ABSTRACT
South-East Asia’s navies have developed unevenly in the almost seven decades since the end of the Second World War. This is understandable. Most have had some benefit from previous colonial masters, but all have had to fight for the resources necessary to generate and sustain their operational capability. Few to this point – Singapore being the outstanding exception – have enjoyed the levels of sustained and systematic support that they have needed. This has resulted in a more diversified sourcing of ships and other material than most navies would have preferred, as well as the continuation in service of a good deal of obsolescent equipment. It has also created fundamental problems in both logistics and training, as well as limiting operational availability. Development plans for several services have also been complicated by the need – constant or periodic – to contribute to internal security, and devote much effort to riverine and shallow water operations, even when there have been substantial contemporary challenges in the offshore domain. Concepts of sea control and even sea denial have often had to give way to the need to support domestic stability. In short, the various navies have, more often than not, been confined within circumstances that have forced them to make do with what they could get, rather than fully responding to national circumstances and needs. Thus, the navies of Burma, Cambodia and the Philippines in particular have developed only very limited maritime combat capabilities, despite the pressures that they face offshore. At the other end of the spectrum, the navies of Singapore, and Malaysia and Thailand, to a lesser extent, attempted to build balanced forces, with at least some combat capability in the surface, air and undersea domains. The Singapore Navy has been the region’s exemplar, executing a deliberate and long-term development plan which has seen it emerge as the region’s most advanced, capable and balanced navy, well integrated with the maritime elements of Singapore’s Air Force and part of an increasingly sophisticated whole of government maritime security system. The Republic’s Navy has evolved from a small
sea denial force to one which now fields significant sea control capabilities across the spectrum of operations and may soon aspire to limited power projection. Although they have both made substantial progress in recent years, Malaysian and Thai naval planning has been by no means as disciplined as that of Singapore. The result is that capability development has not had the same degree of consistency and there remain significant deficiencies in their force structures and, particularly for Thailand, in operational and training standards. Indonesia and Vietnam, both of which have had to labour under much greater constraints of finance and capacity than several of their ASEAN colleagues, are in a similar position. On a much smaller scale, and after perhaps unnecessary setbacks, Brunei has renewed its combat and patrol forces in a way that reflects reasonably well the need for balance between operational requirements and national capacity to provide for its offshore defence.
