Malaysia's Defence Doldrums

Despite an approaching Defence White Paper, fiscal frugality looks set to dominate near-to mid-term defence acquisition projects.

- Dzirhan Mahadzir

Despite a change of ruling party for Malaysia’s government in May 2018, there have been no significant developments in regard to Malaysia’s defence or the Malaysian Armed Forces. To a large extent, this is not surprising considering the Prime Minister is Mahathir Mohamad. While his first tenure saw a number of major defence purchases, many of these were made on the basis of economic benefits, political relations, technology transfers and offsets rather than pure defence or strategic requirements and to a large extent, Mahathir’s pacifist nature also meant that defence capabilities were never seen as a priority or essential to the nation.

To a certain degree, a number of the problems in Malaysia’s defence status are the result of decisions undertaken during his time as Prime Minister, though both his successors as Prime Ministers also contributed by postponing defence programmes while not addressing funding issues for defence.

Prime Minister Mahathir is now governing with a largely inexperience cabinet and his coalition government is grappling with effectively managing a government while addressing issues pertaining to corruption by the previous government, including the trial of former Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak on corruption charges. Given that, it is unlikely that Prime Minister Mahathir will push for new defence developments or increased defence spending as the main priorities will focus on governance.