SINGAPORE – The Ministry of Defence’s (Mindef) announcement last week that it would buy two more submarines, new infantry fighting vehicles and other hardware in the coming years would, on the face of it, look like the same annual ritual: Every year, a few platforms are refreshed.
Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen’s speech during the debate on his ministry’s budget on March 3, however, made it clear that it is not more of the same.
Instead, the ministry is taking a decisive step towards achieving its vision of transforming the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) into a next-generation defence force by 2040.
Dr Ng provided strong signals that the SAF has been taking keen lessons from conflicts and developments around the world in deciding what to procure, to prepare not only for a more turbulent world, but also one whose trajectory is less knowable.
“How do we prepare Singapore and our people for a disruptive future, even a disrupted one?” he asked. “For leaders everywhere, that surely must be the overriding concern as the global order changes before our very eyes.”
The answer is to look at recent and ongoing conflicts such as the Ukraine war and Red Sea shipping crisis for an insight into what modern warfare looks like, he noted. Such engagements have put into stark relief the critical role of drones and unmanned systems, for instance, as well as the complexity of modern urban warfare.
Meeting the unmanned challenge
For a second consecutive year, Dr Ng highlighted the stark asymmetry in costs between an aggressor who launches a swarm of low-cost drones, and the defender who has to spend over 15 times the cost of those drones to nullify the attack.
Such was the case when conventional missiles were used in the Red Sea to deal with the drones fired by Houthi rebels, he noted.
According to media reports, the US Navy fired more air defence missiles in the 15 months until January than it had in the last 30 years, since it began combat operations in the Red Sea.
This is a depletion of some US$1 billion (S$1.33 billion) worth of armaments, a stockpile which will take years to rebuild.
To meet the threat of drone swarms, the SAF will build up Counter-Unmanned Aerial System (C-UAS) capabilities, which include a suite of sensors, jammers and weapon solutions.
Dr Ng did not go into detail, but this suite will likely have high-resolution cameras to detect smaller drones, and, possibly, cannon systems that can shoot them down cheaply or sever the link to their controllers.
These capabilities will also be integrated into the networked Island Air Defence System, the multi-layered system of radar, sensors and missiles protecting Singapore from air threats.
Given that the best defence is a good offence, as the saying goes, the SAF is also exploring ways to exploit the advantages of drones, including cheaper commercial ones.
The Republic of Singapore Air Force (RSAF) and army have both set up their own centres to drive the development of drone warfare tactics and to scale up the use of unmanned vehicles for their units, said Dr Ng.
The army’s Drone Accelerator for Rapid Equipping is significant as it potentially opens the door for the proliferation of drone usage down to lower-level units.
Such enhanced units can better achieve their battlefield objectives without having to request external drone support, such as from the RSAF’s heavier Heron 1 or Hermes 450 drones.
Battles in Ukraine have shown the utility of this, with front-line Ukrainian brigades often having their own attached drone units equipped with smaller drones based on commercially available systems. These have been used for the surveillance of front-line areas from the air, precise strikes against enemy forces, and even dogfights against Russian drones.
The Ukrainians have also deployed their drones as signal repeaters to extend the range of their electronic communications.
The SAF has likewise trialled this at the most recent Exercise Wallaby in Australia to extend signal coverage for soldiers on the ground, Dr Ng told Parliament.
Balancing speed and firepower
The army’s new infantry fighting vehicle (IFV), called the Titan, is also a sign of the times – it will come equipped with C-UAS capabilities, to be able to bring down enemy drones while transporting soldiers to the front lines.
IFVs are armoured troop transport vehicles that have weapons to provide heavier firepower to support soldiers in carrying out their missions.
Dr Ng did not provide further details, but the clues he left suggest that the Titan is likely to be similar to the eight-wheeled Terrex s5 unveiled by ST Engineering at the 2024 Singapore Airshow.
The Terrex s5 can trace its lineage directly to the Terrex infantry carriers currently used by the SAF, although the new vehicle is significantly larger and heavier than its predecessor.
The Titan’s specifications mean it will slot in between the lighter Terrex and heavier Hunter armoured fighting vehicle.
Like the Terrex, it will be a wheeled vehicle, which gives it greater speed and manoeuvrability, compared with the Hunter, which uses tracks for better all-terrain performance.
Speed will be essential for the SAF to deploy quickly across a battlefield, either to respond to developing contingencies or to exploit gaps in enemy lines.
At the same time, the Titan’s 30mm cannon provides significantly more punch than the Terrex’s grenade launcher and machine gun, while its heavier armour affords soldiers greater protection against projectiles and mines.
The Ukraine war has demonstrated what a modern conventional war between two states would look like: a battlefield saturated with attack drones, guided missiles and heavily armoured vehicles where there is a distinct possibility of being hit.
In such an environment, a vehicle that is sufficiently protected to improve the survivability of its occupants, even after being disabled, is worth its weight in gold.
The rule of three
The largest of Mindef’s announcements in 2025, in dollar terms, is that the Republic of Singapore Navy (RSN) will get two more submarines to complement the four Invincible-class submarines previously ordered, of which two have already been commissioned.
Dr Ng said this will bring the RSN’s submarine fleet to a “steady state” of six boats, and reflects the fact that submarines require more rigorous and frequent maintenance cycles with stringent checks.
With six submarines, the RSN can observe the “rule of three”, which is conventional military thinking for major platforms.
This means that at any one time, a third of the force is in major maintenance, a third is preparing for deployment or in short-term maintenance, while the final third is deployed or ready to deploy.
Hence, the RSN would have enough submarines to continually be deployed to protect Singapore’s sea lines of communication (SLOC), even when some of the fleet are in maintenance.
The Republic has two distinct and critical SLOCs covering the majority of commercial shipping coming into and going from Singapore’s ports. These are the Strait of Malacca extending out to the Andaman Sea north-west of Singapore, and the South China Sea to the north-east.
Dr Ng noted that many other regional nations have more than four submarines in their respective fleets, citing Australia and Vietnam, which operate six submarines each.
The utility of submarines in the waters around Singapore has been well established, with their ability to submerge and remain undetected for extended periods.
This provides the RSN with a powerful deterrence capability against any attempt to interfere with the Republic’s maritime interests.
Dr Ng and Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan both noted that big powers respect and appreciate the fact that Singapore invests heavily in its own defence – a particularly important point in an era of sharper rivalry.
“The fact that everybody knows that we are good for our money and we put our blood where we stand on is the core of deterrence and respect,” Dr Balakrishnan said on March 3.
Never fight the last war
Dr Ng has made no secret that Singapore has been closely studying conflicts such as the one in Ukraine to shape the SAF – he said so precisely at the Xiangshan security summit in September 2024.
In Parliament, he also agreed with MPs that militaries must be careful not to draw the wrong lessons from ongoing conflicts.
“There is a common dictum, a cautionary caveat, that militaries must be careful that they do not arm themselves ‘to fight the last war’,” said Dr Ng in Parliament.
This is a salient warning, for there have been countries that looked at the past two decades of low-intensity conflicts and tailored their defence procurements and force structure accordingly, only to be caught flat-footed by the challenge of emerging great-power competition in Asia and Europe.
For instance, the war on terror in the 2010s saw combat forces confront improvised explosive devices and the risk of ambushes, but far less the threat of drones and conventional warfare.
Even less has to be said about countries that under-invested in their defence, which, thankfully, is not a situation that Singapore finds itself in.
While the hope is that Singapore never has to find out how prepared it is for a conflict, Mindef’s plans show that it is aware of the dictum not to look back and will not end up in the same trap.
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