Vietnam's Catch Up Challenge

Vietnam’s legacy 1970s armed forces are gradually being updated with new equipment as defence spending increases.

- JR Ng

Some of the largest increases in military expenditure seen in Southeast Asia since the mid-2000s have led to a fundamental shift in the military power of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN). Its defence budget is understood to have grown almost fourfold in local currency from $1.3 billion (20.5 trillion ng) in 2006 to approximately $4.6 billion (100 trillion đồng) in 2015.

Modernisation efforts have been driven almost exclusively by the threat posed by China over Vietnam’s territorial and resource claims in the contested South China Sea, and has resulted in a focus on the Vietnamese People’s Army’s (VPA) defensive and power projection capabilities to enable it to secure the country’s maritime interests.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Vietnam’s defence expenditure in 2018 was the fourth largest in Southeast Asia at $5.5 billion, just after Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand. It is expected that the figure will surpass $6 billion by 2020.

Land force modernisation

Vietnam’s most recent Defence White Paper, released in 2009, defines the PAVN as ‘an army from the people and for the people’ whose role is ‘aimed at firmly protecting independence, sovereignty, unity, territorial integrity, and national security in all aspects’.

Although the largest and most experienced of the three services, the army faces an uphill task in raising its professionalism and maintaining its large inventories of Chinese and Soviet-made legacy combat vehicles and equipment, particularly with the loss of foreign assistance following its conflict with the People’s Republic of China and subsequently the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.