Do not ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country

This article found in the Yale Daily News that I picked up from the Singapore Daily shares about how the US is thinking of encouraging more young people to take up national service. Yale interviewed some of their international students, some of whom are Singapore Citizens who had gone through their full-time national service.

The few students that were interviewed did not address the issue of whether conscription was unpopular in Singapore but they did talk about the inefficiencies of spending those two years in thrall to the State under the banner of the Singapore Armed Forces. Some of these Singaporean Yale college students were fortunate. One was in the SAF Music and Drama, another was a storeman likely posted to one of the logistics bases run by ST Logistics while the other was in the SAF Military Band. These are the lucky ones. Those who went through tough vocations such as guards, armoured infantry or combat engineers would thank their lucky stars for surviving such "xiong" (physically tough) vocations.

One of the issues that continue to run through my mind even as I've completed 2.5 years of full-time plus 10 years of reservist duty is whether I could have contributed in better ways to Singapore other than being a signaller in an armoured unit and later in my reservist years as a local signal sergeant in the people's defence force. I'm an accountant by training and a CPA but I never really got to apply such civilian skills to my NS vocation, that of a combat signaller and later signals sergeant.

The military bureaucracy is a machine, it generally doesn't care what or who you are (unless you are a "white horse"). It only cares if you are combat fit and what you were trained for, i.e. your vocational training. And your vocation is really determined by the luck of the draw. If you miss being picked up as a NCO or Officer calibre, then you will either be processed for mono-intake into the combat battalions if you are combat fit or you will be shunted to technical or administrative vocations if you are not combat-fit. Of course, if you are a white-horse, then you would have a good life as extra pairs of eyes will make sure nothing too demanding or risky gets to you as some senior officers' balls could be hung if you were damaged by the SAF.

In the end, the result of this system tends to be, in my own experience, a served and f*** off after-taste when it comes to the concept of duty, honour and country. You are treated as a digit and you tend to behave as one in return. For all the notion of ask what you can do for your country, I wonder if the country should consider what it can do for its citizens, especially its male citizens some of who die as part and parcel of being statistics in training accidents and other misadventures whilst under the service of the State.

I wonder if this dinosaur that is conscription should be relooked because it is an anarchronism in a world where specialisation of labour is the key to global economic competitiveness. Having citizen-soldiers who are soldiers only 3-4 weeks out of 52 weeks in a world of global terrorism, rapid deployment forces and quick response doesn't make sense. Would you trust your dentist if he were to practice only 4 weeks out of 52? How about your doctor, your lawyer or accountant? Yet we trust our citizen soldiers in reservist battalions to be an effective fighting force when they only spend very little time being soldiers?

Majullah Singapura.