The Military

To understand how Indonesia is governed you have to understand its army. The military is not one institution among many here; for much of the republic's life it has been the institution, and its habits of mind still shape the attitudes of politicians, civil servants and ordinary citizens alike. In Indonesia soldiers have long been more politicians than military professionals, and the force itself is a product of war and improvisation rather than of any orderly founding. The history below explains why, and why the reformist settlement that was supposed to push the army out of civilian life is, in 2025 and 2026, being openly reversed.

The early progression of state-society affairs in the East Indies

Before the colonial period there was no single "core kingdom" across the 17,000-odd islands that became Indonesia. There were Java-based states of real reach at their peak, notably the Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit of the fourteenth century and later the sultanate of Mataram, but their authority over outlying harbours and vassals was loose and contested. By the mid-seventeenth century Mataram had crumbled and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) had become the dominant power, ruling Batavia and its surrounds directly while ceding authority elsewhere to local aristocrats, the prijaji, and to regents, the bupati, who governed through their own retinues and hired muscle. Modern Indonesia, for all its ancient antecedents, is in a real sense a by-product of that colonial administration. The first stirrings of nationalism came only in 1907-08 with Boedi Oetomo, a movement of reform-minded prijaji, followed by the mass Islamic trading association Sarekat Islam in 1912 and the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in 1920.

The birth of the armed forces 1900-1945

The lineage of the modern army runs less through the prijaji than through the gangs. In old Java, bandit gangs that preyed on travellers were a fixture of rural life, and rulers who could not suppress a gang would instead absorb its leaders into their own private militias. When the Dutch laid out sugar, tobacco and coffee estates across the countryside, it was the descendants of these brigand chiefs whom planters turned to for gangs of contract labourers. The gangs fought each other for those contracts, and the administration, glad to be spared the trouble of recruiting and disciplining a workforce, looked the other way.

By the 1920s the labour bosses had diversified into other lines of "business", vice among them, and so long as they left the Dutch establishment alone they were tolerated. Many became bupati or small-town mayors while continuing to run their rackets. As independence agitation grew through the 1920s and 1930s, students, academics and nascent political groups increasingly called on these strongmen when they needed muscle. That alliance between educated nationalists and the gangs of western Java and the port cities would become one of the decisive forces of the independence war, and it set a pattern that has never entirely disappeared: private militias attached to parties, Islamist groups and tycoons remain a feature of Indonesian political life to this day.

The Military gets its start during the independence struggle of 1945-1949

The Second World War broke the old order. Japanese occupation swept aside the Dutch governors and their domestic allies and, courting local support, permitted the formation of armed groups that would matter enormously later: the youth militias, or pemuda; Islamic units such as Hizbullah; the Heiho auxiliaries; and above all PETA, the Japanese-organised Volunteer Defence Force, which became the single most important nursery of Indonesian officers. When Soekarno and Hatta proclaimed independence in August 1945, two days after Japan's surrender, there was almost no governmental machinery to inherit. Real power on the ground lay with a patchwork of militias, gangs and half-organised fighters.

Then the Dutch came back. Between 1945 and 1949 they mounted a series of military offensives, punctuated by agreements they broke, in an effort to reclaim the colony. The independence side was never united. Civilian leaders such as the socialist prime minister Sjahrir distrusted the PETA officers precisely because the Japanese had trained them, and those officers, for their part, had no intention of becoming the obedient subordinates of civilian politicians. Friction ran in every direction. In 1946 officers loyal to the army commander Sudirman abducted Sjahrir in what became known as the "3 July Affair", the military's first open intrusion into politics. Gangster and militia commanders were folded wholesale into the regular army and handed officers' rank, a trend that began in November 1945 when the Jakarta gang leader Moefreni was made a colonel. The result was an army in which strongmen sat as equals alongside academy-trained officers, and often outranked them.

When the Dutch were finally forced by international pressure to concede sovereignty in 1949, the army took the credit. It had fought the Dutch; the politicians, in the army's telling, had negotiated and at moments refused to fight at all. That claim, that the soldiers and not the civilians had won the nation, became the founding myth of Indonesian military politics and the justification for everything that followed.

Indonesia, 1949-1958: legislative politics and military rifts

The decade after independence was one of turbulent parliamentary politics overlaid by struggles between civilians and soldiers and among military factions. A run of regional revolts gave Soekarno grounds to impose martial law across the country in 1957, which in turn handed the army a formal role in civil administration. The PKI unwittingly strengthened the military too: when its unions seized Dutch estates and firms in late 1957, those enterprises were placed under army management, and many remain state-run to this day. Soldiers thereby acquired an economic base and a patronage machine, recruiting supporters from the workforce of the state companies much as the old labour bosses had done under the Dutch.

By 1959-60 the army was entrenched in politics. General Nasution's doctrine of "territorial warfare" gave it a parallel command structure reaching into every level of civil administration, with officers installed as governors and bupati. Soekarno's notion of "functional group" representation suited the army perfectly, flattering its self-image as a socio-political force responsible for both defending and developing the nation. Out of that concept the military built a civilian front, Sekber Golkar, the Joint Secretariat of Functional Groups, an anti-PKI coalition that would become Golkar. As Soekarno drifted closer to the PKI in the early 1960s, mutual suspicion between the army and the communists sharpened, setting the stage for the catastrophe of 1965.

Soeharto's New Order

How exactly Soeharto came to power after the murky events of 1 October 1965 is a subject I will not reopen here. What matters is the outcome: the PKI was annihilated over the following months in mass killings, Soekarno was eased aside, and by 1968 Major General Soeharto held the presidency, which he would keep for three decades. Golkar became his electoral vehicle, winning six carefully managed elections between 1971 and 1997, and the doctrine of dwifungsi, dual function, gave the whole arrangement its ideological cover: the army was to be both a defence force and a permanent political and social actor, the self-appointed guardian of the nation.

The machinery of control was thorough. Civil servants were required to join Golkar and the corporatist bodies such as KORPRI and to swear loyalty to the state, which in practice meant to Soeharto, the army and Golkar. The territorial command structure shadowed the civilian administration from provincial Kodam down through district Kodim and sub-district Koramil to the Babinsa, a non-commissioned officer posted in every village. Javanese officers governed most outer-island provinces and filled a majority of local police-chief, bupati and mayoral posts until 1998. Intelligence and security agencies watched students, harassed opposition figures and pressured the press, which was managed through a mix of telephoned warnings, permit threats, staged briefings and outright largesse. Control of political office also allowed senior officers to amass fortunes through state contracts and, in the worst cases, through vice, illegal logging and trafficking. By the account of the late General Benny Moerdani, once Soeharto's defence minister, an ordinary retired general could clear US$5-20 million in the 1980s and 1990s; the sums today are larger and better hidden behind proxy companies and foundations. The military wore three hats at once, soldier, politician and administrator, and stitched several million civil servants into a single, cohesive ruling stratum whose privileges, rituals and Pancasila indoctrination courses set it apart from the society it governed.

The military's place in the current reformasi era

The reformasi upheaval of 1998 forced Soeharto out and dismantled the formal architecture of dwifungsi. Over the following years the army, renamed TNI, lost its reserved seats in parliament, and a genuine legal framework for civilian supremacy was built: MPR Decrees No. VI and VII of 2000 separated the military from the police and defined their distinct roles, and this was reinforced by the Defence Law (No. 3 of 2002), the Police Law (No. 2 of 2002) and, above all, the TNI Law (No. 34 of 2004). That 2004 law defined a professional army, barred from practical politics and from business, and confined serving officers to a short list of roughly ten security-adjacent civilian posts; any other civilian job required resignation or retirement first. The law even ordered the government to take over all military-owned businesses within five years.

On paper this was a decisive break with the New Order. In practice the army never surrendered its deepest source of power. The territorial command structure, which reaches to every village through the Babinsa, was never dismantled; reformist officers who proposed abolishing it around 2000 were seen off when senior commanders threatened to resign, and it has since become an untouchable red line that no president will challenge. For years the standard reading, and the one the earlier version of this article gave, was that military influence had gone below the surface: still pervasive, but exercised informally through appointments, budgets and the sheer reach of the territorial network rather than through open political office.

That reading no longer holds, because the reversal is now overt. In October 2024 Prabowo Subianto became Indonesia's eighth president. Prabowo is himself a product of the story told above: a former Kopassus special-forces and Kostrad commander, Soeharto's one-time son-in-law, discharged from the army in 1998 over the abduction of pro-democracy activists, later rehabilitated as defence minister from 2019 to 2024. His vice-president is Gibran Rakabuming Raka, the son of the previous president, Joko Widodo. Under Prabowo the army's civilian footprint has expanded fast and in plain sight.

The central move was the revision of the TNI Law. On 20 March 2025 the DPR unanimously passed Law No. 3 of 2025, amending the 2004 statute. It widened the list of civilian state institutions in which active-duty officers may serve without resigning from around ten to fifteen, adding bodies such as the Attorney-General's Office, the Supreme Court, the State Secretariat and the national counter-terrorism and disaster-management agencies; it raised officers' retirement ages; and it allowed "military operations other than war" to be authorised by presidential or government regulation, bypassing parliament. Critics read all of this as the return of dwifungsi under another name, and the law drew mass student protests and a wave of legal challenges. The Constitutional Court rejected the procedural challenges in September 2025, with four of its nine judges dissenting over the lack of public participation, while material challenges brought by a civil-society coalition ran on into 2026. In June 2026 parliament went further, amending the Police Law along the same lines to let serving police officers take civilian posts without resigning, a step Amnesty International Indonesia called "a sign of authoritarianism".

The territorial expansion has been just as open. On 10 August 2025 Prabowo inaugurated six new regional commands, lifting the number of Kodam from fifteen to twenty-one, with a declared target of thirty-seven, one for every province, by 2026, alongside scores of new lower-level units. One of the new commands, Kodam XXIV/Mandala Trikora, sits in South Papua, one of the four provinces carved out of the old single Papua province in 2022. The army is also being pushed into civilian work directly, running food-security and food-estate programmes through new "territorial development" battalions. The TNI denies reviving dwifungsi, insisting the placements are lawful and service-oriented, and the human-rights minister has claimed that civilian ministers, not the president, requested the officers. Whatever the framing, the concerns are concrete: witnesses have told the Constitutional Court that active soldiers turned up at industrial-relations negotiations, and in March 2026 a KontraS activist was the victim of an acid attack by four active members of military intelligence in central Jakarta.

The party landscape has also moved on entirely from the New Order picture. Golkar is no longer the dominant party led by a serving vice-president. After the February 2024 election the largest party in the 580-seat DPR is PDI-P, chaired by Megawati Soekarnoputri and re-confirmed in that role for 2025-2030, with 110 seats; Golkar is second with 102 and is now chaired by Bahlil Lahadalia, who doubles as energy minister. Jusuf Kalla, described in older accounts as the sitting vice-president and Golkar chief, has held neither post for years. The reformist parties and activists of the early 2000s have, for the most part, been absorbed into the system they once opposed. What has not changed is the underlying reverence: the same generation that faced down soldiers in 1998 still, by and large, venerates the army as the guarantor of national unity, the NKRI. As the retired general Ryamizard Ryacudu has long put it, the territorial commands are "the glue of the nation". That belief, drummed into three generations through schools, ceremonies and slogans, is the real reason the military's return to civilian life meets so little sustained resistance.

NOTES

Further reading. On the militia and gangster origins of the army, Robert Cribb, Gangsters and Revolutionaries (Asian Studies Association of Australia, 1991); on the 1965 events and their aftermath, Harold Crouch, The Army and Politics in Indonesia, and Ulf Sundhaussen, The Road to Power: Indonesian Military Politics 1945-1967; on the post-1998 settlement and its unravelling, Marcus Mietzner, The Coalitions Presidents Make (2023). The armed forces were known until 1998 as Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia (ABRI); today they are the Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI), a lineage running back through the TRI (1946), the TKR and BKR (1945) and the Japanese-sponsored PETA.

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