While Malaysia should upgrade military hardware as and when necessary, we should not go overboard or follow or compare with our neighbours, like Singapore for example, as suggested in the letter Military expenditure is vital

Unless we have excess resources, we would be wiser to allocate more of our scarce resources to economic progress and domestic security. The world has changed and with the end of the Cold War, the threats of attacks have diminished with it.

Realistically, our security threat is domestic and within (for examples, militancy or secession) rather than external and we should spend more on beefing up our police force and intelligence services.

At this moment, we do not have any neighbour that is a foreseeable aggressor and external threat to us.

Singapore arms itself to the teeth and has become in the writer's words a "regional superpower in Southeast Asia" not because she is aggressive in intentions but because being a small island state she is paranoid about her lack of geographical and strategic depth and has no choice but to adopt a strategic military doctrine of forward defence.

Forward defence will include the capacity for a pre-emptive lighting strike (by superior forces in being) of any potential aggressor covering vast tracts of enemy territory  by the very nature of such defence, which almost tantamount to offence, Singapore definitely has to spend more than her neighbours on military infrastructure and maintain the technological edge in maintenance of such a capability.

However, first strike capability is only for the purpose of neutralising and destruction of an enemy's military infrastructure in its territory  it does not mean Singapore has the intent or means to be an aggressor that entails not only a capability to seize territory but to hold it for long as well that it is most doubtful Singapore has.

Besides, I simply cannot imagine Singapore being so crazy as to entertain territorial ambitions either here or in Indonesia or East Timor or Philippines and get away with it without a collective military response from one or more of her threatened neighbours, and vice versa. In each and every other case where the aggressor is other than Singapore, the same would happen.

In contrast, Indonesia is a neighbour with no present aggressive intentions, being known to accord relatively low priority to military defence as compared with economic development. Her best deterrence to potential aggressors need not be military hardware but her sheer geographical expanse and strategic depth that make it  like China  difficult for a potential aggressor to hold her territory in the face of internecine guerrilla warfare for long.

Another immediate neighbour, Thailand, being a pacific nation of Buddhists, has also no territorial ambitions. She literally let the Japanese military walked through during the last world war.

So who is the potential territorial aggressor within this region? None.

In fact the common threat to all with Singapore being an exception is economic and the better insurance for all is collective defence by military alliance (an attack on one constitutes an attack on all agreement) leaving precious scarce resources for economic development!

As Malaysia and Singapore's defence have been described as indivisible, while Indonesia sees Malaysia as a natural strategic partner (for geo-strategic reasons), it is the best insurance policy for Malaysia to rely on military alliance and treaties with Asean countries for collective defence of its members (like Anzus and Seato alliances).

This is especially so when Asean subscribes to the concept of comprehensive security and national resilience and has so far successfully used diplomatic initiatives to keep hostile military powers away from their borders. The Southeast Asian Zone of Peace, Freedom and Neutrality (Zopfan) concept was an attempt to keep Southeast Asia for Southeast Asians.

As there is no pressing need in the region for accelerated defence spending or some kind of arms race by individual Asean member and elections are not too far away for political fund raising to begin  this might well be the circumstances which led one of your readers to speculatively ask in his letter Defence spending has sinister motive? .