After a year in Putrajaya, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim made some changes to his Cabinet, and the Ministry of Defence are one of the ministries that saw a significant change. The changes saw Datuk Seri Mohamad bin Hassan moving to the Foreign Ministry, and replacing him was Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled bin Nordin.
As someone who has observed Malaysian defence postures for almost two decades, the move feels premature. With only one year at the helm, Tok Mat probably received one of the most challenging jobs among all the ministers. The Malaysian Armed Forces is a shadow of its former self, as the defence force faces block obsolescence across all three service branches. The Navy does not have enough ships to patrol our waters, while the Air Force doesn't have enough jets to cover the whole nation sufficiently, let alone to safely put asset rotation in place.
The procurement scandals continue to plague the procurement, especially with the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) fiasco, an extension to the earlier New Generation Patrol Vessel (NGPV) scandal.
To Tok Mat's credit, he has managed to get the Air Force to finalise the procurement of 36 South Korean FA-50s for the Air Force's Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) programme, which would alleviate the current problem with the Air Force. For the Navy, he had managed to get the government to agree to procure a new batch of Littoral Mission Ships (LMS), presumably from Turkiye, and the government's commitment to complete five out of the six planned procurements for the problem-plagued LCS programme.
But with him moving to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the future of these projects is now in question.
On the same note, while I would like to congratulate Datuk Seri Mohamed Khalid Nordin as the new Minister of Defence, I do not think he is the right man for the job with a potential conflict of interest. He was the Chairman of Boustead Holdings Berhad from May to August 2021. During his short stint as the Chairman of Boustead Holdings Berhad, there was a potential conflict of interest. Boustead Holdings Berhad is the parent company of Boustead Naval Dockyard, the principal contractor to the problem-ridden LCS programme. Should the proposed Batch 2 LMS project go to BNS in the future, this will bring further scrutiny on the appointment, especially considering that Tok Mat had earlier proposed to source the ships directly from overseas shipbuilders.
That said, it may be too early to speculate. Datuk Seri Khaled Nordin's short stint with Boustead Holdings Berhad also gave him a perspective on how to fix the problem-plagued Boustead Naval Shipyard.
Anyway, the appointment has already been cast in stone. Let's see if the Minister can weave magic to fix the Ministry of Defence and the LCS or become the rat that devours the pumpkin.
As some have speculated, is Tok Mat's move to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs a demotion? Instead, it reflects Malaysia's focus on foreign affairs to deflect threats to national security. Malaysia's reliance on friendly nations has been the crux of the nation's unwritten defence posture since at least the 90s. We can see this in reliance on the Five Power Defence Agreement (FPDA), which has very much shaped our defence posture post-Vietnam War. Perhaps it is for the best that our Foreign Minister had a stint with the Ministry of Defence to appreciate how important it is to manage our foreign relations.
Danny Liew is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
The User Content (as defined on Newswav Terms of Use) above including the views expressed and media (pictures, videos, citations etc) were submitted & posted by the author. Newswav is solely an aggregation platform that hosts the User Content. If you have any questions about the content, copyright or other issues of the work, please contact Newswav.
