When the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting (ADMM) was inaugurated in 2006, it was conceived as a modest platform to nurture trust, reduce strategic anxieties, and coordinate responses to emerging security challenges across Southeast Asia.

Four years later, its expansion into the ADMM-Plus with participation from the United States, China, Russia, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand reflected a dramatic shift in Asia’s security calculus. It marked the moment when ASEAN ceased to be a passive bystander and instead positioned itself as a convening hub for the region’s most consequential defence dialogues.

The 15th anniversary of ADMM-Plus, commemorated during the ministerial meetings in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on November 1, 2025, offers an important moment of reflection codified in a joint statement. Kuala Lumpur, acting as ASEAN Chair, chose to underscore the urgency of collective stability at a time when the Indo-Pacific is rattled by strategic contestation, military modernization, and the steady militarization of contested space. The statement is neither ceremonial nor trivial. It is a political signal delivered with the tempered language of diplomacy, revealing strategic anxieties that ASEAN rarely articulates publicly.

A central theme woven throughout the document is the reaffirmation of ASEAN Centrality. In an era when Washington and Beijing appear locked in a spiraling rivalry, ASEAN rejects the false binary of alignment. Rather than choosing sides, the bloc aspires to shape the environment, championing an open, transparent, and inclusive regional security architecture.

This insistence on centrality is existential. Without it, ASEAN risks becoming collateral damage in competitions not of its own making. With it, the bloc assumes the role of stabiliser, dampening escalation and sustaining political space for dialogue.

The statement also pays particular attention to maritime and aerial security. The reference to international law implicitly UNCLOS 1982 is deliberate, especially given evolving tensions in the South China Sea. Freedom of navigation and overflight are not luxuries; they are arteries of global trade and prerequisites for strategic mobility.

Efforts to enhance crisis communication, incident-at-sea protocols, and other confidence-building measures reveal that the potential for miscalculation is no longer hypothetical. The risk of unintended confrontation at sea or in the air is real, persistent, and rising.

Equally striking is the emphasis on non-traditional threats. Pandemic preparedness, cyber intrusions, supply chain fragility, and critical technology competition have converged into a shared architecture of vulnerability. Here, the ADMM-Plus provides an operational theatre for collective learning.

Expert working groups serve as laboratories for cross-domain responses, acknowledging that twenty-first-century threats move faster than bureaucratic reflexes and transcend borders with ease. Yet the most intriguing element of the joint statement is its diplomatic subtext. While abstaining from direct accusations, it implicitly rejects coercive diplomacy, excessive militarization, and strategies of intimidation.

This is ASEAN’s signature style − soft on tone, firm on substance, coded in language, clear in intent. It is the art of quiet firmness, a tradition rooted in decades of regional statecraft.

For Indonesia, the implications are multifaceted. As an archipelagic nation sitting astride vital sea lanes and contested air corridors, Jakarta’s strategic interests hinge on unimpeded navigation and credible deterrence. The Northern Natuna area, situated near overlapping claims, demands particular vigilance.

Through the ADMM-Plus, Indonesia expands diplomatic legitimacy in safeguarding its maritime and air sovereignty while strengthening interoperability, situational awareness, and defence credibility in the eyes of peers and competitors alike. However, no statement, however eloquent can substitute for implementation.

The true test lies in operationalization. Without verifiable mechanisms, even the most strongly worded declarations risk dissolving into diplomatic vapor. The region urgently needs binding codes of conduct at sea and in the air, not merely aspirational guidance. Norms without accountability are clouds without rain.

Domestically, Jakarta faces an unavoidable imperative: modernize and integrate. Before advancing further, Indonesia must first resolve the fact that segments of its territorial airspace remain delegated to foreign civil aviation authorities − an arrangement that raises strategic, legal, and sovereignty vulnerabilities if left unaddressed.

Air defence radar coverage, command-and-control systems, maritime patrol capabilities, and satellite-based intelligence must mature simultaneously to respond to asymmetric and rapidly evolving threats. At the diplomatic level, Indonesia must maintain strategic agility cooperating with major partners without drifting into dependency or alignment traps.

Beyond hardware and diplomacy lies strategy. Indonesia must pursue a grand design for national defence untethered from electoral cycles. Industrial self-reliance, strategic logistics, and organisational readiness require long-term horizons.

In this context, the ADMM-Plus becomes not merely a platform for dialogue, but a diplomatic accelerator reinforcing whole-of-nation defence concepts and deepening the architecture upon which sovereignty in air, sea, and cyberspace depends.

Ultimately, the joint statement delivered in Vientiane is both a caution and a promise. It acknowledges a world entering a brittle multipolarity, powered by great power rivalry and ungoverned technological leaps. Against this backdrop, the ADMM-Plus offers a canopy of collective stability, fragile, yet indispensable.

Will it suffice? The answer is uncertain. But without frameworks like this, the Indo-Pacific would be far more vulnerable to coercion, escalation, and miscalculation. In an age where turbulence masquerades as normalcy, the ADMM-Plus remains a strategic bridge one that ASEAN must not only maintain, but continuously reinforce, lest the region awake one day to find the span collapsed and the waters beneath far less forgiving.

The writer, former Indonesian Air Force Chief of Staff, is Chairman of the Indonesia Center for Air Power Studies (PSAPI).