992
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