Opening Remarks By Minister For Defence Mr Chan Chun Sing At The Total Defence Awards Dinner On 6 November 2025

A very good evening to all of you. Thank you for being here despite your busy schedule, to join us for this dinner. More importantly, I should thank all of you for your support for our defence and total defence. It is not easy. It is not something that MINDEF or MHA takes for granted. Likewise, our defence and security is not something that we take for granted, and we certainly do not take for granted the public support for our defence and security. It is something that we will work conscientiously together on, and I am glad to say that tonight with us, we have many supporters of our total defence here.

Tonight, I am going to keep my speech short – I am not going to tell you how important it is for us to have defence, because for you to join us for dinner tonight, you must be part of our choir and converts. Given that we are living in volatile times, it is important for us to reflect on where we are and the lessons that we can learn from the recent conflicts, in order for us to chart our way forward for the next lap for our own defence and security.

Now, if we look at the recent conflicts, from the situation in Europe to the Middle East, or even different parts of the world, what are some of the lessons that we can draw? Well, I am going to share four lessons that I think we can draw from the recent conflicts that we should bear in mind.

First lesson is vigilance. If we look at some of the conflicts, or in fact all of the conflicts in recent times, one can almost make the argument that actually, it is not for lack of capability or the lack of preparedness. One of the fundamental things that keeps happening is that people underestimate the threat, or they allow themselves to be lulled into a mindset that such a threat will not happen, if you recall the situation in Europe and in the Middle East, you will understand what I mean. It is not because the people did not have the capabilities or they had not been preparing, but the most fundamental thing was that they did not truly believe that something bad could happen. Because of that, even with the best intelligence, the evidence was discounted. For all of us in this business, we know that most of intelligence, 80% of them, is open-sourced. It is almost like a chess-board. You can see all the pieces, but how we interpret the other person's intent is the difficult part. Once we get lulled into a certain sense of complacency, that is when problems start. For Singapore, every day of peace that we enjoy will be one day harder for us to maintain our vigilance. To me, the first lesson learnt is not just to keep the peace and secure the peace, it is not just how much manpower we have, how much capabilities we have, but how vigilant we are to guard against being lulled into a sense of complacency, thinking that it would not happen.

The second lesson that I thought was quite useful from all the recent conflict was a lesson in unity, and it should not be a new lesson, because in all conflicts throughout history, people try to take over a country without firing a single shot. For many, the way to do that is to make sure that a country is divided before they even need to march in. Indeed, again, this is an obvious lesson from recent and past conflicts. A country that is divided, disunited, will be ripe for people to exploit our vulnerabilities. Today, in an internet-connected world, in a hyperconnected world, there is no shortage of forces pulling us in different directions where people hope that we can be a proxy for their agenda. The challenge for us is, how do we maintain our unity so that we never fall prey to other people’s bad intentions? If we are not divided, it will be very difficult for people to want to do us harm.

The third lesson, I thought, that was quite interesting in the recent conflict, was the lesson on resilience. We can never say that people will never do bad things to us, or that people will never succeed in doing bad things to our security. The question is not if, but when. The next question is that even if they manage to do something bad, how fast can we bounce back? How fast can we recover? The faster we recover, the less they are able to achieve their objective. That is why over all these years, when we talk about counter-terrorism, we do not talk just about prevention and mitigation – we talk about how we try and get our people back up on our feet so that we will never let them succeed by disrupting our livelihood or way of life. The resilience of how fast we can bounce back is the third lesson I think we can learn.

Last but not least, the recent conflicts have also shown that whether one is resilient, whether one can defeat the threat is not so much just dependent on how much resources or manpower we have at the beginning of a conflict. Instead, it is about how agile and adaptable we are to evolve our tactics, techniques, and procedures as the conflict wears on. We need resilience, but we also need agility. Agility to evolve our processes, our fighting doctrines, as we go on.

To me, these are the four lessons that I thought we should bear in mind to put ourselves in a better position to secure the peace. Making sure that we remain vigilant and never be lulled into complacency just because we think we have superior capabilities or intelligent systems. Making sure that we maintain our unity, that there is no room for people to exploit our vulnerabilities or fault lines. Making sure that we have the determination and the will, the resilience to bounce back as quickly as we can, even in the unfortunate circumstances that we fail to prevent bad things from happening to us. Last but not least, and this is something that we have to practice even in peacetime – how do we evolve at speed so that we can overcome the challenges ahead of us?

These are my short four little lessons learned. My staff reminded me that the acronym is called Vigilance, Unity, Resilience, and Agility (VURA). I thought that was quite a counter to the Volatile, Unpredictable, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world that people have been talking about. Maybe if we can keep to our V-U-R-A, we will be able to overcome the V-U-C-A.

On that note, once again, I want to thank all of you for your contribution to our defence. Everyone counts, every bit counts. Thank you very much for your support to our defence for us to take Singapore to a better place, and for us to continue to defy the odds of history to survive and thrive as a nation.

Thank you very much.

Mr Chan Chun Sing: Be a Defender and Not a Bystander in Keeping Singapore Strong