Oral Reply by Senior Minister of State for Defence Heng Chee How to Parliamentary Question on SAF Safety Audit and Review

Mr Neil Parekh Nimil Rajnikant asked the Minister for Defence (a) whether the Ministry can provide details on the safety audits and review processes that are regularly conducted by the SAF Inspector-General’s Office at training camps; (b) what are the common safety lapses that continue to occur during the SAF’s training and the reasons behind such occurrences and; (c) what steps have been put in place to ensure such lapses do not recur and the quality and standard of SAF’s training is not compromised.

Senior Minister of State for Defence, Heng Chee How:

Each year, the SAF Inspector-General’s Office (IGO) conducts between 40 to 50 physical audits and reviews of safety standards and practices involving SAF Formations and units. The safety policies, management system and culture, day to day practices, compliance to training safety instructions and attention of commanders to safety outcomes form part of these inspections.

In addition, IGO also looks into notable safety incidents and near-misses to establish their root causes, to determine if there are safety lapses and recommend corrective actions where necessary.  In carrying out its work, IGO also taps on external experts and review panels, including the External Review Panel on SAF Safety, which provide further independent reviews, benchmarking and recommendations on the SAF’s safety management systems and practices.

While there have been no significant systemic weaknesses identified, the IGO recognises that the journey to zero accidents is a continuous one that requires constant effort to improve the safety culture of all units. 

From time to time, particular attention is paid to strengthen safety in specific areas. For example, the current area of focus is to reduce vehicular incidents, as the SAF operates a large number and range of vehicles, ranging from jeeps, utility vehicles and trucks, as well as armoured vehicles such as tanks. The SAF has been strengthening its training regime. Vehicle operators are trained progressively, first qualifying to drive, before gaining experience and confidence to operate larger and more complex vehicles. Simulators and driving circuits are used to increase training hours and expand the range of training scenarios, including challenging and contingency situations. On our vehicular platforms, technology such as vehicular proximity sensors and cameras have been adopted to reduce human judgement errors. More recently, technologies like driver monitoring systems to detect driver fatigue, as well as sensors and video analytics to spot unsafe driving practices and safety transgressions have also been deployed. From 2021 to 2023, vehicle incident rate in the SAF has decreased from 3.04 per 100,000km in WY21 to 2.54 in WY23.

Another area of attention is heat injuries, given our rising ambient temperatures. The SAF has raised awareness of units, commanders and servicemen on the importance of heat acclimatisation and early identification of heat injury symptoms. More wet bulb globe temperature sensors have been installed in camps and training areas to provide real-time environmental heat measure for better work-rest cycle decisions.  In 2023, the SAF partnered the National University of Singapore and DSO National Laboratories to establish the Heat Resilience and Performance Centre to conduct research and development on soldier heat resilience and adaptation. Between 2021 and 2023, the annual number of heat strokes and heat exhaustion injuries has fallen from 7 to 2, with no heat strokes during that period.