Mike Yeo, Singapore – An Indonesian official's announcement earlier this month that Jakarta intends to buy at least 42 Chinese J-10 fighter aircraft raised more than a few eyebrows.
After all, the development followed similar pledges to acquire the South Korea's KF-21 Boramae and Turkey's TAI Kaan. The Asian nation has also previously expressed an interest in operating the Boeing F-15EX Eagle II from the US.
Indonesia's Air Force is already operating the Lockheed-Martin F-16 multirole fighter, the Russian Sukhoi Su-27/30, South Korea's KAI T-50 light combat aircraft and the ageing BAE Hawk light attack aircraft/trainer, which it is seeking to replace. Meanwhile, it is on the verge of taking delivery of its first of an eventual 42 Dassault Rafale omnirole fighters from France.
Adding Chinese fighter jets would appear to further complicate the aerial menagerie, but regional experts told Breaking Defense that the announcement may be less about practical operational considerations and more about geopolitical strategy – and pending negotiations.
President Prabowo Subianto "seems to be lurching from one foreign partnership to the next, without any obvious guiding strategy beyond shopping around for the best deals and signaling Jakarta's poly-alignment on the international scene," said Euan Graham, the senior analyst for Defence Strategy and National Security at the Australia Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). "Gamesmanship could well be a factor, if Indonesia's government plays the China card in this very public way as a gambit to obtain more favourable terms from other suppliers."
Likewise Collin Koh, a senior fellow at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, told Breaking Defense that Indonesia's interest in Chinese military equipment was likely due to a desire by the administration to forge closer ties with China for various, mostly economic, reasons.
However, Koh hastened to add that it was not just about the government wanting closer political ties with China but also about a desire to continue strengthening Indonesia's military while keeping its policy of diversifying its sources of defense equipment and staying within its defense budget.
"In order to maximize the limited budget, and going by Indonesia's contemporary approach of diversifying arms import sources after smarting from the past US embargo, Indonesia cannot afford to just acquire from the West – the TNI's preferred source of equipment," he said, using the acronym for the Tentera Nasional Indonesia, or Indonesian Armed Forces.
He pointed out that Indonesia has already missed its Minimum Essential Force targets set in 2010, which, among other criteria, sought to have 10 combat aircraft squadrons and a 274-ship navy by 2024 to adequately defend the 14,000-island archipelago that makes up the country.
The Indonesian military did not respond to a request for comment.
Both Koh and Graham agree that Indonesia will struggle to keep such a diverse mix of equipment operational and adding the J-10 into is not going to make things easier, with Koh noting that Indonesia has chronically underfunded defense for decades.
"It has reached a point where huge chunks of the TNI's equipment have reached block obsolescence (or nearing such in the short term), hence requiring massive investments. It might have helped if such investments were meticulously planned and spread out across the past decades, but this wasn't the case for Indonesia's defense procurement policy", he added.
Graham said that potentially adding the J-10 into the Indonesian Air Force's inventory is unlikely to be a popular choice.
"Maintaining the current smorgasbord of foreign suppliers is already difficult, and adding another country to the frontline mix means a logistician's nightmare," he said.
He also cautioned that there is also a political downside to buying equipment from China alongside the perceived upsides.
"It means you are buying into a long-term supplier relationship with Beijing and all that entails, including an embedded assumption that Indonesia would never fight China," he said. "I don't think that would sit well with everyone in the TNI. But the TNI aren't the final decision makers."