The Future of National Service

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. Fourth time lucky for me on this Motion.

This year, we commemorated 50 years of National Service (NS). And much like the turbulent circumstances of our Independence, National Service was something that we had to embark upon out of necessity.

At the time of separation, Singapore was faced with a host of threats, including the Konfrontasi with Indonesia, insurgency from the Malayan Communist Party and communal violence. The British forces remained to provide security but, in 1967, barely three years after Independence, the British forces also announced their withdrawal.

The Enlistment Act was passed in 1967, at a time when it was clear that Singapore had a very small window of time to build up its own defence forces. At this time, Singapore had very little in way of financial resources and a booming population following the post-war Baby Boom.

It has been 50 years since the Enlistment Act was passed and there have been many changes in Singapore. Our security threats and our approach to NS have evolved with us. In 2013, the Committee to Strengthen NS (CSNS) started an extensive consultation process with a Steering Committee led by Defence Minister Dr Ng Eng Hen and two Working Groups focusing on Support for NS and Recognition and Benefits of NS.

The focus of this committee was to ensure that support for NS remains strong in the population and that NSmen, employers and family members all have a shared sense of duty for their part in this process. The CSNS committee came up with detailed recommendations which have been swiftly implemented and NSmen have felt the impact. The focus of this committee was to improve the lives of NSmen and to make compliance with NS obligations easier for all stakeholders, without compromising training needs – a difficult balance, indeed, that has required thoughtful, well-calibrated policies.

The NS50 events from July to September were particularly moving, with the theme "From my generation to yours", bringing together earlier and current generations of NSmen. Prime Minister Lee himself made a moving speech at the final event last week, sharing his own experiences in the army and ending with the importance of passing the NS torch from his generation to the subsequent ones.

NS is an important rite of passage for us, and I am heartened that many understand and appreciate its importance. My main interest in this Motion is to understand how NS will fit into the future roles the military will be required to perform and the constraints we face.

Traditionally, NS has largely involved starting in the military and with the majority of the cohort going through a Basic Military Training (BMT) that is modelled on infantry training. This shared experience is an important part of the bonding that NSmen feel intuitively when they meet one another. We all have the same experience going through BMT, dealing with NS sergeants and the same thing that we laugh about when we watch "Ah Boys to Men".

Yet, is this largely infantry-based training model appropriate for NS in the coming years, particularly with the changing nature of warfare and the security threats we face?

First, military technology improves at a tremendous pace. New inventions can render previous methods of warfare otiose. One vivid example is the use of drones in warfare.

A BBC story on a United States (US) drone pilot was eye opening. The drone pilot, for example, could have breakfast at home, send his daughter to school, then go to a drone control centre a short drive from home and pilot a drone based thousands of miles away in the Middle East. It will be office hours for him but night time in the country of operations. The precision of such technology allows the pilot to see the targets clearly at night, attack with precision and take photographs after the damage has been inflicted. After a day of fighting, which could still be office hours for the drone pilot, he could go back home at night and have dinner with his family. It sounds like a very simple life. Yet, even drone-fighter pilots go through a very high incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder. So, they, too, seem to face the psychological stresses that other combatants face.

Aerial drone warfare is just one component of increasingly automated forms of warfare, although it is probably the one that captures the imagination most readily. At the recent NS PRIDE Day awards, I was quite happy to see that even our own NSmen have found numerous uses of drone technology and I assume that because this is NS PRIDE Day awards, it is in the public domain. For example, drones are used in naval operations. They are used for surveillance and intelligence gathering. In the army, they can also be used for reconnaissance operations and security patrolling. All of these things used to be done by infantrymen who had to face the danger of enemy fire.

However, would this rapid use of technology make it, first of all, difficult for NSmen to catch up? Secondly, how relevant would it make a largely infantry-based army if every few years the technology that these infantrymen have to deal with changes at a very rapid pace?

Will our NSmen be able to keep up with this increasingly advanced form of warfare? And how will dealing with automated warfare be built into the drills that our NSmen go through, perhaps either in lieu of or maybe in addition to the old field crafts we learnt?

The second type of threats we have to prepare for is on the other end of the technology spectrum. These are the threats posed by terror. The difference between terror and conventional warfare is that conventional warfare, of course, if you comply with the rules of war, is a military-and-military exercise. Civilian populations are not, at least in theory, meant to be targeted.

On the other hand, terrorists have complete disregard for this principle. Their primary aim is to attack civilian populations to cause as much damage as possible. They target highly populated areas, areas like train stations, airports, hotels and even gatherings. They do not require very sophisticated technology. Basic weapons − guns, makeshift bombs or sometimes even vehicles − can be used to carry out terror attacks. In this respect, these threats are much more difficult to identify and prepare for. Yet, as these threats become a much larger face of the type of threats we face, would we see a larger role for NSmen in dealing with this new type of threat?

The final aspect that I have to deal with is how we deal with the limitations and constraints. This is a constant theme that the Ministry has dealt with over the years. In the early days of NS, we had a population boom with high unemployment. So, pulling people into NS did not have as big an economic impact. Nowadays, there are strict limits being imposed. Cohort sizes are falling. So, the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) will have to be able to make do with a much smaller population. At the same time, MINDEF's available training spaces are also getting reduced due to competing needs for land in land-scarce Singapore.

I have been quite impressed by MINDEF's efforts at working around these constraints. Personally, I have experienced it myself. As an infantryman, I did my basic training. I learnt, well, the old M16 rifle, and I barely passed my shooting test. I have shared in this House how the SAR-21 doubled my productivity. I managed to get a Marksman the first time I tried. The range I used was also a multi-storey rifle range. So, that meant it could have many more times the number of people doing the training. So, this seems to be MINDEF's way of adapting. It used better technology to get the same outcomes by using less land and less resources.

While these are admirable adaptions which, basically, are the classic productivity improvements where you are getting more out of less, will we be able to achieve better outcomes by changing the game altogether? For example, if we are looking at the face of warfare where you do not need very large amounts of manpower to fight wars or to man aircraft, do we need different forms of training altogether which would significantly change the type of training areas we need and the type of people we need to have trained?

In this Motion, I was hoping to raise raw themes to give the Ministry a platform to, basically, share the vision of NS perhaps for the next 50 years, even as we move forward to the first 50 with strong support from our population.