Indonesia's second-hand carrier arrives in September. Then the bills start

Indonesia's navy is due to take delivery of a used aircraft carrier on 20 September, the former Italian ship Giuseppe Garibaldi, which will be based at Ratai Bay in Lampung. Italy retired it in 2024 after about forty years of service. Writing for Australia's Lowy Institute, Awais Feroze Hanif says the purchase is driven by national ego rather than any clear military need, and that the low price of an old hull hides the real bill. Making the ship ready is put at Rp7.2 trillion to Rp16.8 trillion (US$400 million to US$936 million), and keeping it at sea costs about Rp101 billion a month. One member of parliament reckons the hull has roughly ten years left in it.

A carrier is built for "power projection", meaning the ability to send aircraft and firepower far from your own coast. Hanif argues that is not Indonesia's problem. The navy has nearly 2 million square miles of sea to watch, about 5 million square kilometres, and that job needs many hulls in many places at once: frigates and destroyers, the mid-sized warships used for patrolling, escorting and answering emergencies. One large ship parked in Lampung cannot be in the Natuna Sea and the Malacca Strait on the same day. The handover also lands just before the armed forces' 81st anniversary on 5 October, which Hanif reads as the real logic behind the date.

His wider complaint is that nobody can say what the shopping list is for. Indonesia is buying or courting fighter jets from France, Turkey, South Korea and China, and has flirted with Russian aircraft, leaving it with a mix of planes that share no spare parts, no training and no maintenance chain. Indonesia has not published a defence strategy document since 2015, so its own institutions have no agreed plan linking what the country buys to what it wants to do with it.

Why it matters

This is public money, and the running cost is the part that keeps coming back: Rp101 billion is due every month, whether or not the ship sails. Watch the refurbishment contract and whether that operating cost appears openly in the 2027 defence budget, because a bargain second-hand ship can quietly become a permanent line item. Every rupiah it takes is a rupiah not spent on the patrol boats that guard the fishing grounds Indonesians actually work in.