ABSTRACT
At least some South-east Asian navies have since the 1990s experienced fairly rapid military modernisation and growth. 2 Thus far, both scholars and policy-makers have been fairly consistent in arguing that this process of modernisation has not amounted to a naval arms race, that what has been taking place is force modernisation, which suggests an essentially natural process by which states acquire military capabilities and upgrade them regularly through a natural process of obsolescence and replacement. There is some truth to this answer. Most of the naval forces of South-east Asian states have, up to the early 1990s, suffered from relative neglect, in comparison to their respective air force counterparts. By the standards of conventional warfare requirements, virtually all South-east Asian navies have been weak and under-equipped.
