Indonesia’s aircraft carrier is an indulgence, not a strategy

On September 20, Indonesia will welcome (Opens in new window) the former Italian aircraft carrier Garibaldi into its fleet, basing it at Ratai Bay in Lampung. The acquisition, championed by the Ministry of Defence, caps a series of missteps that substitute prestige for any clear account of what Indonesia actually needs.

Decommissioned by the Italian Navy in 2024, the Garibaldi will be donated to Indonesia by Italy through a grant. Scrapping the ship would have cost Italy more than giving it away. Despite these favorable terms, the ship itself requires significant refurbishment and maintenance having been in service for 40 years. Tubagus Hasanuddin, a member of parliament’s defence commission, reckons it has a decade of service life left, and puts (Opens in new window) the refurbishment bill at Rp7.2 trillion to Rp16.8 trillion ($400–936 million) depending on specifications. None of which counts the recurring cost of operating a carrier once it arrives, which he estimates to be roughly Rp101 billion (about $5.5 million) a month.

Those costs would be easier to justify if they bought a capability Indonesia had decided it needed. Instead, the core motives seem driven by national ego.

A previous report found (Opens in new window) that the Ministry of Defence was targeting a delivery before 5 October, the date of the Indonesian National Armed Forces’ (TNI) 81st Anniversary.

Of course, an aircraft carrier is a significant naval asset. It offers power projection, a mobile base for maritime and aviation assets, and a command-and-control hub. But for any country weighing its maritime assets against financial constraints, the biggest and most prestigious platforms are not always the ones it needs. That is doubly true for Indonesia, having an archipelagic geography that hands it a maritime domain of nearly two million square miles to police. The need to patrol sea lanes, enforce sovereignty, and respond to disasters across that space is not efficiently done by carriers.

The acquisition of the Garibaldi is not an isolated example. Under Prabowo Subianto’s tenure as defence minister and now President, Indonesia has taken an unwieldy approach to modernising the TNI. It is ordering or courting fighters from France (Opens in new window), Türkiye (Opens in new window), South Korea (Opens in new window), and China (Opens in new window) – while also flirting with Russian (Opens in new window) jets. This menagerie of incompatible systems stems from the anxiety of the 1990s, when Washington grounded Indonesia’s F-16s, and Western embargoes over East Timor left the TNI badly weakened.

The strongest case for the carrier tries to reframe the debate. One defence of the purchase holds (Opens in new window) that Indonesians call a carrier a kapal induk – a “mother ship” – so the Garibaldi should be judged not as a strike platform but as a mobile hub for helicopters, drones, and sea-basing across the archipelago. The reframe is clever, but it doesn’t rescue the purchase. If the mission is a floating aviation-and-command node, the Garibaldi is among the most expensive ways to buy one: built to fly fixed-wing Harrier jump jets, it carries the cost and heritage of a strike carrier for a role a purpose-built amphibious or aviation-support ship fills for far less. And the argument’s other half – that the ship “demonstrates technological ambition” – is just the prestige case restated, the very impulse driving this acquisition in the first place.

Prabowo’s genuine interest in defence should be channelled instead toward maritime assets that allow the navy to patrol Indonesia’s extensive waters and fulfill multiple mission sets effectively. Workhorse frigates and destroyers provide that avenue at a far more affordable cost. Building that fleet, and the institutional knowledge to operate it, is precisely what would let Indonesia integrate a carrier effectively, if it ever truly needs one, rather than buying the symbol first and inventing the doctrine later. Tellingly, the same politicians who approved the transfer raised exactly those worries surrounding funding, operating costs, and the doctrinal adjustments that the ship will demand.

What this really points to is the need for strategic clarity. Indonesia has not published a defence white paper (Opens in new window) since 2015. Without one attuned to the current geopolitical environment and domestic constraints, its own institutions lack a shared blueprint for how force structure serves strategy, and partners have no way to align cooperation and arms transfers with Jakarta’s goals. An effective strategy document provides a framework for navigating strategic interests amid the financial and geopolitical constraints every nation faces.

Without a fresh strategy, prestige will keep driving Indonesia's defence decisions – starting with a carrier it neither needs nor can properly crew.