Hawaii National Guardsmen are in Indonesia participating in a multinational exercise as the U.S. seeks to bolster its ties to Pacific nations.
Images released by the U.S. military last week showed Hawaii guardsmen playing a central role in the Exercise Super Garuda Shield, with senior Hawaii Guard officers participating in the official kickoff ceremony in Jakarta on Aug. 25 and other photos showing Hawaii Guardsmen leading and participating in cyber warfare training involving American, Indonesian, Australian and Singaporean serv ice members.
Hawaii has played key role in Washington’s relationship with Jakarta, with both U.S. military leaders and politicians in the Aloha State playing a surprisingly pivotal role in shaping those ties over decades. The Hawaii Guard has a partnership with Indonesia through the National Guard’s State Partnership Program, which pairs state National Guards around the U.S. with foreign militaries for training exchanges.
With a population of over 280 million people, Indonesia is the world’s fourth-most-populous country and third largest democracy, spread across a massive archipelago of 17, 508 islands that span both the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
It also has Southeast Asia’s largest military and one of the region’s largest economies. As the U.S. and China compete for influence and power, Indonesia has emerged as a key area of interest for both as they seek to tap into both its economy and it’s strategic location.
In a media release the Hawaii-based commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Samuel Paparo, said that “this year is the largest Super Garuda Shield ever with over 6, 500 participants and 13 nations, which represents a commitment to our partnership and to the sovereignty of each country through the prism of mutual respect.”
Indonesia is one of several countries to have been embroiled in territorial disputes with Beijing, which claims nearly the entire South China Sea as its exclusive sovereign territory over the objections of neighboring countries that also depend on those waters. More than a third of all international trade travels through the busy waterway and countries around the region have increasingly drilled for oil and natural gas deposits beneath it.
Indonesian officials have in recent years accused Chinese forces of sending vessels and covert drones into waters they claim, particularly around the Natuna Islands. Previous iterations of Super Garuda Shield brought troops there to train.
In October Indonesian law enforcement and naval vessels engaged in a standoff with the Chinese coast guard over oil and gas resources in the northern portion of the Indonesia’s continental shelf in the South China Sea. But in November, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto signed $10 billion dollar deal to “jointly ” develop maritime resources in the area.
The deal was immediately controversial.
Aristyo Darmawan, an international law professor at at the University of Indonesia, wrote in an op-ed in The Interpreter that in tolerating China’s claims to territory within Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone Prabowo “has assented to something that is illegal under international law … Even worse, Indonesia is willing to share its sovereign rights to explore and exploit fisheries and oil with the country that is making this claim.”
Since then, investment by China in Indonesia’s energy and mineral sectors has only grown, while in March the Administration of President Donald Trump quietly backed out of the the Just Energy Transition Partnership, an international initiative launched in 2022 to help Indonesia shift away from coal. Chinese officials and companies has been eager to step in.
Meanwhile American military leaders in Hawaii have been working to tighten their ties with Indonesia and ensure they maintain access to the archipelago. Hawaii guardsmen accompanied leaders from INDOPACOM to Indonesia in January for their 2025 Bilateral Defense Discussions in Jakarta, where they discussed information sharing, integrating operations and planning a cyber task force for Exercise Super Garuda Shield.
A news release at the time said the Hawaii Guard provided “medical professionals, translation services, information operations, and administrative support. Experts from these fields engaged in discussions with their counterparts, fostering knowledge exchange and collaboration between the two nations.”
The agreement between the Hawaii Guard and Indonesia was signed in 2007 by Gov. Linda Lingle, who already had a deep interest in the country. In 2010 Lingle gave a speech to the Hawaii-Indonesia Chamber of Commerce where she was introduced as the “only Indonesianophile governor of the state of Hawaii.”
Lingle had first traveled to Indonesia in 1995 while serving as Maui’s mayor through Sister Cities International for the nation’s 50th anniversary of independence from the Netherlands. She returned in 2001 as part of a program training members of the Indonesian government as they adapted to democratic civilian rule after decades under the bloody dictatorship of a military officer known only as Suharto.
Suharto’s deadly reign had been largely supported by American officials that saw him as an ally in their fight against communism. But after the Cold War, American attitudes changed sharply.
In 1998 Suharto resigned in the face of widespread riots and chaos, and the country began holding democratic elections. But in a 1999 referendum East Timor secured independence from Indonesia and violence broke out as government-backed militias committed numerous atrocities with support from elite Indonesian special forces. Then-President Bill Clinton ordered a suspension of military cooperation with Indonesia.
However, after the 9 /11 terror attacks American officials were keen to bolster ties with Muslim countries, with Indonesia seen as a priority.
Hawaii’s late U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye slipped language into a defense bill that allowed Indonesian military officials to participate in programs at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Waikiki and in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that ravaged Indonesia and killed 227, 898 people, the U.S. military played a key role in the humanitarian response.
Officials in Indonesia later credited their partnership with the Hawaii National Guard for improving the way the country responds to volcanic eruptions. In 2010, Hawaii Guardsmen worked with both civilian and military leaders in Indonesia on a simulation of an eruption that officials said paid off when Indonesia’s Mount Merapi volcano erupted in 2010, killing 353 people.
But the resumption in military ties hasn’t been without critics. In Hawaii several activists and academics have pointed to the Indonesian military’s bloody campaigns in East Timor—now Timor Leste—and continuing violence in West Papua, where the Indonesian military and police have been accused of widespread human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings in their fight against pro-independence rebels and activists.
Until relatively recently Prabowo, a former Indonesian special forces officer, was himself banned from the United States for alleged atrocities committed while leading troops putting down rebellions across Indonesia. Since taking power he has been accused by some of overseeing a creeping remilitarization of the country’s government.
Exercise Garuda Shield became “Super ” Garuda Shield in 2022 when it went from being an exercise that focused mostly on maneuvers pairing American and Indonesian troops to a growing multinational exercise that now includes increasing aircraft, ships and missiles.
This year service members from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil and the Netherlands are also participating in the exercise.
Indonesian forces also regularly train in Hawaii through exchanges with the Hawaii National Guard, training with the Schofield-based 25th Infantry Division and with warships in the biennial Exercise Rim of the Pacific.
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