Elite: The Special Forces of Indonesia 1950-2008

by Kenneth J. Conboy

For more than half a century, the elite units of the Indonesian Armed Forces have been in the forefront of that country's brushfire wars, counter-guerrilla campaigns, counter-terrorist battles, and police actions. They have also dominated Indonesian politics for most of the decades since independence. Now for the first time in print, a history of all the commando and airborne formations in the Indonesian Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, and Police. From battlefields across the Indonesian archipelago and beyond, get a detailed understanding of these units from their origins to the present day. KEN CONBOY heads Risk Management Advisory, a security consultancy in Jakarta. A graduate of Georgetown University and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Conboy also studied at Sophia University in Tokyo and was a visiting fellow at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. A resident of Indonesia since 1992, he is the author of more than two dozen books on intelligence and military history.

Genres: History

146 pages, Paperback

First published November 21, 2007

About the author

Kenneth J. Conboy is a former policy analyst and deputy director at the Asian Studies Center in Washington, D.C., and author or coauthor of seventeen books, including The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet and Spies and Commandos: How America Lost the Secret War in North Vietnam and, most recently, FANK: A History of the Cambodian Armed Forces.