Keynote Address by Second Minister for Defence Mr Lui Tuck Yew at the 17th Asia-Pacific Programme for Senior Military Officers (APPSMO)

Ambassador Ong Keng Yong,
Excellencies,
Distinguished speakers,
Ladies and Gentlemen, 

Introduction

A very good morning to all of you. First, let me express my appreciation to Ambassador Ong for inviting me to share in the session this morning and speak to you. I would start off by extending a very warm welcome to our foreign guests from the region and beyond for joining us. This year is special for Singapore as we celebrate the 50th year of our nation's independence and also the 50th year of the formation of the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF). It started with only two infantry battalions and two ships. There was no air force. Over the years we have grown to become a strong and professional armed forces, with leading-edge capabilities networked to form an integrated fighting system.

Increasingly Complex Security Environment

Today, militaries including the SAF face an increasingly complex security environment. In the past, the role of militaries and military officers was more straightforward, dealing primarily with the defence of sovereignty and territorial integrity. Missions and tasks handed down the chain of command were usually clearly defined. Adversaries and threats were conventional, relatively predictable and less sophisticated.

Over the years, we have seen the security environment transform into a complex mosaic of transnational and non-conventional threats, ranging from cyber-attacks to piracy to terrorism.

As countries and commerce move online, this has created new opportunities and new threats. A few months ago, Europol Chief Rob Wainwright reportedly said that cybercrime is now the number one security concern, alongside terrorism. It is quite a change. As you may be aware, the US intelligence agencies rank cybercrime as the number one national security threat, ahead of terrorism, espionage and weapons of mass destruction. Quite a change from the era we grew up in during the Cold War. In February this year, Russian security company Kaspersky Lab reported that a hacking ring had stolen up to $1 billion from more than 100 banks from 30 countries since the end of 2013. New tools exploiting the pervasiveness of new media, have created new threats on a much larger scale.

The Internet has also facilitated the global spread of radical ideologies. Some 30,000 foreign fighters from 90 countries have joined ISIS to date, and the number continues to grow. Some who returned home have plotted or carried out attacks, including the Tunisia beach massacre that claimed at least 38 lives two months ago. Distance from Syria and Iraq is no buffer, Southeast Asia is a key recruitment centre for ISIS. Alarming inroads have been made, with more than 700 Indonesians and over 200 Malaysians joining ISIS. In fact, they have formed a unit all by themselves - the Katibah Nusantara or what is known as the Malay Archipelago Combat Unit. This unit poses an increasingly severe threat to Singapore and Southeast Asia, in line with the ISIS goal to set up a worldwide caliphate and it will be threat that will be with us for decades. After 9/11, we rooted out the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), and we are still doing so because it is a multi-headed monster that continues to spring new heads every time you try to cut off one or two. The genesis of the JI and the networks that they have, the capabilities, the expertise that they have built up, could be traced back to the Afghanistan War.  So you see the JI rearing its head in the region 10 to 15 years after the Afghanistan War, it is still a problem with us. So ISIS and the fact that we have far larger numbers who have gone there, and who will come back with radical ideologies, new capabilities, expanded networks, will be a challenge that we have to confront for many years to come.

So in this increasingly complex environment, the SAF, like other militaries, has had to undertake a wider spectrum of operations. We started out with limited medical and peace-support roles, for example in Angola, Cambodia and Afghanistan in the 1990s. Our contributions grew over time, and the SAF sent its first officer as a Force Commander for the United Nations Mission of Support in East Timor in 2002. I remember this clearly because I was Chief of Navy then. It was a challenging time and we were able to contribute, to try to bring about a new situation, a new landscape, a new calm, in what was happening then in East Timor. The SAF has also undertaken roles in maritime security, counter-terrorism and Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Relief efforts, including the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, the Nepal earthquake relief efforts and ongoing operations in the Gulf of Aden and the fight against ISIS.

Need For Whole of Governemnt (WOG) Approach

In dealing with a wider spectrum of operations, militaries need to build new capabilities and adapt to new roles. Just as importantly, militaries need to adopt a Whole of Government approach, and work effectively with other agencies. Why is this so? Let me share with you my thoughts on this.

The examples that I had highlighted earlier - cybercrime and transnational terrorism illustrate the multi-dimensional nature of the security challenges that we increasingly face. They involve multiple stakeholders who do not necessary share convergent goals. They have causes and influencing factors that are not easily deciphered. Therefore, a one-agency solution would fail, given that it is based on narrow expertise, parochial considerations, and may be prone to simplifying assumptions. We need a network to fight a network, and this network is an integration of diverse insights, experience and expertise to solve the multi-faceted security problems that we face. At the design stage of either policies or plans, there is value in pooling domain expertise and knowledge because no single agency has a monopoly on good ideas needed to deal with these threats. Just as importantly, the implementation and delivery of these policies and plans would need to be synergistic and coherent.

In the last two decades or so, we have seen a shift in thinking away from a predominantly military solution to resolve conflicts such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Civilian elements such as the judiciary, socio-economic, constabulary, political and humanitarian efforts are critical to address the root causes of the security threats, and must be part of enduring solutions. These solutions require multiple agencies working towards the intertwined goals of promoting security, institutionalising good governance and the rule of law, and paving the way for economic development, if we are to attain enduring solutions.

Challenges With Adopting a WOG Approach

While adopting a Whole of Government approach to tackle our security problems is an imperative, we know there are challenges in doing so. First, you need a basic change of mindset at all levels of an organisation. Governments, militaries and security agencies, like all bureaucratic organisations, tend to keep information flowing vertically within organisational silos. It is really difficult to get organisations or departments to share information horizontally across the silos. We face it here in Singapore. We have advocated a Whole of Government approach to solving domestic issues, domestic problems for a quite number of years. It is an ongoing effort, a work in progress because the tendency is to do it the same old way. And unless you have a generation of officers who have been raised from the very beginning to think Whole of Government, to work Whole of Government and to approach it from a Whole of Government perspective, it is hard to eradicate the old practices and habits. And so, this is something you really need to encourage right from the top, to engender the kinds of relationships and the kinds of organisational structures, in order for this to succeed. So a basic change of mindset is the first.

Second, there are differences in the organisational culture of different agencies. For example, the military and law enforcement organisations tend to be more hierarchical, with preferences for strict compliance, discipline and regimentation. Compare this with civilian organisations, many of them may prefer consensus-building, and a more laissez faire approach and type of leadership. There are also differences with terminology itself, where terms are subjected to contested or inconsistent interpretations.

The third challenge of a Whole of Government approach is that it can be time-consuming and inefficient because of the extensive consultation that is required. As a result of the consultations, more considerations are likely to be surfaced in deriving and arriving at the eventual solution to overcome a particular security challenge, which will take up more time. We know this is not ideal as many of our security challenges are time-sensitive, and being able to act on it as quickly as possible is an imperative. So we need to recognise the challenges, change of mindset, organisational cultural differences as well as the fact that it can actually slow us down. But I believe, notwithstanding these challenges, we really need to work hard at overcoming them and solving them.

Resolving the Challenges and Sharing Singapore's Experience

One way is the establishment of inter-agency platforms and structures which enable the horizontal sharing of information across agencies. This will encourage a culture and mindset in which officers consider the spill-over effects of their policies and plans onto other agencies. In 2011, Singapore launched the National Maritime Security System or what is now known as the NMSS. This is an example of a platform to foster horizontal information sharing. The NMSS involves five key agencies in delivering a coordinated effort against maritime threats. The five agencies are the Republic of Singapore Navy under Ministry of Defence, Police Coast Guard under the Ministry of Home Affairs, Maritime Port Authority of Singapore under the Ministry of Transport, Singapore Customs under Ministry of Finance and Immigrations and Checkpoints Authority under Ministry of Home Affairs. So you have different agencies under different ministries all coming together, in order to pool resources to deal with common security challenges. During my time as Chief of Navy in the early 2000 period, sharing of information among these five agencies was patchy and less efficient, resulting in slower responses and sometimes duplication of effort or even conflict of effort. Today, the five agencies share a common national maritime operating picture through their sense-making systems, which allows observations and threat assessments to be harmonised, and also enables a timely and coordinated operational response to these threats. And if you ask the officers now, they cannot quite imagine how we have been working just 15 years ago.

Beyond the setting up of new inter-agency platforms, the Government of Singapore established the new Strategic Policy Office in the Prime Minister’s Office just last month. This unit will help build a shared understanding of the Government’s priorities, and be responsible for strategic resource allocation, in terms of budget, manpower, and where necessary, land, or even carbon. Instead of setting up a new dedicated unit every time a new issue arises, the purview of this office is to oversee such cross-agency issues.

Besides inter-agency platforms and structures, we need to also establish clear roles, responsibilities and processes to oil the Whole of Government  machinery. It is crucial to have clarity on the responsibilities of each agency and its representatives, and the working processes within the inter-agency platform.  This allows communication, intelligence or data gathering, information-sharing, decision making and approval to be more seamless. Clear processes will also minimise the risk of issues falling through the gaps and close the organisational cultural differences between agencies.

Singapore was one of the many countries that had to deal with the 2009 H1N1 influenza virus outbreak. Various ministries and agencies formed inter-agency working groups called Crisis Management Groups or what we commonly call CMGs. We had CMGs ranging from Education to Public Communications to Safety and Security. Each of the CMGs was led by a ministry, and had specific responsibilities such as border screening, vaccination, domestic surveillance and public education. As the crisis was essentially an infectious disease outbreak, the Health CMG was designated as the lead agency to coordinate the national response to manage the crisis. The clarity of the command and control structure and the responsibilities of each agency ensured a timely and effective response to deal with the health epidemic. And on top of the Health CMG, actually we have the Homefront Crisis Executive Group, which is actually a group of Permanent Secretaries who come together in order to oversee the entire Whole of Government effort to deal with the H1N1 influenza virus outbreak.

In order to achieve timely responses against swiftly evolving threats, we also need to empower the lower levels of the Whole of Government team to solve problems. This is not unlike the German military’s adoption of auftragstaktik or mission-type tactics. Since the 19^th century, the most junior German officers were empowered to make decisions on the spot to exploit in good time the opportunities that develop. In today’s context, it is necessary to empower Whole of Government team members to make decisions and resolve issues at their level, especially those issues where the feel of the ground or direct operational contact is important. It is not easy. On the one hand, you want to empower them, you want to back them up when they make decisions, and sometimes the decisions go wrong. On the other hand, you want to develop that discernment and judgement on when to escalate issues and what type of issues that ought to be escalated. For such empowerment to succeed, the commander’s intent is the most important part of the orders. As military officers, we are used to rules of engagement (ROEs), and it becomes a more and more complex set of ROEs because we try to imagine all sorts of scenarios that we have to deal with. That is the prescriptive part and we pay a lot of attention to that. We imagine the situations, game-plan it in our minds, how we would act and we try to script it into the ROEs. But the intent of the ROEs is just as important and we need to pay equal attention to the descriptive part. So there is that balance between what is descriptive and what is prescriptive because in a very complex environment and fast evolving landscape, you cannot prescribe and script every situation. People on the ground need to understand the intent behind the set of ROEs and understand what is in the commander’s mind. So the descriptive portion of the ROEs, which we sometimes skim over, is actually just as critical as the prescriptive part. Understanding the commander’s intent allows effective and sensible exercise of initiative by his subordinates. In the same vein, Whole of Government representatives at all levels need to understand how their purpose and roles fit in with the larger Whole of Government aims and objectives.

Conclusion

To sum up, I hope that this APPSMO will help to enhance our understanding of how Whole of Government approaches can be applied to increase the effectiveness of our military organisations. Whole of Government is a work in progress in many of our nations. It requires emphasis, support and attention at all levels, starting from the very top. And I think Whole of Government effort is helped when officers from various organisations, various countries come together to share what it is they have tried to do back home, within their respective organisations or agencies because these examples enrich our repertoire, enrich our thinking on this very important subject, and allows us to bring different perspectives and ideas to our thoughts to allow it to percolate in our minds so that we can continue to be fresh and improve on what is it that we do within our own organisations.

But I would urge you to also not forget the traditional objectives of APPSMO. These are equally important - to acquire new knowledge, to make professional connections and to reflect. I hope this week will be a professionally fruitful and personally enriching one for all of you.

Thank you very much.