https://www.forbes.com/sites/davida...t-buy-v-22s-the-reason-is-china/#5b4272fc2d7b
Bell-Boeing concept for an Indonesian V-22.
The U.S. State Department on Monday cleared Indonesia to buy up to eight V-22 Osprey tiltrotor transports from Bell-Boeing for a cost of around $2 billion. That sum includes spare parts.
Jakarta might not actually want the speedy, twin-rotor Ospreys and may never sign a deal. But it’s not hard to see how the Indonesian armed forces could benefit from an acquisition.
It boils down to one word: Natunas. It’s an Indonesian island group in the South China Sea. One that Chinese leaders would love to annex. The Natunas “are a source of ongoing tension in the region,” the California think-tank RAND
explained.
The Natunas are an archipelago of 272 small islands, the center of which lies 730 miles north of Jakarta. Fewer than 100,000 people live on the islands. Pretty much all of them work either for the government or as small fishermen.
The Natunas are poor, but its waters are rich in natural gas and, of course, fish.
Which is why China is jealous of the islands. While no one seriously disputes that the Natunas belong to Indonesia, Beijing’s so-called “nine-dash line”—the farthest extent of China’s unofficial claim on the China Seas— extends deep into the 200-mile exclusive economic zone surrounding the archipelago.
Which is why Chinese fishing boats, escorted by paramilitary coast guard vessels, frequently sail into the waters surrounding the Natunas and use their bottom-scraping nets to strip every living thing from vast swathes of the ocean.
DAVID AXE
The fishing incursions have become a geopolitical crisis. In January, a Chinese fishing flotilla
appeared off the Natunas, just a day after Indonesian President Joko Widodo visited the island group. The Chinese fleet returned the following month.
“Little by little, I think the Chinese will take the Indonesian sea, the Philippine Sea, the Vietnamese sea,” Wandarman, a fisherman in the Natunas,
told The New York Times. “They are hungry: oil, natural gas and lots and lots of fish.”
Indonesia sometimes responds to
Chinese incursions by deploying patrol planes, fighters jets and navy vessels to the South China Sea. But there’s a problem. Indonesian bases in the region are few, small and under-developed.
There’s an airport at Ranai, the capital of the Natunas. That facility with its 8,400-foot runway in theory can accommodate fighter jets. The Indonesian air force’s F-16s and Su-30s in the past
have deployed to bases around the periphery of the South China Sea.
Matak airfield.
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
There’s a smaller airfield at Matak, 150 west of Ranai, that’s 3,900 feet long—probably too small for fast jets. There’s a naval base at Tanjung Pinang, 300 miles southwest of Ranai, that can support naval vessel up to 100 feet in length.
And that’s pretty much it for major military infrastructure. Most of Indonesia’s biggest naval ports and air bases are many hundreds of miles from the Natunas. And that means any significant force deploying to the archipelago must function as its own base while maintaining lines of communication over
long distances.
Amphibious ships are the obvious starting point. It’s not for no reason that Indonesia, in recent years, has devoted billions of dollars to building amphibs, including five South Korean-designed landing docks, or LPDs.
Each
Makassar-class LPD is 360 feet long, displaces 11,000 tons fully loaded and can carry more than 200 marines or soldiers plus around 40 vehicles up to the size and weight of a Leopard II tank. Twenty-two landing ships, tank, three coastal tankers, two troop transports, an oiler and a hospital ship support the LPDs.
The Indonesian LPD 'Banjarmasin.'
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
The two
Banjarmasin-class ships
—variants of the
Makassar—are the closest thing the Indonesian navy has to
aircraft carriers. Each can support five helicopters and
should be able to accommodate a V-22.
The Indonesian navy operates around two dozen light helicopters. The air force has around 20 Puma and Super Puma transport ‘copters. The army, with its 50 Bell 412s and 10 Mi-17s, possesses the biggest rotary force.
None of those rotorcraft can match the V-22’s 300 mile-per-hour cruising speed and 400-mile mission radius with a full load of two dozen troops. That capability comes at a cost, of course. Not only is a V-22 expensive at $70 million per copy, it’s unreliable and maintenance-intensive compared to a traditional helicopter.
But it might be worth it as Indonesia builds up a naval flotilla that can function as a sea base for pushing back against China’s incursions into Indonesian waters.
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