Chapter 5 - Democratic Consolidation and Reform of the TNI in the Post-Suharto Era

Summary

It will be a daunting prospect to establish civilian control over the military in a country like Indonesia, particularly as the TNI was the capstone for Suharto's authoritarian regime. As we have discussed in Chapter 4, the security ideology of the TNI, particularly after 1965, was further infused by a professionalism that epitomized Stepan's description of the Brazilian military and other military regimes in Latin America premised by the logic of what he called the “new professionalism of internal security and national development”. In Indonesia's case, this “new professionalism” was a logical product of a military that was politicized, highly bureaucratic, and well schooled in the curriculum of U.S. military assistance programmes that emphasized “counterinsurgency, civic action and nation building”. At Seskoad in the early 1960s, American-trained Indonesian officers were preoccupied in studying socio-political underpinnings of revolutionary protest particularly the challenges posed by the Darul Islam and PKI. Consequently, developing doctrines and training techniques to neutralize such movements shaped a “professionalism” that required a greater focus on political problems. Such an outlook was in direct contrast to Huntington's professionalization thesis and its orthodox emphasis on military professionalism rooted in skills developed for conventional warfare against external threats. The example of Latin American military establishments and their preoccupation with subversion and internal security requiring “institutional professionalization” facilitated by extensive U.S. military assistance cited by Stepan certainly resonates with the Indonesian experience:

The formulators of United States military assistance programs and the chiefs of many Latin American military establishments now believed that professionalism led to a belief that there was a fundamental interrelationship between the two spheres, with the military playing a key role in interpreting and dealing with domestic political problems owing to its greater technical skills in handling internal security issues. The scope of military concern for, and study off, politics became unrestricted, so that the “new professional” military man was highly politicized.