Is defence spending justified?

Malaysiakini - No parliamentary oversight on runaway defence spending.
In the above news article, Kua Kia Soong, the Suaram director and academician who wrote 'Questioning Arms Spending in Malaysia', described the arms race in the region as both wasteful and futile.

According to him, many Asean countries, but particularly Malaysia, has been on an arms race since the end of Cold War.

“Since the early 1990s, the Asean countries have been the only region in the world where defence spending has increased by more than 10 percent since the end of Cold War,” he said at a forum entitled 'Towards an Alternative Defence Policy and a Culture of Peace' which was held in conjunction with the book launch.

Kua also said: RM1 billion worth of arms is equivalent to building at least 100 hospitals or 1,000 new schools or 10,000 new houses.

Do you know that since Independence in 1957 – after more than 50 years - there has not been a single new Chinese or Tamil primary school built? In fact we had more Chinese and Tamil primary schools then (1,350 and 880 respectively) compared to the present (1,285 and 550 schools respectively). And the population at Independence was only half what it is today.

But in one weekend alone in April 2010, the government could justify spending RM10 billion on arms at the Kuala Lumpur Defence Fair. With that money, we could have built 1,000 hospitals or 10,000 schools or 100,000 houses!

I find it very difficult to assess his article as a whole because there are several separate issues mixed up together, for example, Kua talked about:

(1) RM1 billion worth of arms is equivalent to building at least 100 hospitals or 1,000 new schools or 10,000 new houses. Chinese and Tamil schools have reduced in numbers while the population has doubled.

In this, I totally agree with him on both, what RM1 billion can do, and the marginalization of vernacular schools. But let’s not mix defence spending up with civil infrastructure or the BN government's neglect of vernacular education, though I appreciate of course Kua was trying to higlight the 'waste' of the former. It should be a separate subject. In an ideal world our billions we allocate for defence should be used instead for building schools and hospitals. But unfortunately we live in a violent, selfish and greedy world.

(2) Corruption involved in defence spending – see separate MKINI article Defence Ministry goes on a spending spree. There have been and will be various forms of corruption, from:

(a) humongous ‘commission’ (for no or little work done, a la the Selangor hospital project),

(b) large sums for substandard products - manufacturer merely passes on ‘commission’ sums {see paragraph (a) above} by either substracting same from the cost for the products which means it gives us a cheaper and thus inferior product to what we pay for, or adding same to the cost of the product which means we pay a far higher price than we should for the product - eg. RM700 million extra for the submarines.

(c) directorship of military-industrial complexes for retired generals and senior civil servants or retired politicians who kowtim (okay-ed) the choice and purchases, to

(d) ownership of agencies supplying spares for purchased aircraft or ships or vehicles - one of the most guaranteed and lucrative contracts, etc.

Again, I totally agree with Dr Kua. This explains why our defence budget is way too bloody high and why at the same time we usually received substandard products for it.

Thus I support the musing of Subang MP R Sivarasa who lamented the absence of a parliamentary standing committee to oversight the considerable military spending.

He said: “Among the many dysfunctional institutions in Malaysia, one of them is the Parliament. Yes, we are supposed to debate the defence expenditure, but the government can always bulldoze it through.”
(3) However, I believe Kua has been incorrect to describe Malaysia’s armed purchases as a futile arms race by comparing it to the gargantuan defence expenditures of China, S Korea, Japan and India. He stated that each of their respective aircraft procurement budgets would dwarf that of all of Southeast Asia combined.

He cried: “Given the disparity in defence budgets, Asean countries cannot be said to engage in an arms race against regional powers like India or China. It would not be a race.”

No, Asean countries aren’t competing with the biggies. Kua has been wrong in this respect, to imagine Malaysia is competing with, for example, China or India. Those are major if not super powers, giant sharks like the USA.

In fact they are less dangerous than the USA. The USA has eleven nuclear-powered aircraft carriers with several complementary amphibious fleets and a capacity to wage wars at the international level in two separate theatres, and thus the only major power in the world to have an invasive force, by amphibious or air or combined operations, backed by a monstrous worldwide logistic capability.

We aren’t worried about the biggies. If the unthinkable happens, and say, the USA invades us, we retreat to the jungles and hills and copycat the Vietnamese. The Yanks won’t like that. The Chinese or Indians don’t have a US-like invasion capability nor secure logistic lines to sustain any invasion of Malaysia, assuming they would even try that in the first place.

Malaysia is a mere ikan bilis military power, but an ikan bilis has its natural predators.

Who then are our threats. For a start, let’s leave out Singapore as a potential enemy which seems to unduly worry many Malaysians, especially Malays. Singapore would be nuts to invade Malaysia, because it’ll at the same time destroy all it has built up for itself, as a First World economy and international financial and shipping centre. It is as dependent on Malaysia as we're on it.

Singapore merely postures its military might as a deterrent, telling its neighbours not to threaten it as it has a heavy bite. Naturally vis-a-vis Malaysia, it doesn’t want its water supply curtailed, nor will it tolerate its vital sea lanes being threatened. In the latter, it has allied itself with the USA to ensure (okay, let’s be blunt and call a spade a spade) Indonesia behaves itself.

We can also dismiss Thailand or Vietnam as potential and immediate threats. The communication and logistic lines are far too daunting for any ambitious Thai or Viet Napoleon. Besides Thailand has its own humongous internal problems to address, and I cannot see a war weary Vietnam trying to rebuild its country and economy back to normal out for mischievous and expensive adventure.

Now, I am not sure whether Kua is plain naïve or just from the looney far left who only wants to build schools, universities, hospitals and aged homes, when he stated: ... although the last war against the Indonesian 'Confrontation' was over more than 40 years ago, the government has continued to make available ample funds for the defence minister to purchase state-of-the-art defence equipment.

Defence planning is always about the future. Malaysia cannot wait until a new Konfrontasi occurs before we rush off to buy weapons. If we do that, then we certainly will need all the hospitals Kua wants the defence budget to go to. Lots of war cemeteries will be necessary too.

Malaysia is a littoral state with one of the longest coastline in the world, around the Peninsula and that in the east, from Tanjung Datu in the extreme west of Sarawak running all the way to Tawau in Sabah. We also have the most porous borders with Indonesia and Philippines.

In recent times, we have significantly serious disagreements with Indonesia over some islands and their potential for fossil fuel deposits. Illegal migrants slipping through the Sarawak/Sabah borders with Philippines and especially Indonesia can only get worse, if the illegal migrants were not economic migrants but instead trained and armed troops in mufti.

We badly need more patrol boats for both the Straits of Malacca and the north and eastern parts of Sabah, and surveillance along the Sarawak/Sabah borders with both Indonesia and Philippines. Essentially, we require helicopters, patrol boats, surveillance aircraft (both manned and drones), troops trained for jungle warfare, first class communication, logistics and good intelligence.

Alas, we cannot do without fighter aircraft for protection of our ground and sea operations. Land and sea forces will be highly vulnerable without air superiority. So we are talking about an arms race between ourselves and Indonesia or Philippines.

I think Philippines would have lots of problems in trying to better us (financial problems and its own preoccupation with the southern Muslim insurgencies) so our main threat, much as the government may not wish to publicly acknowledge, is Indonesia.

As long as Indonesia is well off and prospering, it won’t bother us. But once it has internal problems it will need an external enemy to divert its people’s attention, as the recent Bentera hooligans and once Soekarno had attempted.

No Dr Kua, we certainly require arms. Besides, old war horses like the Nuris and MIG 29s need to be replaced. Perhaps the MIG 29s can be refurbished to last for another decade. Look, I won’t go into the nitty gritty but suffice to say, we don’t live in an ideal world.

And yes I agree with you, we dread and anticipate the corruption that will underlie or is already underlying our military spending. We are trapped between the Scylla of not (or under) preparing for the defence of our national interests and the Charybdis of unmitigated corruption in our defence spending.