The Diponegoro Division, according to Anderson and McVey, comprised a greater percentage of ethnic Javanese people than other units in the Indonesian Army. Compared to neighboring West Java and East Java, the region of Central Java, where the Diponegoro Division was headquartered, experienced a more traditional culture. Because the region "has been for centuries the seat of political power in Java", residents believed that its position "has been usurped by Djakarta". This inequality resulted in a hostility between officers who held traditional Javanese values and the revolutionary movement in high esteem and officers of the Army General Staff who were more "intellectual" and educated in the ways of the Dutch. Anderson and McVey observed that the more traditional officers believed "soldiering itself is less a matter of techniques and skills, than the development of moral and spiritual faculties through a kind of modernized asceticism". Officers of the Diponegoro Division had a number of sympathizers throughout several military branches inside and outside the capital city, including Lieutenant Colonel Untung Syamsuri of the presidential guard. Fueled by rumors that members of the General Staff had been working with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a group of officers from the Diponegoro Division plotted to conduct a series of raids to kidnap members of the General Staff to either be held as hostages or killed. They believed that President Sukarno, whom Untung would warn of an impending coup by the Army General Staff, would be persuaded to support the Diponegoro coup group while the Army was "too decimated in its top leadership to do anything but acquiesce".
