Keynote Address by Minister for Defence Mr Chan Chun Sing at the Defence Technology Prize Award Ceremony on 1 October 2025 at DSTA Auditorium

A very good afternoon to all of you.

It is always good to be back here to meet and catch up with all of you. There are many familiar faces – many who have worked with me and my generation for many years.

First, I want all of you to know is that while you might not be in uniform, all of you in this room are what I consider to be the fifth service of the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF). We have the Army, Air Force, Navy, and the Digital and Intelligence Service (DIS) as the four uniform services. But all of you who are not in uniform – you are the fifth service of the SAF in my mind. It has been like that for all the years that I have worked with you, ever since I was a young officer, and I continue to believe that if you do your job well, the SAF will either not have to work so hard, or we may not even need to deploy the SAF in uniform. This is how important I want you to know your role is.

Having said that, I think the world has changed. Warfare has changed, and various things have changed. Today, even as we applaud our own accomplishments, we must also know what we must do to adapt and keep pace. But I will also cover some of the things that we must never change.

Let me first start with what are the things that have changed. By now, you are all familiar that the geopolitics have changed – the way that we look at the world, the assumptions we made about the partnerships, the global international order, the rules-based order – all that has to be reviewed. We must leave no stone unturned, and we must not make the wrong assumptions or use outdated assumptions.

The second thing that has changed is that the nature of warfare. Today, we talk about all these asymmetric means, the low-cost options, the dual-use technologies and so forth. Actually, all of us in this room know that these are not things that surprise us. Many of the things that we talk about today – we have been talking about them for many years, just not openly. Many of the things that we celebrate today, including some of the Defence Technology Prize winners – I think once upon a time, we started working on them together. The papers were written by me and you together. So, the nature of warfare has changed. There are new challenges but there are also new opportunities for us to review the way that we work.

The third thing that has changed, and will keep changing, is our own demographics and the base of talent that we can draw upon. This generation of youngsters coming into service will have very different capabilities from the previous generations, just as our generation would have very different capabilities from the generations before us.

These three things will impact how we do business in MINDEF and the SAF: the changed global geopolitics, the changed nature of warfare, and the changing demographics, talent and aspirations of our people. The question is, how do we respond?

I think there are a few simple things that we can do and do better. First, we know that today, speed is of the essence – to be timely and relevant. The age-old model whereby we can have one fixed target in a set of capabilities to be delivered over many years, and we scale it up across the entire orbat – that will change, and has already changed. Instead, today, we are likely to see rapid iterations of multiple generations of technology within our orbat. This brings both challenges and opportunities. Challenges – in terms of how do we integrate backward and forward integrate our capabilities across different generations of systems. Opportunities –   instead of looking for the perfect solution for a static target, we are looking for a series of dynamic solutions that are always one step ahead of the challenge. That is the first thing that we have to change.

The second thing is our own perspectives. In the past, we have a certain perspective of who are our partners; who are the majors, and as we call them, the large industrial manufacturers, defence contractors, and so forth. But today, we have widened the spectrum of people that we need to work with, and we have started on this journey many years ago. Many years ago, we started with Temasek Lab. We expanded our collaboration with the universities in order to bring in ideas and talent that we will not be able to have it all within our own organization – that we must continue doing. Today, beyond the major arms contractors, there are also many interesting start-ups – some in the military field, some in the dual-use field, and some even in the civilian field – that we have to expand our horizon to find those new partners, adapt some of their ideas, which can then help us to speed up our innovation and development process. That is the second thing that we need to change.

The third thing that we need to change is in our own conceptual understanding of where we can apply our capabilities. In the past, we had a very binary conception of where we applied our forces – either during war or peace – almost binary. Today, we talk about peace to war as a continuum. Many years ago, we started by calling it OOTW – operations other than war. Then it evolved to hybrid warfare. Today, we call it the grey zone operations. But whatever we call it, what is consistent is that there has never been, and never will be a binary division between war and peace. Instead, we operate within the entire spectrum. What has changed is this – the weight of the spectrum may not be in the past, whereby a large part of our effort is dedicated to the capabilities of warfighting – that we must continue to hone and maintain, Today, increasingly, we have to put in quite a lot of effort in what we call the grey zone operations between peace and war that we need to invest our resources. Very often, one can even argue that this path may even determine whether we need to even get to the hot war base of the operation. And this is where, in the investment of our talent, efforts and resources, we have to rebalance in terms of how we look at the entire spectrum. Certain capabilities will be able to use across the entire spectrum; certain capabilities may not, and we will have to judiciously apply our minds to make best use of the resources.

Having said that, I must say that there are three things that must never change. These three things are what we hold dear to our hearts as we build up our capability system. First, we always take a long-term perspective on our capability development. We are not, and hopefully will never be like some others who might be caught up in the facts to say that this is the latest technology that we want to adopt. Because I can assure you, the three prizes that we are going to give out today – none of them developed their capabilities in the last few years. Guided Systems branch – they have worked with me more than 20 years ago. If you trace back some of the old papers that were written, probably my name was there; maybe Captain Chan Chun Sing. This is just an example of how far we think ahead.  The “Tan Kok Tins”[1] of the world and many others in the DSO Guided Systems branch have dedicated their entire lives to achieve something very precious for us. If you meet them on the street, they look like any other ordinary Joe, but they are anything but ordinary. They have dedicated their entire lives solving problems with that ultimate goal, one problem at a time, one solution at a time. Nothing too small, because even if the smallest thing does not get right, the system cannot work as intended. But this was also a team that dared to dream.

When we first started this division many years ago, I did not think we dared to dream what they are capable of today. Today I am back in MINDEF and when I hear of their plans, I know that we have the right people, and that they are guiding the next generation to continue to dream big so that we will have capabilities that we will never need to tell people of or ever need to use.

The second thing, besides taking a long-term view, is the investment in our people. All of you might not be in uniform, but many of you stay on in this organisation even longer than those in uniform. If you look at the Advanced Information Analysis team, they did not pop up over the last one to two years, or three to five years. Generations of people who have come before them have contributed to the foundations which now allow them to do what they do today, and for us to award them a prize. This particular project, for which they won the DTP award, was built upon years and perhaps decades of hard work, deep expertise and capabilities. This is the essence of how the MINDEF Defence Technology Community build up our people and capabilities. Very often, we build up the capabilities not because we have in mind a certain fixed target. As we evolve the capabilities and we know what we are capable of, we also set higher goals to stretch ourselves. It is an iterative and dynamic process whereby our goals and capabilities iterate with one another and we keep stretching ourselves to go faster and further before the threat emerges. So, take a long-term view, and invest in our people. These are two things that we will not change.

The third thing that will not change is what we say – taking a systems approach to how we develop capabilities. When we talk about systems approach, you remember many years ago when some people go overseas for courses and they do operation analysis. Some people will do what we call, System of Systems approach. When we talked about this at that point in time, not many people understood what we were talking about.

We used to have System Architects. I still remember the first four gurus called System Architects. People did not know what they were supposed to do, but it was very important to take a system approach. By that, I do not mean a life cycle approach - which many people do - and it's basic 101 to take a life cycle approach to capabilities building. To take a systems approach, for us to be able to integrate capabilities and to have different perspectives and bring them all together, that is a secret sauce in DSTA. It is one thing to say that I know many parts of the system and I know many different kinds of technology, but to be able to apply them and bring them together is both a science and an art.

If you look at the team that did the SAFTI City, each and every component of the technology is not a secret. Most of them will be available commercially off-the-shelf. To be able to integrate them, at the lowest cost, in the fastest time, and to be able to use what is commonly available in the market to come up with capabilities that are not easily acquired or purchased off-the-shelf – that requires expertise, that speaks to the depth of capabilities that we have. This is not just in the DSTA Building and Infrastructure (BI) team, it is in the DSTA Command and Control System teams and many other teams. The ability to think at the systems level, the ability to execute at the System of Systems level – that is a secret sauce that we have built up over the years. So, these three things must not change: take a long-term perspective to how we develop capability, continuously investing in our people; and taking a systems approach to how we develop capabilities. If we can continue to keep our eye on the ball and be quietly confident knowing what we can do with the capabilities that we have built up. Then I am confident that MINDEF and the SAF will be in good stead because what we are doing is not for the here and now, what we are doing are for generations to come. The many things that Defence Technology Committee (DTC), DSO National Laboratories, DSTA, Singapore Technologies (ST) Engineering and so forth have built up may not often be made public. That is why, even today, as per every year for such awards, we do not go into the details of each project. Deep in our hearts, all of us can be quietly confident that we have what it takes to respond to new challenges, and we have also what it takes to anticipate challenges before they even arise.

Final story to encourage you. Last night at dinner, at one of those official dinners, someone asked me, “Have you all been looking at Ukraine and the Middle East conflict? Have you all been noticing that the people use the swarm of drones for targeting, picking up targets and so forth?” Do you know what my answer was? I told them that if you remember one National Day Parade (NDP) about 10 years ago, the most spectacular and memorable part of the show for me, in that NDP, was not the dynamic display, the parade segment or the show segment. 10 years ago, the NDP Executive Committee (EXCO) put up a drone show with 300 drones making a heart-shape saying, “I love Singapore”. At that point in time, people thought, “What a wonderful live show”. I am quite sure on hindsight, for all the informed observers out there, they will know 10 years ago – what we were thinking about and what we have thought about.

On that note, I wish you all the very best, and I am very proud of what you have achieved, and I look forward to even greater achievements and ideas from all of you. Thank you for your service. Thank you.

[1] Tan Kok Tin is one of the key pioneers in Guided Systems Technology in Singapore.

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