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STAFF AND TRAINEE DYNAMICS
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THIRTEEN
II. A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
Lastly, no one has recorded the dislocation that the personnel of the Singapore Military
Forces experienced with the complete change in orientation that the setting up of the SAF
brought, in the wake also of the trauma of separation from Malaysia. Especially for the
regular officers and NCOs of 1 and 2 SIR, for whom the military was a sole livelihood, their
terms, conditions and expectations were up in the air. While on the one hand, they could
contemplate better prospects, on the other, once the word got around that it was not merely
a matter of expanding the armed forces but of reinventing the whole organisation, optimism
gave way to apprehension of where they stood in the scheme of things. As it turned out, the
vast majority were successfully co-opted and went on to advance further than they would
have expected when they first enlisted, but there was a lengthy period of soul-searching with
little prospect of official elucidation because nobody was the wiser.
The local instructors of the first intake were in an invidious position, although, these being
early days yet for the SAF, they may not have been aware of its full extent. The Advisors had
a strong mandate to decide on nearly all aspects of the training, including the organisational
structure, syllabus, doctrine, training format and even key training-related appointments. As
the principal activity of the SAF for the foreseeable future would be training, this mandate
had career-affecting implications and warranted tactful responses, which have never been the
defining characteristic of military personnel.
The Advisors were seen rightly or wrongly as unofficially, the arbiters of military expertise
for Singapore’s purposes. Their appearance on the scene, seemingly consigned to history, all
pre-Advisor local expertise, based on the British forces. The selection of local instructors as
trainers for the first intake was based on the First Instructors’ Preparatory Course, completed
less than a month before the first intake reported to SAFTI.
1
Though that course was meant to
provide a common denominator for personnel from a wide range of backgrounds including
the Police Force and Volunteers, as well as provide methodology models for training the new
enlistees based on IDF experiences, it was not a compressed version of the first officer cadet
course syllabus. It was evident that quite a lot of the operational training in the officer cadet
phase was being developed as the first intake was being trained. This gave the first intake
trainees the impression, probably correctly, that at least in some areas, their local instructors
were only one step ahead of themselves. It also left the local instructors off-balance, as they
could not definitively predict what training would come up in the latter stages of the course,
as they were not formulating the syllabus.
It was to turn out, over time, that the Advisors were themselves re-cycling a good deal of
British material, because they would often refer the Doctrine Department of SAFTI to
British field manuals when their own translations failed them under pressure of time.