But remember a huge chunk of Indonesian defence spending goes on maintaining the garrison units whose main purpose is keeping the peace.
The other thing is Indonesian procurement is schizophrenic, corrupt and innefficient (remember when they brought most of the non-functional East German Navy) and has been since the late 1960s with no signs of improvement.
I suspect their military capability let alone force projection will not improve much in the next 30 odd years.
After all they’ve not really increased capability in the period 1980-2013, especially when compared to their neighbours.
China has similar internal security issues (although handled and funded separately from the military), is also heavy on personnel, and corruption is an enormous challenge for them as well, yet they manage regardless.
It could be that Indonesia will remain something of a backwater, but I feel that people tend to overestimate the influence of such local factors on the underlying structural picture. Size matters, in other words. But to argue against my own point I offer the case of Mexico, which is projected to be in the same 2nd tier (by economic size) category as Brazil, Russia, Japan and Indonesia; yet one has difficulty crediting it with, well, any sort of coordinated national capability whatsoever. That said I don’t know anything about modern Mexico beyond what I get from American sources, which probably skews my perspective somewhat.
One last, seemingly random point: a nation’s ambitions tend to lie in accordance with its resources. China in the 1980s, for instance, did not aspire to project power as it did today. America did not attempt to run the world until it discovered that it could. Indonesia to date hasn’t had the resources to do much of anything, but once awakened to its potential that could well change. And given the historic animosity with China, I don’t think there’ll be any lack of prodding in future.
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