RM50 Million For SF, 2018 Budget

PENANG: As stated in the previous post, the Defense Ministry was hoping that the Special Forces will get an extra allocation from the 2018 budget.

It appears that they had. Prime Minister DS Najib Razak when announcing the 2018 budget stated that an allocation of RM50 million will be given to the Special Forces. However he did not say what the allocation will be used for.

And for the Defence Ministry, it has been allocated RM15.863 billion for 2018. Most of the allocation is for the Operating Expenditure – RM12.566 billion – while the Development Expenditure is RM3.297 billion.

However as there was no breakdown of the OE and DE figures, I cannot determined where the RM50 million for the Special Forces allocation is coming from. And it is likely most of the DE funds are for those things already delivered or in the pipeline like the A400M, LCS and the AV8.

Najib also said that RM250 million will be allocated for ESSCOM while another RM50 million has been set to pay for coastal surveillance radars also for the same area.

Again as there was no breakdown of the allocation, the RM300 million could come either from the Defence Ministry budget or even the RM9 billion allocated for the police. Or even from the National Security Agency.

MMEA also get an allocation of RM900 million of which RM450 million will be used for maintenance and the procurement of three patrol boats.

Several hours after the budget was released, RMAF official Twitter account announced that the 2018 allocation for the Defence Ministry included funding for 4 MPAs. This was not mentioned in the budget documents so this is definitely something worth following up.

-Malaysian Defence

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