This weekend, I met an American who had volunteered to
send his son to do national service. He was proud of the fact that his son was
posted to be a medic and he was also glad that his son, who had been to international
schools finally got the chance to make Singaporean friends.
He had, however, one complaint, which was the fact
that from what he saw, basic military training (BMT) was “soft.” He told me that
when he went for the initial parent’s visiting at Pulau Tekong, he saw an army
of Bangladeshi workers raking the leaves.
While I generally try to avoid getting into the “It
was tougher” in my day line when it comes to national service, I did tell him
that there was a time when raking leaves was considered “rest” for soldier in
BMT. His immediate reaction was “Yes, if those boys raked the leaves, they will
look at Bangladeshi workers in a different way.”
OK, I get that the Singapore of today is very
different from the Singapore of the 60s and the nature of warfare has also
changed. Technology has seen to it that you can get the firepower at the push
of a button that once required several men. I am reminded of the time I was
invited by the then Chief of Artillery to “review” the Primus Gun in 2003 because
he felt that it was worth getting the perspective of someone trained on the old
Field Howitzers. My first question to the young commander was “What’s your gun
drill like?” He stared at me blankly and then the S3 had to sheepishly say, “Our
gun drill is called push button.”
So, like it or not, this is the way things heading.
With our small population and lack of strategic space, our military needs to
have the best technology available if it is to have an edge against any
potential adversary. When my batch got the FH2000 in 1998, it was considered
the state of the art. I take my alma matter, the artillery as an example. In 1998
my batch were told that we had a wonderful gun called the FH2000, which
required an eight-man crew and could send rounds up to 40km away. This was
progress because we had eight instead of 12-men on a crew and we did
considerably less hammering of things. However, in 2003, Primus came along and
artillery was no longer about sitting there and firing rounds. It was about
mobility. Then in 2011, we became one of five US allies that got to use HIMARS,
where a single HIMARS unit could do as much damage as an entire six-gun battery
under the old system.
Technology in the military like elsewhere is supposed
to give you more bang for your buck. Having said that, there are something that
shouldn’t change. Soldiers, for example, need to be physically more resilient
than your average civilian even if the technology the soldiers of today allows
them to do more damage with a single shot than their predecessors could.
What is true of a professional army should actually be
more so on a conscript army like what we have in Singapore. For your average
Singaporean, national service is often the first “away from home” experience
that our young men have and it’s supposed to be the place where you get some of
the harsh realities of life kicked into you. It is, for example, the place
where you actually discover that Singapore is much larger than the small magic
circle your junior college would have let you believe.
However, in 2011, we realized that this was increasingly
untrue. Someone caught a young recruit walking to camp with his maid:
This caused something of an uproar and the Ministry of Defense had to come out and say that it had counselled the young man. However, whilst many old folks like me had lots of grumbles about, there were those who thought differently and actually didn’t see what the issue was. I’ve even found a note written in 2017 telling us not to be mean to our boys in green:
https://pride.kindness.sg/dear-singapore-stop-taking-army-boys-granted/
Whilst I do believe soldiers should be respected for
the work they do; I think the writer is missing the point. National Service is
the first time that many of us actually thinks of us. The boys from well to do
families who went to top schools suddenly experience what its like for the wider
world to think of them as nothing but another nuisance. It’s in that moment
where they have to bond with the boys from less well of families and be actual
humans rather than part of the magic circle that they were told was their
birthright.
Well, that’s clearly not happening if you have
recruits getting their maids to carry their rucksacks or Bangladeshi workers doing
area cleaning. When you allow this to happen in national service, you actually normalize
the idea that you are too good for certain things and certain entitlement
attitudes are normalized.
When I thinks of national service today, I inevitably
think of how we treat construction workers. It rained today and as the bus
drove past a group of construction workers, I noticed that nobody was going to
stop the work. Interestingly enough the SAF actually has protocols to stop
training if the rain gets heavy or if there’s a thunderstorm.
Or is the message simply this. We no longer produce
men in Singapore so we cannot expose them to a knock or two. Again, this is not
to say that we should return to the “brutal” training of the 1960s. However, we
should not go through the other extreme where we panic every time one of our
boys gets a nose bleed.
You cannot talk about foreigners “taking” from us
until our young men actually go through experiences that give them resilience.
Our guys need to be able to take a knock and get right back up and fight. You
can’t outsource resilience to Indians and Bangladeshis. The point of National Service
is to toughen us up. I think of the current UAE President, Mohammed Bin Zayed
Al Nahyan, who felt that his people needed to be toughened up and imposed ju-jitsu
in schools and national service.
When you mollycoddle our boys and tell them that they
don’t need to carry their bags or clean up after themselves, you turn them into
the type of people who are only good for being automatons in cubicle land and
in need to be told what to do by people who once experienced what it was like
to pick up their own bags.
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