Unhappiness over the perceived disadvantages Singaporean men suffer by serving National Service (NS) has been percolating for some time.

The unhappiness is largely directed at foreigners residing here, namely new citizens and some permanent residents (PRs) who enjoy the benefits Singapore has to offer yet do not need to make the same sacrifices in shouldering the defence burden.

There have been calls for all PRs —not just second-generation ones — and new citizens to be liable for NS. These concerns and suggestions will invariably surface in the conversations the Committee to Strengthen NS will host in the coming months.

The broader issue they broach is the universality of NS: Why are some drafted and not others?

This issue is not new. The exclusion (and suggested inclusion) of women from NS has been debated in Parliament over the years; it also recently resurfaced in an Our Singapore Conversation session. Then and now, the arguments to make more liable for NS are not irrational or illogical.

The obstacle to accepting them, however, is how NS is implemented. In the current way, NS will struggle to accommodate calls for its enlistment criteria to be enlarged.

FOR DEFENCE OR NATION-BUILDING?

Broadly, the justifications for NS are its crucial role in Singapore’s security and its importance as a platform for nation-building. Within Singapore’s strategic culture and perceived context, the defence need for NS is presumably self-evident; nation-building is no less so.

Dr Goh Keng Swee, the architect of Singapore’s NS policy, observed that “nothing creates loyalty and national consciousness more speedily and more thoroughly than participation in defence”.

As the argument goes, NS should include as wide a swath of society as possible because it is what some have called the “school of the nation”.

Those who see themselves as Singaporean should therefore serve NS to have that common nation-building experience. Dr Goh himself concluded, “the nation-building aspect of defence will be more significant if its participation is spread over all strata of society.”

Both the defence and nation-building roles of NS are equally prominent, and are, therefore, commonly assumed to be equally important. In the actual implementation of NS, however, they are not.

The Government unequivocally privileges defence over nation-building when determining how NS should be carried out. In fact, Dr Goh’s observations were made in the context of his justification of why male Singapore long-term residents had to be conscripted for Singapore’s defence, not any broader nation-building agenda.

As consistently repeated over the years in Parliament, the three guiding principles of NS are:

1. NS must “meet a critical national need for security and survival because it imposes considerable cost both to the individual and to the nation”;

2. “NS must be universal. All young Singaporean males who are fit to serve are eligible for conscription”; and

3. NS policies must be “applied equitably to everyone regardless of background or status”.

Crucially—and often overlooked—there is a hierarchy of importance, with the first principle, NS serving “a critical national need for security and survival”, trumping the latter two principles of universality and equitability.

It is these two principles, however, that give NS much of its nation-building value of a common and equitable experience. This distinction was highlighted in 2004 when it was again suggested in Parliament that women too should be enlisted for NS in the interest of nation-building as well as social cohesion.

The suggestion was rejected because nation-building is “not of the same order of critical importance as the defence of Singapore”. Having females serve NS, therefore, could not be justified along the requirements of the first guiding principle of NS.

This was again reiterated in Parliament in 2011. Although nation-building and social cohesion are all desirable outcomes of NS, they are ultimately still of secondary importance in deciding who is enlisted for NS. Simply put, the first principle determines who serves NS and the latter two guides how they serve it.

THE SLIPPERY SLOPE OF CONFLATION

However, the guiding principles are typically conflated and assumed to be of equal importance. How the enlistment of second-generation PRs is justified is a useful case study of this conflation.

While it is unusual for a country to conscript foreigners, a strong case for the enlistment of second-generation PRs can be made: The yearly NS cohort is decreasing in size. The majority of second-generation PRs do grow up in Singapore like their citizen peers, and therefore make suitable candidates for NS.

These second-generation PRs thus augment the native pool of manpower available for NS. Enlisting them adheres to the all-important first guiding principle of meeting a critical national security need.

Conversely, this does not apply to other PRs, new citizens and females because there is no similar operational necessity for them to serve that justifies imposing NS on them.

This, however, is not what the Government offers as the primary reason for the enlistment of second-generation PRs.

Instead, it emphasises the universality and equitability principles — that they are beneficiaries of Singapore’s peace and prosperity, and should therefore shoulder the defence burden too.

Although these reasons are important — and foregrounding them is understandable in light of the current socio-political context — by focusing on these latter two principles and not privileging the first one, the Government has set itself up on a slippery slope that invites the present contention where, because it excludes some PRs, new citizens and females, NS is argued to be not universal or equitable.

On their own, these calls for others to serve NS are not unreasonable. They, however, reflect assumptions about NS based on personal (even if common) impressions of the policy, rather than how the policy is actually defined and implemented.

NS, as a policy formulated to primarily serve the critical need of defence, must be fully understood in those terms. Until changes occur to the definition of what constitutes a critical national security need and who can meet it, NS’ guiding principles or their hierarchy of importance, widening NS liability to include more individuals cannot be expected.

Yet, seeing how this issue repeatedly surfaces, the Committee to Strengthen NS would do well to reflect on the rhetoric behind NS, how NS is actually implemented — and whether there is any disconnect between the two that needs remedying.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ho Shu Huang is a doctoral candidate with the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He is currently on study leave from the Institute of Defence & Strategic Studies, S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University.