While the United States spends billions on military infrastructure from Guam to Darwin, one crucial enabler of Indo-Pacific deterrence remains noticeably underdeveloped: rights to pass through Indonesia. The sea and air space of the archipelago would be hard to avoid in any regional conflict scenario. US and allied force planning has rightly focused on hardware and forward basing, but has it given enough attention to the challenge of regional access? In a crisis, the deciding factor may not be bombers or submarines, but whether Indonesia permits access and aligns politically with allied operations. Without reliable passage through Southeast Asia, and Indonesia in particular, deterrence risks being operationally constrained, even where significant capability investments have been made. Heavy basing in Guam or northern Australia cannot offset gaps in force mobility across Southeast Asia, notably through strategic corridors such as the Sunda, Lombok and Makassar Straits. As regional tensions increase, it is this political gap, not a military one, that threatens the coherence of allied deterrence strategy.
A studiously ignored problem: force projected from Australia must go through Indonesia (Michael Roach – The Strategist)
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