The SAF is arguably ‘the most impressive military force in contemporary Southeast Asia’ (Huxley, 2000, p 249). Yet, the threat of military intervention in Singapore’s political system, what Feaver (1999, p 214) terms the ‘civil–military problematique’ – wherein the ‘very institution created to protect the polity is given sufficient power to become a threat to the polity’ – is unlikely (Tan, 2011, p 148). Scholars have contended that Singapore’s civil–military relations transcend Feaver’s problematique. Four decades earlier, Chan (1985, p 136) already noted ‘the most striking feature of the Singapore scene is the undisputed predominance of the civilian sector over the military.’ We broadly agree with Tan (2001, p 276), who explains that such control is achieved through ‘civil–military fusion’ whereby ‘the military, both in leadership and in structural terms, functions as an integral part of a centralized, bureaucratic state’; and also with Chong and Chan (2016), who observed civilian society is arguably built in the likeness of a quintessential military force, with a seeming permeation of martial values. We, however, suggest an alternative for such integration. Rather than one world enfolding the other into a hyphenated whole, a ‘civilianized military’ or ‘militarized civilian’, we argue that the foundational cultural values of Singapore society and government, and its armed forces, are the same, precluding separate ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ worlds in the first place.

In Singapore’s history, such ontologically distinct worlds never existed to a significant extent, nor did Singapore’s development allow them to be created. Consequently, there is no civil–military gap – a key concern in civil–military relations scholarship – in Singapore, transcending the civil–military problematique. While the military naturally plays a different role, it does not occupy a different world. Singapore presents a curious case of how its military evolution has existed within the operational role of the SAF as opposed to a changing relationship between different worlds.

In August 2019, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the nation’s most significant defence reform since its establishment as a constitutional republic – the institution of the post of Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) (Unnithan, 2019). By appointing a four-star general and establishing the Department of Military Affairs inside the Ministry of Defence, the government sought to address the array of issues that afflict India’s military effectiveness. The post of the CDS has been a core recommendation of almost all defence review committees set up in India to scrutinize the armed forces’ workings. With its realization, the government has demonstrated intent in implementing more systematic reforms that will have a broader impact on India’s defence organization.1 According to Prime Minister Modi, ‘the CDS would be the government’s single-point military advisor and sharpen coordination between the forces making them even more effective’ (Unnithan, 2019). While the CDS’ investiture is no silver bullet, it assuages the paucity in synergy between the different elements that constitute India’s higher defence management [the political leadership, the bureaucracy and the military] – which have traditionally operated in silos. A similar fragmented relationship also exists among the armed forces’ respective services, severely impacting India’s jointness in operations and defence planning. The CDS is mandated to bind together all these disjointed sections and restructure India’s armed forces. Under his command, India is now undergoing a fundamental recalibration from segregated service-based commands to integrated functional commands. The plans to establish an Air Defence Command and a Maritime Theatre Command (MTC) are already in progress and could herald the most extensive organizational restructuring in the history of the Indian armed forces (Dhoundial, 2021).

Across the two administrations of Joko Widodo (popularly known as Jokowi), the Army-dominated TNI (Tentara Nasional Indonesia – Indonesian National Military) has experienced a resurgence. The military’s present influence is not what it was during Suharto’s New Order (1967–98) when the dwi fungsi (dual function) doctrine gave the TNI sweeping political power. Yet, the self-styled civilian reformer has synergized the TNI and its hardline elements. Jokowi has extolled and supported institutional and individual narratives of indispensability to national stability and has opened the door to New Order-era figures’ reclamation of political roles.

Since Jokowi assumed the presidency in 2014, regional and national military authority has grown. The TNI has signed Memorandums of Understanding with civilian agencies for the provision of security and has become involved in government initiatives such as rural food self-sufficiency programmes. The TNI’s demands for a greater role in counterterrorism operations grew during Jokowi’s second term. On top of that, the military has become indispensable to Indonesia’s COVID-19 response. On balance, the military is evolving into an institution that seeks an outward facing role while continuing to fulfil its mandate as national guardian.

Under Jokowi the number of ex-TNI hardliners in cabinet positions and courting political office has increased, bringing with them the normalization of intolerance. They have escalated discrimination, threats, intimidation and violence against LGBTQ+ communities and survivors of the state-sponsored anti-communist violence of 1965–6. Talk of proxy wars inform crackdowns against ‘subversive elements’. Inflammatory rhetoric about the nation’s moral decay, a sustained unapologetic stance about human rights and conservative ideas about state defence prevail.

For progressives, the appearance of hardliners at the helm extinguished hope that Jokowi would honour his promises of meaningful socio-political reform. ‘There is now scholarly consensus,’ a recent Brookings report states, ‘that Indonesia’s democracy has not just stagnated but is regressing’ (Sambhi, 2021).

States have to rely on military force as their ultima ratio, but how does the state ensure the loyalty of the ‘ultimate arbiter of power’? The overwhelming answer in the literature is civilian control of the military. Yet Vietnam’s solution is different. Organized as a Leninist state, it keeps its armed forces loyal through political control. Unlike civilian control, which implies a zero-sum game between the state and its military, political control is a reciprocal mechanism based on the mutual embeddedness of the armed forces in the Communist Party and of the Party in the armed forces. This architecture characterizes the relationship between Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party (VCP) and its armed forces, which include the military and the police.

The mutual embeddedness of the state and its military manifests itself in a host of organizational devices such as the institution of the political commissar in every military unit, the mechanisms of political–ideological work in the military and the representation of the military in key policy making bodies, giving rise to both the politicization of the military and the involvement of the military in policy making. These aspects have evolved significantly and yet, mutual embeddedness has remained constant throughout the history of Communist Vietnam. This constant – political control of the military through mutual embeddedness of the military and the ruling party – is probably the architectural kernel of the Leninist state.

With these main arguments, this chapter will outline the architecture of civil–military relations in Vietnam and trace the evolution of its constituents since the country was reunified in 1975. After a brief discussion of the origins of civil–military relations in Communist Vietnam, I will examine how the state controls the military and how the military influences politics. Finally, I will address the evolution of the military’s missions and the military’s attitude toward modernization and democratization.

Origins

The military in today’s Vietnam – the Vietnam People’s Army (VPA) – traces its roots to the armed teams that operated under the guidance of the Communist Party in the struggle against French colonialism and Japanese occupation during World War Two (Ministry of National Defence, 2019, p 72).

The idea of a national security state that thrives on perpetuating a national climate of insecurity is often associated with the Global South. The military is geared to protect a nascent state that remains fallible despite years of experimentation with civilian control. More likely, having tasted and exercised power in the past, the military has entrenched for itself a reputation for being the indubitable guardian of normality and the security of the population, and even as the seeder of the correct formula for economic prosperity (Ahmad, 1985; Luckham, 1991). South Korea, also widely known by its formal name, Republic of Korea (ROK), is not completely distinct in its practice of civil–military relations from the rest of Asia. As we will argue in this chapter, the tussle over democracy in civil–military relations is more a symptom than a primary explanatory framework for South Korea. This is in view of the heavy social, psychological, and ideological burdens imposed by the legacies of Japanese colonialism, as well as the panicked improvisation of the South Korean economic growth strategies that started under General Park Chung-hee’s direction between 1961 and 1979. In short, South Korea’s current political stability was attained at a cost and its economic powerhouse status achieved through compromises arbitered by military rule and justified against a geopolitical environment of exaggerated insecurity.

The stereotypical Global South narrative about generals turning autocrats in pursuit of national salvation against civilian ineptitude and corruption is very much borne out by existing literature on South Korean civil–military relations. One distinct strand treats civil–military relations as the dramatic rise and fall of civilians pulling the puppet strings of military and paramilitary factions to stay in power (Cotton, 1991; Kim, 1998). Conversely, in the cases of the presidencies of Park Chung-hee, Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, elites within the military traded uniforms for civilian business suits to consolidate the appearance of civilian political supremacy (Cotton, 1991, pp 210–13; Croissant, et al, 2012, pp 19–20).

China’s four decades of economic development have invariably coincided with a profound transformation of the PLA; nowhere has that change been more apparent than in the period following the 18th Party Congress of the CCP. With Xi Jinping’s assumption of the trifecta of Party–state–military power coinciding with the structural growth in China’s comprehensive strength, the PLA’s status in Beijing’s domestic and international calculus has become more pronounced. Since arriving at the top, the incumbent has shown considerably greater interest than his immediate predecessor in harnessing the Party’s coercive forces as his own domestic powerbase as well as foreign policy instrument to complement hard Chinese economic power. To be sure, Xi’s meddling in PLA affairs reflects his aspiration to reshape the Party–army into a force commensurate with Beijing’s global stature in conformity with his ‘China Dream’ – that is, a strong country needs to possess an equally powerful military (Xinhua, 2017). Notwithstanding the increased time and resources devoted by Xi to managing his country’s military affairs – suggestive of the growing clout of the armed forces in the PRC – the PLA’s rising stature has nevertheless been accompanied by the conundrum of concurrent efforts by its commander-in-chief to destabilize it. These have come in the form of purges against PLA elites on graft charges and Xi’s push for the latest iteration of Chinese military modernization to streamline the PLA and its operations.

Not unlike previous eras of civilian paramountcy over the CCP’s armed servants under the regime’s revolutionary forebears, Xi’s emergence as China’s strongman leader would not have been possible without first gaining control of the Party’s gun. What accounts for the return to this manifestly politicized nature of authority more commonly associated with Mao Zedong – and to a lesser extent, Deng Xiaoping? Has Maoist absolute control of the Party’s army returned to the fore? And what is its significance for the trajectory of CCP–PLA interactions in the medium to long term?

The practice of international peacekeeping has experienced considerable change over the past decades. For the purpose of this chapter, peacekeeping is defined as:

Since the end of the Cold War, peacekeeping has come to incorporate a growing number of military, civilian and police functions aimed at creating long-term stability in the host country. At the same time, it underwent a shift with regards to personnel contributing countries, with increasingly higher numbers of peacekeepers coming from the global south. In this regard, Southeast Asia is no exception. Singapore, Thailand and the tiny sultanate of Brunei began to participate in peacekeeping under the aegis of the United Nations after the Cold War ended. Cambodia became part of the group of contributing countries in 2005 and Vietnam in 2014. Indonesia and Malaysia, the regional countries with the longest history of contributing to UN peacekeeping, have significantly broadened their engagement in the past two decades. Indonesia has even ranked among the top ten contributors to UN peace operations in recent years. To some extent, the Philippines also broadened its peacekeeping engagement. Myanmar, which had adopted an internationally isolationist stance in the 1960s, reversed its peacekeeping policy in 2015, during a democratization period, and for a few years sent a handful of peacekeepers to different missions. Thus, of the ten countries of ASEAN, to date only Laos has no direct experience in peacekeeping.

At the same time as peacekeeping became more prominent in the region, it also turned into ‘a growing focus for defence cooperation’ between the ASEAN states themselves and with external partners (Capie, 2015, p 120).

In closing this attempt to plumb an Asian contribution to civil–military relations, we will revisit the six research questions set out in Chapter 1. Before doing so, it is appropriate to preface the conclusion with a reflection upon a representative perspective from a grounded Asian approach to civil–military relations. The following excerpts come from Malaysia’s first ever Defence White Paper, published in 2020 (Ministry of Defence of Malaysia, 2020). We chose Malaysia because it has been a country very much neglected, or at best under-studied in the field of civil–military relations, as David Han pointed out in Chapter 6.

Chapter 11 concludes the book by disucssing the evidence and the historical and insitutional conditions under which the three-way succession model operated in China. It ends with a discussion of the implications for China’s future.

Chapter 7 assesses the claim that the student protest of 1989 constituted a revolution, one that could have overthrown the government. The question is explored from three angles: the goal of the alleged “revolutionaries,” the strength of their movement, and finally whether the state was vulnerable to regime change.

Chapter 3 continues to describes the power relations and the hierarchy of Deng’s regime, focusing on his relationship with two potential heirs. It also discusses the precarious position of General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, the possible successor, on the eve of the student protest.