177 / 409
SECTION TRAINING
161
NINE
those who supplied the food. It would take the sustained outcry of National Servicemen to
bring about the change that eventually led to high quality camp food in nearly all SAF units.
II. OBJECTIVES OF SECTION TRAINING
III. THE M16 RIFLE
Section training was in line with the thinking that every infantry officer must be fully familiar
with the skills, role and scope of duties of the infantry NCO; or, to put it more succinctly
from the Advisors’ point of view, officer candidates should be selected from the NCO cadre.
As such, the training was a fusion of section level operations with the role of a section
leader. But, as there was not yet an NCO base in the SAF, Manpower Division was following
the reverse of the IDF approach. From Manpower Division’s point of view, the initial officer
training courses at SAFTI had to build up the NCO base as well. The overall recruitment
strategy was to re-route those who could not make the first cut for officer cadet training
to staff the NCO shortfall in combat units either until the follow-on officer cadet course
began, or permanently as their grading warranted.
The 14-week section training phase was intensive. Key personal skills—topography, signals,
demolitions, operational planning, and issuing of operational orders—were introduced.
But, the carrier wave was the role of an infantry section in the four phases of operations:
attack, defence, advance and withdrawal (the use of American euphemisms like retrograde
operations had yet to gain general currency). The employment of tactics to project combat
power, an introduction to Signals, demolitions and the basics of field engineering, map
reading, crossing of water obstacles and patrolling were incorporated into the training. The
sub-text of the training in this phase was the combat leadership of an infantry section,
which ideally would produce a Corporal who could manoeuvre his seven men as a close-knit
team against the enemy, within the context of a platoon mission. But, there were practical
difficulties in achieving this because each section comprised about 13 trainees and, at best,
there would only be one or two opportunities for leadership role-play during the whole
phase for each trainee. It was this phase of training that brought in the widespread currency
of the term LOB (left-out-of battle) to the SAF.
The first few weeks of section training were spent in map reading, elementary signals, section
battle formations and introduction to combat as a rifle section, while the HQs of the two
companies were busy formalising the replacement of the SLR with the M16 (initially referred
to as AR 15) as the personal weapon. This allowed for repeated firing of blanks. The M16s
had been used for the National Day Parade as well as the basic training passing out parade
the weekend before. Although enough stocks of M16s were available, an administrative delay
had occurred for the preparation of the instructors to teach the technical handling of the
weapon. As far as can be recalled, the M16s were issued a fortnight after the beginning of
the section training phase.