As some people who live in Thailand will know, the Thai military made a lot of purchases for themselves before they lost control of the government due to the democratic elections. According to Saab owned Gripen “The Thai Cabinet has approved a budget of 34,400 billion baht (US$ 1.1 billion) for the Royal Thai Air Force (RTAF) to procure 12 (twelve) Gripen multi-role fighters, to replace its ageing fleet of F-5 B/E aircraft, and 2 (two) Saab Erieye AEW aircraft, together with associated equipment and services.” From reuters“Since the coup, Thailand’s army-appointed government has approved a 66 percent increase in military spending… Last month, the post-coup interim cabinet approved the 6.7 billion baht ($211 million) purchase of Israeli guns, Ukrainian armored vehicles and Chinese missiles.”
It is all too easy to point out the blatant abuse of power, as many other people have done so already. But the real questions, the one that no one has really asked and no one has ever analyzed, are “Why does Thailand need this military equipment?” and “Is this equipment even any good?”
It is fairly safe to say that Thailand is no immediate danger of going to war with any of its neighbors. If anything, Thailand and its Southeast Asian neighbors want to coexist peacefully to bring economic stability for all. In fact, the only thing that Thailand sees in terms of military deployment is fighting the insurgency in the South, and protecting the borders from various criminal elements. Unfortunately, the equipment the military wants to procure does nothing to help them in the fight against the insurgency.
The insurgents in the south make their camps in the jungles of Thailand. These camps are very hard to spot, and require patrols of soldiers to wander around the forest hoping to blunder into them. When the insurgents are not in the jungle, they can wander freely in the populated areas because, quite frankly, they look like everyone else. This is the classic example of gueirella warfare. So how does purchasing attack jets help us in rooting these insurgents out? How about used, broken down, outdated armored vehicles? Or those Chinese missiles? The navy has even been mumbling about buying a submarine for themselves. What are we going to do, fire torpedoes into the jungle?
Sadly, the military has no idea what it is doing, or how to combat insurgency. Instead, it flails about buying new superfluous toys for itself. Instead of blindly buying equipment that helps the country in no logical way, how about analyzing the type of conflicts which are most pressing and urgent, and procure equipment based upon the actual needs of the country?
For example, instead of sending out soldiers into the jungles to blindly wander around like Hansel and Gretel hoping to come across some breadcrumbs, why don’t we buy UAVs that can be sent out to patrol vast spans of jungle in the time it would take a platoon of soldiers to patrol a single square kilometer? Not only can they patrol more efficiently, they sure as heck cost a lot less to own and fly than a Fighter jet that we have no use for. To supplement the UAVs, we could have squadrons of troop transport helicopters to bring platoons to remote areas quickly in response to what the UAVs find. We could also have a squadron of attack helicopters to quickly eliminate any major threats that require immediate disposal. One billion USD can buy a whole lot of UAVs and helicopters…
So why aren’t we doing this? Or more precisely, why are we buying things that have no relevance to the safety of our country? Unfortunately, there is no single answer, and the convoluted web of lies, under the table money deals, and petty power struggles is beyond the scope of this post. Suffice it to say, as long as we maintain the status quo of allowing incompetency fester in the military and the public sector in general, the insurgency will continue and more people will die everyday.
