Defending the Lion City: The Armed Forces of Singapore

DEFENDING THE LION CITY

The Armed Forces of Asia

Series editor: Professor Desmond Ball, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

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DEFENDING

THE LION CITY

THE ARMED FORCES

OF SINGAPORE

TIM HUXLEY

ALLEN & UNWIN

First published in 2000

Copyright © Tim Huxley 2000

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Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Huxley, Tim, 1956–

Defending the Lion City: the armed forces of Singapore.

Bibliography.

ISBN 1 86508 118 3.

1. Singapore—Armed Forces. 2. Singapore—Defences. I. Title.

(Series: Armed forces of Asia).

355.3095957

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For my parents

Foreword

The minuscule island-state of Singapore is exceptional in a number of respects, especially in its economic accomplishments. A further striking expression of that exceptionalism has been in its government’s provision for defence. Singapore stands out within Southeast Asia for the absolute and relative size of its defence budget, for the technological sophistication of its armed forces and for its model of military mobilisation. In addressing these and related topics, Dr Tim Huxley has provided the first comprehensive and scholarly account of the origins, evolution and institutional experience of Singapore’s defence establishment. He brings to this subject some two decades of assiduous research based on fieldwork within Southeast Asia and involving a thorough scouring of available source materials.

At issue in this meticulous study is why Singapore, which has never experienced armed attack or an explicit threat of force since independence, should engage in defence provision well beyond that of any regional neighbour. Indeed, Dr Huxley points out that Singapore is probably the most densely defended state anywhere. He explains the strategic perspective that informs such defence provision as well as the corresponding strategic doctrine based on registering a credible deterrent capability towards its closest neighbours, in particular. He also provides a detailed account of the evolution of the country’s separate services since an unanticipated independence and their roles in the order of battle, as well as an important analysis of civil–military relations in which the non-involvement in politics of serving officers contrasts with the political role assumed by select senior counterparts on retirement from active service.

Dr Huxley notes that Singapore’s defence policy is transparent but that its defence doctrine is relatively opaque given its sensitivity in regional context. He has overcome the difficulties in collating data arising from that sensitivity in an admirable way. He has also written an authoritative and sympathetic account of Singapore’s defence practice. He points out that without the deterrent provided by Singapore’s armed forces, the vulnerable island-state lacking in territorial strategic depth would have been at the mercy of its neighbours. He adds that it would be difficult to overstate the extent to which strong defence has provided ‘necessary assurance not only to Singapore’s population but also to local and foreign investors so that they can continue to prosper in security’.

This study also raises an important question about the mettle of the leadership of Singapore’s armed forces, which arises from the country’s political culture. He asks, are they bureaucrats or are they warriors? An ability to maintain a credible deterrent, irrespective of available hardware, will depend on the answer to this intriguing question.

Michael Leifer

London School of Economics and Political Science

Contents

Foreword

Tables, figures and maps

Glossary of acronyms and abbreviations

Preface and acknowledgements

Introduction

1 The Singapore Armed Forces’ origins and early years

2 Defence policy, threat perceptions and strategy

3 Command and control

4 Personnel

5 Singapore’s army

6 The Republic of Singapore Air Force

7 The Republic of Singapore Navy

8 Defence procurement, R&D and industry

9 Regional and international links

10 Political and administrative roles

Conclusion

Appendix 1—Summary of forces

Appendix 2—Paramilitary forces

Notes

Bibliography

Tables, figures and maps

TABLES

2.1 Singapore’s defence budgets and actual defence spending, 1966–2000

2.2 Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia: strategic comparisons, 2000

5.1 Major Singapore Army formations, 2000

8.1 Selected major defence equipment contracts with foreign suppliers, 1990–2000

10.1 Reservist and retired senior officers in civil service and parastatal posts, 2000

10.2 Reservist senior officers in the Cabinet, 2000

FIGURES AND MAPS

2.1 Singapore and its sub-regional locale

3.1 Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) organisation, 2000

5.1 Singapore Army organisation

6.1 Republic of Singapore Air Force organisation, 2000

7.1 Republic of Singapore Navy organisation, 2000

7.2 Singapore: major military installations

Glossary of acronyms

and abbreviations

Preface and

acknowledgements

This book represents the culmination of many years’ work on the Singapore Armed Forces, dating from the early 1980s and my doctoral research at the Australian National University on the ASEAN states’ threat perceptions in relation to Indochina. During the course of that research it became clear to me that Indochinese developments by no means wholly explained the huge effort which Singapore was putting into building up its military strength, and this stimulated an interest in the republic’s defence policy and strategic outlook. Subsequently, this interest intensified into fascination during my time in the republic as a Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, from 1985–87.

Many individuals have assisted my long-term research on Singapore’s defence policy and armed forces. Without their help, it is unlikely that I could have written this book. The late Gerald Segal, then editor of The Pacific Review, did much to encourage my work on Singapore by publishing my subsequently infamous article entitled ‘Singapore and Malaysia: A Precarious Balance?’ in 1991. Gerry was later Director of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Pacific Asia Programme which, from 1995–97, funded my wider research on East Asian security, with substantial spin-off benefits for my simultaneous, more specific work on Singapore. Grants from the British Academy’s South-East Asian Studies Committee also funded some of my research on the defence policies of Southeast Asian states, including Singapore.

I am especially indebted to Professor Victor ‘Terry’ King, formerly Director of South-East Asian Studies and subsequently Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Hull, for constantly encouraging and facilitating my research in general and my work on this project in particular. Sally Harris, Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and Asian Studies, has consistently provided extraordinarily useful research assistance. During our period of collaborative research when he was a postgraduate student at Hull in 1995–96, the Singaporean journalist David Boey contributed substantially to my knowledge of the subject. Numerous colleagues, students and friends in the UK, Southeast Asia and Australasia have provided me with pieces of information and nuances of interpretation which have found their way into this book.

I am grateful to the series editor, Des Ball, for giving me this opportunity to contribute a volume to the Armed Forces in Asia series. The series coordinators at Allen & Unwin, Ann Crabb and Karen Penning, have indulged my rather hesitant progress towards completion of the manuscript, and I thank them for their tolerance. The maps were helpfully prepared by my colleague Jean Michaud, using the cartographic database developed by Professor Rodolphe de Koninck and Yves Brousseau of Laval University in Quebec.

Finally, I must thank my family for their forbearance while I have been writing this book. My wife, Pauline, has read and commented on drafts of most of the chapters; I have greatly appreciated her helpful suggestions. This volume is dedicated to my parents, who met in Singapore at a time when its present-day status as a highly prosperous, technologically sophisticated, independent state with modern, powerful armed forces would have seemed an utterly incredible notion.

Introduction

We are here in Southeast Asia for better or for worse and we are here to stay, and our policies are designed to ensure that we stay peacefully in Southeast Asia in accord and amity with our neighbours but with a right to decide how we order our lives in our own house . . . any act, any programme, and decision which will help to secure a more enduring future for ourselves and our progeny in this region must be pursued whatever the sacrifice.

Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s Prime Minister,

in Parliament, 14 December 1965¹

The SAF is an armed force; it is not a civilian corporation. Its mission is to defeat its enemies, ruthlessly and completely. It is an instrument of controlled fury, designed to visit death and destruction on its foes . . . soldiers must have steel in their souls . . . must learn in war to kill and not flinch, to destroy and not to feel pity, to be a flaming sword in the righteous cause of national survival.

Brig.-Gen. Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore Armed Forces Chief of Staff

[General Staff], at his sending-off parade on retirement from active

military service, Khatib Camp, 18 September 1984²

Singapore, a small Southeast Asian city-state with an area of 648 sq km and a population of almost four million (of whom 3.2 million are citizens or permanent residents), is remarkable in many ways. Most importantly, it is a rare example of a former colonial territory which, since gaining independence, has prospered rather than merely survived. Notwithstanding widespread criticism (especially, but by no means entirely, from outside) of its authoritarian domestic political arrangements, since separation from Malaysia in 1965 Singapore has maintained not only a high degree of social cohesion—itself unusual in an ethnically diverse state surrounded by larger and sporadically unstable multi-ethnic countries—but has also achieved outstanding economic success. Rapid sustained growth (averaging 8.7 per cent between 1990 and 1996), deriving to a large extent from its government’s relentless efforts to direct the economy into higher value-added, more highly technological and more capital- and knowledge-intensive activities, gave Singapore Asia’s highest, and the world’s fourth highest (after Switzerland, Japan and Norway), per capita GDP by 1997. While income distribution is far more unequal than is the case in North America, Western Europe, Australasia or Japan, Singapore’s economic success has nevertheless yielded tangible economic prosperity and social wellbeing for the majority of its citizens.

The region-wide economic recession which began in 1997 certainly affected Singapore, reducing growth from 8 per cent in 1997 to 1.5 per cent in 1998 and creating unemployment. But the city-state was not so badly affected as its neighbours, and its advantages, particularly in terms of its geographical position, its highly educated workforce and its pragmatic, technocratic and forward-looking political leadership, ensured that its recovery was more rapid than elsewhere in Southeast Asia: the economy grew by 5.4 per cent in 1999 and was expected to expand by more than 6 per cent during 2000.

Singapore’s defence policy and armed forces are also exceptional in Southeast Asia. Ever since 1965, the republic’s political leaders have stressed (some, probably unjustifiably, would say over-stressed) Singapore’s particular vulnerabilities—its small size, lack of natural resources, ethnic diversity and location between much larger neighbours. The pessimistic, quintessentially Realist precepts of Lee Kuan Yew and other ‘Old Guard’ leaders of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) have dominated Singapore’s regional and international outlook: the first ‘fundamental principle’ of its foreign policy is that ‘as a small state, Singapore has no illusions about the state of our region or the world’. The second principle is that ‘Singapore must always maintain a credible and deterrent military defence as the fundamental underpinning for an effective foreign policy’. There are other vital ingredients in Singapore’s foreign policy, particularly an emphasis on promoting ‘good relations with . . . immediate neighbours in all spheres’ and a related commitment to regional cooperation through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). In addition, since the end of the Cold War there has been a greater emphasis on Singapore behaving as a international ‘good citizen’, especially by supporting the role of the United Nations.³ Nevertheless, it is clear that building up the capabilities of the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) has played and continues to play a central role in the Singapore government’s efforts to ensure security in the face of perceived external threats. While western countries’ defence policies have largely ceased to focus on national survival since the Cold War’s end, Singapore’s government has not felt itself to be in this luxurious position—indeed, it stepped up its defence effort during the 1990s.

Singapore’s defence policy is remarkable in several ways:

• through the Total Defence (TD) strategy it attempts to provide a degree of security from enemy attack unmatched elsewhere except perhaps by Sweden and Switzerland: overall, Singapore is probably the most densely defended state in the world;

• it involves the wartime mobilisation of human and other resources on a scale probably matched only in Israel, the European neutral states and the remaining Asian communist states;

• in contrast to most other Southeast Asian states, the SAF has focused on developing capabilities for offensively-oriented conventional warfare rather than internal security operations and territorial defence;

• the SAF’s development has necessitated per capita defence spending exceeded (in 1998) only by Israel and Qatar;

• the local defence industry and defence science organisation provide a degree of support for the armed forces which is unparalleled in Southeast Asia, adapting, developing and producing a broad spectrum of defence equipment for specific national requirements;

• an extraordinarily wide range of bilateral defence links has been established in Southeast Asia, the wider Asian region and globally in order to develop and train the SAF; and

• despite Singapore’s close security and defence links with western governments and armed forces, many details of its military equipment, organisation and capabilities remain shrouded in secrecy.

In many spheres of the social sciences, Singapore is probably the most intensively researched piece of real estate in the world. But despite their distinctive features, Singapore’s remarkable defence policy and armed forces have gone largely unnoticed outside—and to some extent even within—Southeast Asia. Though Singapore’s earlier military history has been closely investigated,⁴ and a number of Singaporean postgraduate students have written dissertations at British and other overseas universities on Singapore’s post-1965 defence policy and armed forces, little has been published on these latter themes. My own previous work on Singapore’s defence strategy in relation to Malaysia and on its evolving military capabilities has not provided a full picture of the SAF. This book aims to provide a more comprehensive assessment of the development and contemporary status of the SAF, locating it in the broader contexts of the city-state’s foreign policy, defence policy and strategy, civil–military relations and defence– industrial capabilities.

Producing a detailed analysis of the SAF is by no means a straightforward task. It is not as difficult as researching the armed forces of a state with a closed political system, for example China or Vietnam, but it is not as simple—particularly in terms of securing reliable sources—as investigating a western state’s military capabilities. Singapore’s government is formally democratic, but it tightly controls the release of information relating to security and defence matters. Little detailed official information regarding the SAF has been made available in consolidated or coherent form.

Though there has been a series of officially sponsored ‘coffee table books’ on branches of the SAF, some of which have contained occasional useful titbits of information, most of these publications are essentially Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) public relations documents, with the twin aims of bolstering public support for conscription and reservist service and promoting recruitment of regular officers and NCOs. These publications’ historical background concerning the evolution of the SAF is rather thin and there is no official history of the SAF.⁵ Since the 1990s, MINDEF has occasionally released defence information papers—most recently, in February 2000, Defending Singapore in the 21st Century—but these have been unimpressive and unrevealing by the standards of those produced by western governments, or Asian states such as India, Japan and South Korea.

Nevertheless, over the years official sources have cumulatively revealed a good deal about the SAF’s evolving force structure, equipment, training, personnel and international links. Although independent coverage of national defence policy and the SAF has remained off-limits for the state-controlled mass media, useful data has been released through the SAF’s monthly journal, Pioneer, the individual services’ own monthly magazines, frequent press releases (now available on MINDEF’s website) and defence ministers’ parliamentary statements.

While these official sources have helped to build up a picture of Singapore’s contemporary armed forces, such a picture would be incomplete without the use of unofficial sources. Many aspects of the SAF have remained ‘under wraps’, primarily because of the Singapore government’s wish not to exacerbate neuralgic relations with the city-state’s neighbours. MINDEF has been consistently less than frank in statements regarding the SAF’s order of battle and equipment, not to mention the threat assessments which underlie Singapore’s defence policy and strategy. So I have also drawn on my discussions—dating back to the 1980s—with informed observers of the Singapore defence scene, notably local and foreign journalists, diplomats and defence attachés. Most Singaporeans (particularly the majority of the adult male population who have direct experience of the SAF through the National Service system) are cautious when discussing local defence matters, particularly with foreigners, but the anonymity provided by the Internet has helped to break down some of this reserve: Net discussion groups such as soc.culture.singapore have provided some interesting revelations.

This book begins with a brief survey in Chapter 1 of the evolution of Singapore’s defence arrangements from the late 1950s and, particularly after the separation from Malaysia in 1965, in the context of the city-state’s political development. This first chapter also looks at the evolution of the three branches of the SAF during the 1970s and 1980s.

Chapter 2 examines the Singapore government’s defence policy—summed up in the notion of Total Defence—and how the evolution of the republic’s threat perceptions, which have been dominated by concerns over its immediate neighbours, have influenced its military strategy. The following chapter investigates Singapore’s defence command and control arrangements, in terms both of the way in which the government shapes defence policy and how command and control is exercised over and within MINDEF and the SAF. Chapter 3 also looks at MINDEF’s communications and information infrastructure, including its use of satellite systems, and at intelligence collection and analysis.

Chapter 4 probes the development of the SAF’s personnel policies, in relation to full-time national service, reservists and regular personnel. This chapter considers the challenges which the SAF has faced from a declining national birth rate and a booming civilian economy, and touches on the handling of ethnic and gender issues within the SAF.

Chapters 5, 6 and 7 detail the evolution of the three services’ organisation, equipment, logistic support, training and mobilisation procedures, and assess the SAF’s capabilities at the turn of the century. Increasingly these capabilities have depended on locally developed or modified equipment. Chapter 8 tackles the issues of defence procurement, military research and development (R&D) and the defence industry.

The focus of Chapter 9 is on the extraordinarily wide range of regional and international defence connections which MINDEF and the SAF have cultivated, particularly during the 1990s. The final chapter assesses the unique characteristics of Singapore’s civil–military relations, through which senior military officers increasingly have become integrated into the heart of the republic’s political and administrative establishment. The conclusion weighs up the SAF’s strengths and weaknesses, and looks to the challenges which the SAF may face in the early years of the twenty-first century.

1

The Singapore Armed

Forces’ origins and

early years

When the Malayan Federation became independent in 1957, Singapore remained a British colony although it had effectively formed part of a political, economic and military unit with Malaya since the nineteenth century. Not only were Singapore’s naval and air bases still important to Britain as a strategic foothold in Southeast Asia, but for both racial and political reasons the Malay-dominated government of the newly-independent Federation was unenthusiastic about the prospect of absorbing the island’s largely Chinese population.

Nevertheless, efforts were made to move Singapore towards self-government. As in the rest of Malaya during the 1950s, both the British and moderate local politicians saw greater democracy as a necessary instrument with which to undermine the appeal of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), which since 1948 had fought a political and military struggle against the colonial power with the aim of establishing a unitary Malayan Socialist Republic, including Singapore. During the mid- and late 1950s Singapore experienced intense political struggle which pitted anti-colonial political parties against both the British and each other. One of the leading local political organisations was the People’s Action Party (PAP), established in 1954 on the basis of a coalition between English-language educated nationalist intellectuals (led by Lee Kuan Yew) and left-wing trade unionists. A third element of the political struggle involved conflict between the PAP’s moderate and pro-communist elements. Nevertheless, the PAP won the May 1959 general election resoundingly and Lee Kuan Yew became Prime Minister at the head of a PAP government when Singapore was granted internal self-government in June 1959.

MERGER WITH MALAYSIA: DEFENCE IMPLICATIONS

During the early 1960s, the PAP leadership (which had long-term ambitions to play an important and eventually dominant role in wider Malayan politics) used as its principal political theme the idea that Singapore should only become independent by joining an enlarged Malayan Federation. The PAP placed great emphasis on the notion that Singapore was economically, politically and strategically unviable on its own. Drawing an obvious lesson from the Japanese conquest of Malaya and Singapore in 1941–42, the PAP stressed that, in military terms, ‘Singapore and the Federation are one unit’.¹ In the view of the PAP leadership, dominated intellectually and politically by Lee Kuan Yew, an independent Singapore could ultimately find itself in a geopolitically uncomfortable position, similar to that of Israel. While the Federation’s leaders had initially rejected the idea of absorbing Singapore, the PAP argued that it was unlikely that they could accept the existence of an independent, largely Chinese-populated and probably communist-influenced Singapore with equanimity because of the threat that it would pose to Malaya’s political and racial stability.

At this time the PAP’s proposed solution to Singapore’s internal security and defence needs was merger with the Malayan Federation. Forming a larger political unit with the Federation, where the communist threat had effectively been eliminated by the late 1950s and which had become independent in 1957 under a fiercely anti-communist government, would ensure that procommunist forces would not be allowed to take control in Singapore. In the long term, Singapore would be defended against external threats by the federal armed forces, to which it would contribute both finance and personnel. While there seems to have been little detailed PAP thinking on this matter, Lee Kuan Yew expected that ultimately an expanded Federation’s army would need between 15 and 20 battalions.² (On merger in 1963 it deployed nine regular infantry battalions, including two from Singapore, as well as artillery and reconnaissance regiments and smaller support units.)³ But there was no serious expectation that the larger Federation, including Singapore, would need to accept the major share of responsibility for defending itself against external threats in the near to medium term. In October 1957, three months after Malaya became independent, the Anglo-Malayan Defence Agreement (AMDA) had come into force. Under AMDA, Britain promised to help Malaya develop its armed forces, while Malaya would permit Britain to maintain bases and forces on its territory. Malaya and Britain agreed to cooperate in taking ‘all necessary action’ in the event of an armed attack on Malaya or any of Britain’s remaining territories in the Far East (Singapore, North Borneo, Sarawak, Brunei and Hong Kong). While even as early as 1961 there were indications that economic difficulties and a refocusing of British foreign policy on Europe might eventually force Britain to reevaluate its overseas military commitments, there was no serious expectation that it would withdraw its defence umbrella from Malaya in the foreseeable future.⁴

So in the early 1960s it appeared that Singapore’s main contribution to its own defence and that of the Malayan Federation, even after the proposed merger, would continue to be through the provision of facilities for British forces, particularly naval dockyards and air bases. Britain had originally built up Singapore’s military infrastructure—most notably its massive naval base and coastal defences—during the 1920s and 1930s as the lynchpin of its military presence in the Far East. Though the ignominious loss of this supposedly impregnable fortress to the Japanese in 1942 had destroyed Britain’s role as the dominant military power in Asia, British forces had returned to Singapore after the war. British military strength throughout Malaya had been built up during the Malayan Emergency (the campaign against the MCP between 1948 and 1960) but, after the Federation’s independence in 1957, Britain’s Southeast Asian military presence—which together with smaller, locally based Australian and New Zealand forces provided a Commonwealth Strategic Reserve—was concentrated in Singapore to a greater extent. This was particularly true of the air force component.⁵ A large part of the rationale for maintaining substantial forces in the region derived from Britain’s commitment under the 1954 Manila Pact to the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO), but the Malayan government had made it clear during the negotiations leading to AMDA that its ‘nonaligned’ foreign policy precluded allowing Britain use of Malayan military bases for SEATO purposes. During the 1957–63 period such a restriction did not of course apply to Singapore, which remained under British sovereignty.

By May 1961, Tunku Abdul Rahman, the Federation’s prime minister, had accepted the desirability of an eventual merger between Malaya, Singapore and the British Borneo territories. This would ensure that Singapore could not threaten Malayan security by developing into a communist-dominated Southeast Asian ‘Cuba’; at the same time, the integration of the Borneo territories with their substantial indigenous populations would help to maintain the Federation’s ethnic balance despite the inclusion of the Singaporean Chinese. In a referendum in Singapore in September 1962, 71 per cent of voters supported merger. With this popular mandate, two weeks after Singapore became independent in September 1963 the PAP took the city-state into the Federation of Malaysia, which also now included North Borneo and Sarawak. In the run-up to merger, AMDA was renegotiated to cover the whole of the larger Federation, including Singapore. There was considerable debate over whether Britain’s use of its Singapore bases would now be subject to the same restrictions as those in peninsular Malaya. While the Malaysia Agreement of July 1963 specified that the