Closing Address by Minister for Social and Family Development and Second Minister for Defence Mr Chan Chun Sing at the Regional Conference on ''Building Civil-Military Capacity for Disaster Relief Operations''

Distinguished colleagues

Let me first thank all of you for joining us for this conference. We have gathered here at this conference, policy makers, practitioners and experts from international organisations, government and defence agencies, NGOs the private sector and academia, from this region and beyond, representing many disaster response stakeholders. It has been our pleasure to host you these last two days, and your presence has certainly enriched the discussions at this conference.

I understand that the conference discussions have been fruitful, with many valuable insights shared. Such discussions are important, as they allow us to better understand the challenges faced in disaster relief operations, so that we can address them and, most importantly, overcome them together. At the same time, I hope that the conference has provided a useful opportunity for all of you to get to know one other, the most important thing you can get out of this conference is not just the theories and the philosophies, nor even the SOPs. But is the relationships that you have forged that will enable us to respond to the next disaster that more decisively, that more coherently.

We must continue to improve and innovate

The Asia-Pacific region remains the most disaster-prone area of the world. Over 70 percent of all natural calamities globally occur in the Asia-Pacific. The Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 took the lives of over 250,000 people from Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Typhoon Haiyan last year wreaked havoc in the Philippines, Vietnam, and even Southern China. In the Philippines alone, there were more than 6,000 lives lost due to Haiyan; some 16 million people were affected and more than 4 million displaced- that's almost the entire Singapore. The question whenever such disasters happen, the question that the military always asks ourselves, is if we can do more, if we can do better, and if we can do so better together, so that we minimise the sufferings to our fellow beings, fellow people in the region.

This trend is unlikely to change significantly in the future. More people and economic assets will be exposed to more frequent and devastating disasters. Many vulnerable groups will not be able to cope with the impact of large-scale disasters. Amidst this backdrop, it is imperative that we continue to improve and innovate to deliver more effective disaster relief to the people in the region.

In the last two days, the conference discussions have highlighted a number of areas that we, as a collective community, can strengthen to improve disaster relief in our region. Whether it is improving military-to-military coordination or civil-and-military coordination, more can be done so that we can deal more effectively and deliver humanitarian aid to the victims as necessary. The previous session discussed how we can better leverage technology and the private sector in our response efforts. I hope that the insights and the recommendations from the conference will make a small contribution towards the development of more innovative practices.

Important that dialogue between civil-military actors continue

The conference discussions have, in particular, highlighted gaps in understanding between military and civilian humanitarian actors. Both groups have to work closely alongside each other in disaster settings. Yet military and civilian humanitarian actors have different cultures and working norms, and there remain many challenges when it comes to civil-military coordination. It is thus critical that dialogue between the military and civilian humanitarian actors continue to intensify, so that mutual understanding and a strong culture of collaboration can be built.

We also need to better understand one another's roles, cultures and working practices. This will not take place overnight. It requires deliberate efforts on the part of all actors to regularly interact to understand one another, share experiences, build working relationships, build trust, and such platforms, like today's workshop, will be one part to the entire jigsaw puzzle that we need to fix.

Moving beyond dialogue to build capacity in concrete and practical ways

But beyond dialogue, beyond conferences, we must also build real capability and capacity for disaster response in concrete and practical ways. The region has made positive progress on this front. There are existing structures and mechanisms in the region today to coordinate overall relief efforts, such as the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on disaster management, or AHA, as we affectionately call it. The progress made by AHA Centre is particularly admirable, and Singapore is committed to supporting its efforts to coordinate overall disaster response within ASEAN.

But there is scope for the region to do more on the military front. Militaries play an important role in the immediate aftermath of disasters. Militaries have unique capabilities such as strategic airlift and are on 24/7 operational footings, able to rapidly mobilise and deploy. Militaries thus play a critical role in the immediate hours and days after a disaster to support initial response operations, while civilian humanitarian actors are in the process of scaling up their response efforts. And for everyone who has been involved in disaster relief, you will know how critical the first 48 hours will be. And this is where I think the military can play a significant role to complement the overall efforts by the non-military agencies and other like-minded parties.

Recent experiences have however highlighted that foreign military assistance to disaster-struck countries can be better coordinated to provide a more effective response. This is why Singapore has offered to host the Changi Regional HADR Coordination Centre, or what we call the Changi RHCC.

The Role of Changi RHCC and its Value Proposition

Our aim for the Changi RHCC is a practical one. The RHCC seeks to facilitate military-to-military coordination in disaster response, by supporting the Affected State's military in coordinating the foreign military assistance provided and in liaising with disaster response stakeholders. In doing so, the RHCC will of course seek to support and coordinate seamlessly with existing coordination mechanisms like the AHA Centre and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs or UN OCHA as we call it, which focus on supporting an Affected State's National Disaster Management Office in coordinating the overall relief effort.

We envisage the RHCC's value proposition lying in three areas. First, the RHCC seeks to facilitate decision-making by militaries and minimise duplication and gaps in the provision of foreign military assistance. It hopes to do this by providing partner militaries with a comprehensive situational picture before, during and after a disaster that highlights, among others, both the needs as well as the pledges. In managing any crisis, making sense of the situation is the first and most crucial step, and disaster response is no different. The RHCC's OPERA command and control information system can take data from a wide range of sources, either open source or through partner agencies, or those collected by needs assessment teams, and then fuse it together and disseminate it to partner militaries. The OPERA system was deployed for the 18-nation ASEAN Defence Ministers' Meeting-Plus Exercise in Brunei last year, and feedback has been positive. But we are working towards enhancing OPERA further.

The second thing that we envisage the Changi RHCC to bring to the table is that information sharing and operational coordination for a multinational military response will be further enhanced via the RHCC's International Liaison Officers, or ILO, network and operations centre linkages with partner militaries. As with the IFC, or Information Fusion Centre, which currently has 15 ILOs from 14 countries attached, we also hope that we have a good number of partner militaries attach ILOs to the RHCC to facilitate information sharing and operational coordination. Third, the RHCC is also able to deploy a mobile coordination unit into theatre within the first 48 hours of a disaster to support the Affected State's military in coordination efforts on the ground. This mobile unit can support the Affected State's military in setting up a Multinational Coordination Centre, including providing it and assisting militaries with access to the OPERA command and control information system to provide a common operating picture and enable tighter coordination.

The RHCC is still in its early phases of development. As a first step, we are building up the RHCC's physical infrastructure to support information sharing with partner militaries. With the necessary technical infrastructure and linkages, RHCC will be capable of providing a better situation picture to our partners. Hence, the RHCC is able to leverage on the infrastructure and expertise of the Republic of Singapore Navy's Information Fusion Centre or IFC, which has played a similar role for regional navies when it comes to maritime information sharing since 2009. And you will have the chance to visit the RHCC later this afternoon, but please bear in mind that the infrastructure is still a work in progress and there is some way to go before the RHCC reaches full operational capability. We also welcome your suggestions on how we can strengthen the linkages within RHCC and how to improve the technical capabilities of RHCC so that we can all benefit from this joint effort of ours, which is ultimately to improve the help that we can deliver when a disaster strikes.

We are also currently developing the RHCC's concept of operations, or CONOPs as you would know, through consultations with partner militaries and other disaster response stakeholders like yourselves. The CONOPs will be "live" and will continually evolve as we have conversations and exchanges, and participate in exercises and operations with our partners. We recognise that this will be a challenging journey, and the RHCC's success is ultimately contingent on the support of partner militaries and other stakeholders. This includes partners coming on board to share information with the RHCC or deploying their officers as ILOs in the RHCC.

Conclusion

In conclusion, let me thank you all once again for joining us for this conference. Your participation as representatives from diverse civilian organisations and many military establishments underscores our commitment to help those people when disasters strike, and it also underscores the importance of building civil-military capacity for disaster response. Recent experiences in the disasters in our region have shown that civil-military as well as military-to-military coordination can be enhanced. Dialogue between civil-military actors must continue, and is one way to build a more collaborative culture between all disaster response stakeholders. However, we must also build real capacity for disaster response in concrete and practical ways. We have the existing infrastructures and mechanisms in place in Asia and ASEAN today to coordinate overall relief efforts. But we can do more as a region to strengthen coordination between militaries for disaster response. The RHCC presents an opportunity for militaries to participate and engage in practical cooperation on this front, and contribute to strengthening the regional HADR coordination.

On this note, I thank you for your participation and may I invite you to visit the RHCC later, as we open our doors to overseas visitors for the first time.

Thank you very much, and we look forward to working closely with all of you.>> Back to News Release