Speech by Minister for Defence, Dr Ng Eng Hen, at MINDEF Pride Day 2014 Awards Presentation Ceremony

Minister of State for Defence, Dr Maliki Osman,
Chairman and Members of the Government Parliamentary Committee for Defence and Foreign Affairs
Permanent Secretary (Defence Development),
Chief of Navy,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Good morning.

It is useful once a year during PRIDE to examine not what we do but how we do things. Because how we do things affects the organisation and when we look at how MINDEF or the SAF perform our duties or think of new ideas. And the challenge for Singapore is at our current level of development, growing further will be harder. If you want to grow the economy, it will be harder. Why? Well not only for Singapore, but also for all countries and organisations that have grown for a substantial period to keep growing and you reach a level at which further gains to be made from just incremental changes or simply doing more of the same, these gains would have dried up, you reach a high level. And if you study organisations or even countries when they reach that level and they fail to improve through bursts of productivity or innovation, these countries these organisations they lose their market position and for some they are overtaken into irrelevance. We can say that this is a very stressful environment, very competitive, organisations have to compete, countries have to compete, but if you think about it, who drives this stress? We ourselves. Let me give you an example.

15 years ago, what phones were you using? Think about it. I think many of us were using Motorola, Erricson or Nokia phones. I remember visiting a Nokia factory in Finland and they showed me their first handphone, it was a brick. Today, what phones are you using? Does Motorola still produce phones? How many of you use Motorola, Nokia or Erricson? Not many. Today Samsung and Apple are popular, are market leaders. Why this disruption? For the simple reason that we all choose what will give us the most value. Five years from now, would you be surprised if the most popular phones are from smaller players today? I don't think many of you will be surprised. Some of you are already using much cheaper but as good phones made in China right? For a fraction of the cost, and honestly sometimes just as good. What drives this stress and competitive dynamics is what we need, our demands as users as consumers, and economists have termed this creative destruction. It is our own demands that drive this creative destruction which only productivity and innovation can seek to achieve.

For the security arena, it is no different. The demands on us are increasingly more complex and sophisticated. You look at what is challenging us today in the cyber realm, biologic pandemics whether it is SARS, Ebola, or a new disease that can come up in the future, terrorism, the complex problems, trans-national. In other words, affecting many countries. Complex origins, complex solutions. And the only way MINDEF or the SAF can address these challenges adequately is that individuals within the organisation come up with good ideas. You heard the phrase "Thinking Organisation". Actually that is a misnomer. When we come together it is not as if we think better. An organisation can only think as good as the people within. So PRIDE needs to be an on-going activity and the spirit behind MINDEF's Productivity and Innovation in Daily Efforts, or the PRIDE movement needs to be something that is second nature to us.

The theme for this year's PRIDE Day and the Public Service Division's PS21 ExCEL Convention captures the idea - "Today's ideas, Tomorrow's PRIDE".Let's ask another question: Why is it that some companies do better in productivity and innovation? You hear about how Apple can innovate, how Google is a good company, how it comes up with good ideas, or in Singapore how some companies can do better in innovation than others. And this applies to countries. For example, there are more Japanese Nobel prize winners if they go to the US but you compare Japanese professors in Japan, the likelihood or historical record of them getting Nobel prizes is much less. Why is it that some companies and even countries innovate and are more productive. I think two words sum up the reasons - culture and mindset. Let me give an example of how culture and mindset can make a huge difference in output, even when the inputs are the same. And I will use an example that I think you can relate to.

I run on and off and I run along Alexandra Canal, it is near my house and it is a nice stretch. During my runs, I notice three groups of people doing the same activity but with very different intent and outcomes. What is the activity? The activity is fishing. Let me describe the first group. The first group is a father and son. The father is teaching the son to use a reel of line, tugging at it, and you can tell that the son is very excited. There is real bonding between father and son. I don't think this father and son expect to catch fish, it is just an activity to bond and if they catch a fish it is a bonus. I can imagine them going back home describing to mummy what they did and the boy being very excited. And they are very happy to spend some quality time along the canal fishing. Then I see a second person. The second is an elderly gentleman. I see him riding his bicycle with two fishing baskets on the back of his bicycle. These baskets look hand-made, I don't think you can buy them off the shop. I see him lowering the baskets until it reaches the floor of the canal, he just leaves it there, ties it to the railing, sits aside, takes a smoke, reads his newspaper, occasionally tugs at the basket to see if there are fish. He actually expects to catch a few fish, but his real interest is to see whether his baskets work. I can imagine him sharing with his friends how a better basket is, what new innovations he can make his hobby. The third group is Bangladeshi foreign workers. This group is more innovative. The canal is about 15 to 20 meters. The foreign workers have taken a net that span the entire canal. They have gotten on both sides of the canal and they are trolling the whole canel. For them catching fish is an expectation not only for themselves but to feed the whole lot of their co-workers back there, so they dispense with the line, they dispense with the basket, they trawl the whole canal and many onlookers are enthralled by this because fish are jumping up and down, and they have a huge catch. Same canal, same activity, but very different perceptions and outcomes. . For one, it is an opportunity purely for recreation, another, a simple hobby and few fish, yet another food for a group for dinner. What explains this difference? Culture and mindset which are borne out of different circumstances and needs. Culture and mindset frame our life and through it our perceptions of every facet in daily activities, how we view the canal is viewed very differently, what we can get out of a particular situation can be completely different.

You would have often been encouraged as heads of your departments at MINDEF PRIDE Day and PS21 ExCEL Convention to foster a culture of innovation, to inculcate habits of working smart, to nurture good ideas of our people so that PRIDE can become a reality. In honesty, I wish it was so easy and the fact that only a few companies do it very well globally tell us that this task is actually very difficult and the effort a long-term one has to be a sustained one. In the book stores, there are many books on how to build such a culture. I am not a guru on productivity and innovation but I have one simple observation. And that observation is that culture and mindset are better transmitted through living examples - better caught than taught. We've had SARs, we've had Ebola, and basically in the word you need super-spreaders if you want to get an organisation to become like that.

We have some super-spreaders and some positive examples within MINDEF, within SAF, within our organisation, DSTA, DSO. It was our defence engineers who successfully built Singapore's first and the world's most advanced Underground Ammunition Facility. That idea spread, it led to others - the Jurong Rock Caverns, Southeast Asia's first underground oil storage facility. And it spread even further, so much so that our urban planners now are thinking that you can create underground cities. Our defence engineers are helping the Urban Redevelopment Authority develop the national master plan for underground space in Singapore. So that is a very good example of super-spreaders infecting others with good things this time and PRIDE making a difference to our country.

Today, I like to announce another innovative idea that will be implemented soon - this time not underground but up in the sky.

For the underground space, our engineers were challenged because all of us recognise there is limited land in Singapore. Let me describe the challenge for this idea in the sky. The problem is a simple one. We need an effective early warning system from threats that can come by air or sea. That is a simple problem, Singapore is a small island. You have incidents like 9/11 where there were attacks on the twin towers in Manhattan, you have the Mumbai attacks where terrorists came from the sea and these attacks are a reality, in other others they are not theoretical. JI members that were caught like Mas Selamat, had told the police that this type of attack, planes against targets in Singapore was indeed one of their plans. The recent MH370 incident showed us or revealed to us that international rules for civilian air traffic do not require planes to reveal their positions all the time. Thus, each country must build its own robust air surveillance system and maritime system. Singapore is a small island, we are an air and sea hub, and that potentially increases our threat and we have to take it seriously.

The SAF has put in place a strong early warning and surveillance system both for our air and maritime threats. But what is the limitation? In order for you to see far, you have to be either very high and you make sure that no buildings block you. But think about what is happening to Singapore. First of all, we don't have very high points and all our mountains are not really mountains. At least Bukit Timah Hill is a hill. But Mt Elizabeth is no mountain. You know what our highest point is, but we are also building up, 40-storey buildings. Soon, I expect maybe even 50-storey or higher buildings. They can obstruct us. Our ground-based radar systems can only operate above high-rise buildings. You can send a plane in the sky, airborne. That will solve your problem. But you have to make sure that you can go round the clock and even if you can do that, and the cost of manpower, not only in terms of money but in terms of resources, the attention to be 24/7, very intensive.

So we have this challenge and our military planners and civil engineers came out with this solution. It is a big balloon called a tethered aerostat. You would recognise this if you watch golf tournaments. Otherwise you can't see the ball flying. This tethered aerostat will carry radars for air and maritime surveillance to complement our current suite of modern sensors. It will be deployed at a sufficient height so that it has a clear line (of sight). It is tethered, meaning there is a cable that you float it. This is purely for surveillance. But at a particular height, it will have a clear line of sight to see our air and sea space. It can be airborne 24/7, it is unmanned, cost effective, and sustainable. For a small island state like Singapore, surveillance and early warning to give us sufficient reaction time to respond will always be a challenge but the aerostat will improve our surveillance capabilities significantly.

This is what we can accomplish when we put our minds together, recognise the imperative, recognise challenges and say this is a solution, this is a good solution. It saves us money but that to me is secondary. It will save approximately $29 million in operating costs every year but the capabilities it gives us will be there - it is a protector in the sky.The organisation came up with it but it is the people within the organisation that started the idea because people are the transmitters of productivity and innovation.. And we need super-spreaders to infect the whole organisation. Super-spreaders like the winners of this year's Minister for Defence Awards who come from NALCOM, 7AELG, 6AELG and UAV Command; those who bagged two Star and 24 Gold awards in the Team Excellence Symposium. We also have MINDEF/SAF staff who received awards - a Gold Award in the Innovation Champion category; and internationally, where many of our MINDEF/SAF's teams continue to win the highest accolades at international symposiums, pitched against the world's best.

Let me share one WITS project this year that exemplifies another group of super-spreaders. You saw it in the video clip.

These are men and women at 816 SQN who found a simple solution to a difficult problem to replace the shoulder bolt in the Chinook helicopter. They became key-hole surgery specialists. To transform a three-day procedure into a four-hour job using fewer people. And as the video clip showed, 83% time saved and more than $200,000 annually. When you look at the video clip, you ask yourself why didn't somebody think about this. It is so intuitive. Why do you have to take apart everything just to replace one part? Which is what they did. And the solution is so useful that Boeing, who is the manufacturer of the Chinook is looking at it. It tells you of the quality that we have and what we can do when we put our minds together.

At this stage of our development, MINDEF and the SAF are more dependent on human ingenuity and new and better ideas to help tackle our security challenges. So we must keep up our efforts in PRIDE. I think we have done well with impressive achievements over the years. We have a strong culture of productivity and innovation and that is something we can continue to build on. And I wish all of you another productive and innovative year ahead.

Thank you.