INDONESIA (COMMONWEALTH UNION) – it looks like Indonesia is looking at beefing up their flight fleets with the help of the international community. The Defense Minister of Indonesia Prabowo Subianto gave a press conference recently at the Halim Perdanakusuma air base where he confirmed this.
He assured whilst standing on the military air base that he has plans on expanding the Indonesian military air fleets so that the country’s air force is better equipped if the need was to arise and they needed the air defense. He went on to state that the crafts that they were getting would be previously used jets but of course they would be examined and only the ones that pass the quality check would be purchased by the Indonesian government.
The statement read as follows “We plan to acquire a number of aircraft from overseas that are not too old,” the statement was made after the handover of the C-130 Type J.
The defence minister did not however give a detailed account of how the buying of the jets happened but he did make a promise that all those details will be provided shortly. The plan is to publicly announce the procurement has made. The only thing he did mention was that they had purchased the fighter jets from Dassault Rafale fighter jets based in France.
The talks of the purchase have been happening between the Indonesian government and the French government since the start of the year 2022. According to reports the Indonesian government had ordered 42 fighter jets out of which 6 will be delivered in the year 2026.
This is big news as Indonesia has never had the need to have such a large fleet but the country is taking the stance better to be safe than sorry.