Executive Summary
Not Available.
Introduction: Indonesia Erupts
Consider the following scenario set some twenty years in the future. The president of the United States is meeting with her National Security Council to consider military options aimed at stabilizing the escalating crisis in Indonesia.
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The crisis began in December 2015, when the Indonesian military, frustrated by its increasing inability to cope with growing insurrections on Irian Jaya, East Timor, Borneo, Java and Sumatra, initiated a bloody coup against the post-Suharto regime. By March of the following year, the carnage inflicted by the military junta reached a level not seen since Suharto’s consolidation of power 50 years earlier. Human rights organizations have estimated the number of people killed to date at more than half a million. An ongoing information revolution intensified dramatically both the causes and conduct of the conflict.
Despite the increasing bloodbath as Indonesia plunged deeper into civil war, there was no serious consideration of international intervention until three events galvanized the world’s attention. The first occurred on the night of July 10-11, when the Japanese oil supertanker,
Nara, on its way to Nagoya from the Persian Gulf, exploded after transiting the Strait of Malacca. The main Muslim separatist insurgent group on the island of Sumatra,
Sarekat Islam
(or Islamic Union, named after the anti-Dutch nationalist movement formed some 100 years before), claimed responsibility, declaring that it sank the
Nara
with an antiship missile.
Sarekat Islam
claims to have “several dozen” of these missiles. The group’s leadership also announced that it has deployed hundreds of advanced, antiship mines in the Strait and in the narrow waterway between the islands of Sumatra and Java, and warns that both will remain closed until the “Jakarta Junta” is deposed. The group's announcement, which was released via the Internet, called upon Islamic states and the “great powers” to take “immediate action” to depose the Indonesian government.
The second event occurred three days later, when hundreds of Indonesians of Chinese descent were killed by the Indonesian military, which has cast the Chinese community as a “scapegoat” for the country's woes. The Chinese government reacted promptly and aggressively. Chinese submarines operating in the Timor Sea launched a cruise missile attack against the main Indonesian air base on the island of Java. Simultaneously, Chinese long-range aircraft operating off of Hainan Island struck Indonesian Army Headquarters with standoff precision-guided munitions.
The third event took place on July 20th, when a low-observable, ground-launched cruise missile, apparently fired from Borneo, struck an Indonesian off-shore oil platform, setting off an oil fire. Anti-government guerrillas claimed responsibility, and threatened more missile strikes until the Indonesian government is toppled. The attack was followed by mass demonstrations in Pontianak, Balikpapan, and Banjarmasin.
The president is cognizant that the Indonesian military would strongly resist any outside interference, given that successful intervention would likely lead to elections that would depose the junta. While the Indonesian military has no weapons of mass destruction, it does possess several hundred antiship cruise missiles, and over 500 medium-range (500-1000 km) low-observable cruise missiles. The missiles have been dispersed in clusters of four to six in roughly 100 remote sites among the country's more than 13,000 islands, with many believed to be stored in mountain caves. Indonesian forces communicate with each other via commercial satellite links. The military leadership is believed to be in deep underground bunkers below the defense ministry complex in Jakarta, where the army's elite ground units are stationed. Indonesian regular ground forces are believed to be ready to abandon the countryside and concentrate their resistance in the cities that remain under their control, principally those on the islands of Sumatra and Java. Indonesia’s military leaders have vowed to turn Jakarta into an “Asian Stalingrad” should outside forces attempt to occupy it.
Anti-government insurgents may not completely welcome the arrival of outside forces either. American forces could thus find themselves in the middle of a full-scale civil war: facing government troops in the cities of Sumatra,
Sareket Islam
guerrillas in the countryside, and ascendant separatist forces on Timor and Irian Jaya bent on revenge against those supporting continued affiliation with Jakarta. Insurgent forces have already demonstrated they have access to antiship mines, low-observable cruise missiles, and antiship missiles. They also have demonstrated the ability to use commercial satellite networks for command, control, communications, and intelligence purposes.
The president is acutely aware that the American public will not have a high tolerance for casualties. She is concerned about the significant risk to U.S. forces which the Indonesian military’s distributed stockpile of low-observable cruise missiles poses. Taking into consideration the difficulties inherent in trying to impose peace upon belligerents armed with such extended-range weapons, she cannot discount the possibility that one of the factions might use biological weapons. She also fears that U.S. forces could be drawn into house-to-house fighting on their adversaries’ terms in Indonesia’s teeming cities. The president is concerned as well about the difficulty of securing narrow sea passages from the threat posed to merchant shipping by distributed, land-based antiship missiles and mines. There is also the very real possibility that the “combat zone” may not remain confined to Indonesia.
The scenario described above illustrates the very different challenges U.S. forces could face should they be called upon to intervene in future intrastate conflicts. Yet intervening in intrastate conflicts will likely be the most prevalent, if not the most demanding, mission future U.S. forces will have to be prepared to execute, and, as this report will suggest, it could become a far riskier mission as well. While previous military revolutions have had non-existent or extremely limited effects on the lower end of the conflict spectrum, there is substantial reason to believe that an emerging transformation could well be different.
Most scholarly research completed to date on the characteristics and consequences of revolutionary change in warfare has been historical in nature.
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While the notion of an impending transformation of war is gaining increasing currency in U.S. defense circles, almost all of this debate is centered around the impact such change could have on the conduct of high-intensity, conventional war.
