Citing arms race in Southeast Asia as a primary reason, the Thai junta has embraced a plan to equip the Royal Thai Navy with submarines. However, many wonder if the extra 36 billion baht in military spending could be a burden to the struggling Thai economy when it could be spent on other necessities.

Well-known pro-democracy activists and an academic have concluded that in addition to reforming its military, Thailand needs to reform its judicial institutions as well to get out of the endless cycle of coups d’état. Resistant Citizen, an anti-junta activist group, on Monday, 22 February 2016, organised a well-attended public seminar on Judicial Institutions under Special Circumstances at Thammasat University, Tha Prachan Campus, Bangkok.

Despite reports from Russian intelligence about ISIS members hiding in the country, security experts said that Thailand still has minimal risk of a spread of violence from the troubled Middle East. However, given the rise of Buddhist hardliners and security officers distracted by political dissidence, this might change.  

In an analysis of the development of Thai identity and culture, an academic argues that much of what was promoted by the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) as Thai identity and culture in the 1950s was invented for US consumers.   “It's the American consumers who showed the urban middle class Thais what to value about Thai culture,” said Matthew Phillips, a Southeast Asian Studies academic from Aberystwyth University in the UK, at the launch of his book at Thammasat University, Tha Prachan Campus, on Tuesday, 3 November 2015.

Following the controversial 12 nationalistic Thai values introduced in the aftermath of the 2014 coup d’état and the construction of a theme park with grandiose monuments of ancient kings, the Thai junta has now published its latest version of Thai history, which many historians view as an attempt to legitimize military rule via a narrow nationalistic history.