Speech by Senior Minister of State for Defence Mr Chan Chun Sing, at the Young Defence Scientists Programme (YDSP) Congress 2013

Good afternoon, Mr Chan Yeng Kit, Permanent Secretary of Defence Development,
Mr Tan Peng Yam, CE of DSTA,
Mr Quek Gim Pew, CEO of DSO,
Distinguished guests, parents, students, friends and family who have gathered here today,First let me congratulate you for successfully completing the whole programme, and also to welcome you on board the larger defence science community. For many of you, this might be your first encounter with many of our defence scientists working quietly behind the scenes, securing our homeland 24/7. Please feel free to engage them, get to know them more, and maybe, perhaps one day, you will join our ranks as a defence scientist.

Today, actually when you look around us, almost everything that we come to touch and feel has something to do with science and technology. The Chinese has this saying, the four basic needs: 衣食住行。 衣, the clothes that you wear. 食, the food that you eat. 住, the house that you live in, and 行, the transport that you take. Every aspect of our life is touched by science and technology, and sometimes even without us knowing, sometimes we just take it for granted. The clothes that you wear, the kind of technology that is used to spin the cloth, and to even weave the cloth, has changed tremendously in recent years. Now you have new materials that you use in your shirts, in your vests, that are vastly different from the past. If you talk to a cyclist, even the front and the back of his shirt is made of different materials. One, to protect him against the UV rays, another to dissipate the sweat as soon as possible to keep the body cool. Talk about the food that you eat, every piece of food that we eat now, has some form of technology to allow it to be kept fresh from the time that it is harvested from the farm, to our tables. A simple meal that we have today would have ingredients from all over the world. It is a tremendous achievement.

A hundred years ago, we talk about planes, and people trying to fly. Nobody imagined that we can fly. Today, it is part and parcel of modern, global living. And today people are talking about flying from London to Australia in a couple of hours in the latest jet. As I was sharing with some students last weekend, maybe one day, we will get people to fly individually. And that will bring about a totally different way of seeing transport in our society.

But all these are civilian technology. Internet, iPads, all these are civilian technology. Every country will need a strong scientific base to sustain its economy. But what is the difference between civilian technology and defence technology? Actually, in the Singapore Armed Forces, where I grew up, we always say that we have four services. The Army, the Air Force, the Navy, are the three usual suspects. The forth service of the SAF, the Singapore Armed Forces, is really the defence scientists. And we have a big group of defence scientists in our midst. Without our defence scientists, the SAF would not be what it is today. Without the defence scientists coming out with their innovative ideas, the SAF will be a far cry from the kind of operational capabilities that we have. But today, I am going to share with you some of the fundamentals of our defence ecosystem.

Our defence science needs is actually defined by our own geo-strategic circumstances. First, we are small. We are a small country, we are a small nation. We do not have the depth like other countries. In other countries, if they get attacked, they can, what we call in the military, trade space for time. They take their time, figure out what they want to do, so on and so forth. In Singapore, we do not have that luxury; we are small. We better know before any harm can be brought to us. On top of that, we do not have many chances to get things right. As we were always reminded, for Singapore, defence means that we need to get it right, the first time, every time, all the time. They, who are on the other side, wishing us harm, just only needs to get it right, one time, one time. For us, it is: get it right the first time, every time, all the time. That is the first thing. That defines our defence challenges. The second thing is that we have finite resources. Finite land, finite airspace, finite manpower, finite money. So the question is, how do we stretch our defence dollar? To make sure that every dollar we spend on defence will require people to spend many more dollars to counter us. Only so, would we have succeeded. If we spend one dollar on defence, and people spend 10 cents to counter us, then we have failed. No matter how good our technology is. Because we would have outspent other people, and bankrupted ourselves. And what about manpower? We have finite manpower, unlike some other countries with large pools of manpower. We have to force ourselves to come up with solutions that require less manpower, and yet solutions that deliver the greatest punch. Later, I will talk about some of these examples.

But having said this, we have our own strengths that we must never give up. And some of these strengths are not obvious to people even in the regular armed forces. And the most important strength that Singapore society has, is our national service system. Many people in the regular armed forces of other countries see national servicemen that come from all walks of life as a liability. But we have turned our constraints into an advantage. Because over the years, all our national servicemen, precisely because they come from all walks of life, bring into the Singapore Armed Forces a great amount of talent across the entire spectrum of society. This has allowed us to actually improve the SAF much faster than even many other regular armed forces. And this has been the motivation behind the tremendous improvement in the SAF. Because we want the SAF to not only keep pace, but to stay ahead of the expectations of our own society.

So let me give you some examples of where our scientists have quietly worked behind the scenes over all these years, and maybe one day, you will also join their ranks. We used to use the M16 that was bought from overseas. When we had the M16 rifle, it took a soldier, a unit, at least half a day to zero the weapon. What is called zero-ing the weapon? Probably for the newer generation of soldiers, they would not even understand the concept. Because nowadays, they pick up the rifle, they can just go and shoot. Zero-ing the weapon in the past meant that you must make sure you align where you aim with where the bullet lands, in simple English. And you have to take half a day to do that. That is just to zero the weapon. Then in order for us to train an average soldier to be a marksman, you will take at least two, three days of training. Intensive training, just to do that. So from a novice, a civilian, to a trained marksman, it will have taken us easily two to three days of intensive training. Today, if you pick up a SAR21 rifle from the Singapore Armed Forces, you do not have to zero the weapon. There is a scope there. And in order for us to train you to be a marksman will perhaps take us half a day. In the past, after three, four days of training, out of a hundred soldiers, we would be lucky to get 15 of them to be marksman-trained. Today, with the SAR21, with half a day of training or less, we get 50 to 60 per cent marksmen. Even the ladies who come to our open house, after a couple of hours, can become marksmen. This did not happen by chance. This is the power of applying science and technology, applying design, to what you use. So you see how we have turned our so-called disadvantages, into advantages. We lack training time, we lack training resources. We have to design our own system to make sure that we come up with a solution that is not only more effective, but saves time, saves money. That is the challenge that the previous generation of defence scientists have come up to.

Today, we are not designing systems for this generation of soldiers. When you come and join us in the ranks of the defence scientists, you are actually designing systems and weapons for yourself. Just to let you know a secret, today, we are not upgrading this generation of tanks and armoured fighting vehicles that we have. That was designed by the last generation for this generation of soldiers. Today, you will be designing the generation of tanks that you will use when you come into the SAF. Why? Because it takes us a couple of years to design a new system. It takes us a couple of years to produce the new system. We do not design systems for the last generation. We design systems for the next generation. Today if you go and see one of the SAF fighting machines, you will see that it is very different from the fighting machines that other countries have. We designed it to leverage on your skill sets; many of you like to play computer games, many of you like to play xbox, Kinect, whatever you have. The next generation of command and control systems will use exactly those skill sets that you use. Once upon a time, when I learned to use a rifle, I learned to shoot and try to shoot straight. Today, the soldiers are no longer just learning how to use the rifle and learn to shoot straight. If you see the next generation of rifles that is integrated with the Advanced Combat Man System, which is basically an on-board computer on the soldier, you will see that they not only try to aim and shoot straight, each of their 10 fingers are simultaneously operating a control panel that is no different from your latest iPhone, that allows them to transmit messages, receive messages, receive data, from the higher HQ. And in that, they have the entire SAF firepower, into the backpacks of the soldiers.

All these did not come by chance. All these were not bought from other countries. They were designed and developed indigenously by our defence scientists and defence technologists. And we have many more examples. It includes UAVs or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles; we have developed an on-board power system that allows us to stay afloat four-times the time that other people can do. It includes our frigates that use half the manpower that other similar class of ships are able to do. And most amazingly, we can buy systems from everywhere in the world, and integrate them locally into a system of systems fighting machine for the entire SAF. Not many countries can do that.

This is how, over the years, we have stretched our defence dollars. This is how we have managed our costs to make sure that we get the greatest bang for our buck. This is how, over the years, we have become smart users of technology. We do not just buy things from other people and try to use them. We know how to build them, we know how to modify them. And at the end of the day, we know our own unique requirements that other people’s technology will not be able to apply. A simple example, the humidity of this country, the weather of this country, requires us to develop solutions that are very different from other people who just buy their technologies from other temperate countries.

All these, and many more other secret-edged technologies are things that are indigenously developed by our defence science community. So you can see, why we spend so much time and effort to seek out and groom the next generation of defence scientists. Because the power of the SAF is not made up of just by the Air Force, Army and Navy. Behind the Army, Air Force, Navy, there is a big group, and a powerful group, of defence scienctists and technologists working quietly behind the scenes to make sure that every dollar that we spend is stretched to the maximum. That every dollar that we spend, will require many people on the other side to spend many more dollars, in order to even come near to us. Without all these capabilities, without all these investments, the SAF will not be what it is today. So all thanks to all the scientists and technologists working quietly behind the scenes: the Defence Science Organisation, DSO, the Defence Science and Technology Agency, DSTA, the Singapore Technologies group of companies. These are the quiet workers behind the scenes, that allow the SAF to be what it is today.

It is for their efforts that we are able to be thankful for what we have today. If we had not made all these investments over the years, today, the SAF would just have been another average armed forces. That would not have done justice to the investment that the country has done over all these years. It would also not allow us to have the space and the freedom to do what we want to do, to be called Singaporeans, and so forth. So on that note, I encourage you to continue to pursue your interest in the defence science area. Because one day, when you join the ranks of the defence scientists, you too will play a quiet role behind the scenes, doing wonderful things that allow fellow Singaporeans to sleep peacefully at night. One day, when you join the ranks of our fellow defence scientists, you too, will have the satisfaction of being able to work on things that nobody else talks about in Singapore or elsewhere. That is my guarantee. Because I have known the defence science community for many years. And I know that the kind of projects that they do are things that nobody will even dream about. What I have shared today are but the tip of the iceberg. So if you are interested in science and technology, do come and join us. Do come and join us to play a part to keep our country safe and sound, so that all of us can enjoy many more years of peace and prosperity. So on that note, I wish you all all the best in your onward journey, to become scientists, and hopefully become defence scientists.

Thank you very much.