"In a world where the big fish eat small fish and the small fish eat shrimps, Singapore must become a poisonous shrimp," said Lee Kuan Yew
"I may not completely destroy you, but you'd have to pay a high price to subdue me, and you may still not succeed," said Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in 1984.
Boastful words? In the art of war, many had fell due to being boastful, how impoverished nation like Vietnam defeated the mighty USA.
Singapore spends 25 percent of its annual budget on defense. Military spending has risen from $600m annually at the start of the 1980s to $12bn in 2013. By comparison, Malaysia - whose population is more than five times bigger than that of Singapore - spent just $5bn in 2012.
Vietnam is a good example where one does not need to have expensive state of art weapons to defeat its enemy.
Does not man one having degrees or phd or genenal , one can not be stupid. In this case our leaders are stupid and we are paying heavy price for their stupidity. Let us analyzed their two saying of the father and son of the above; Look at the modern invasion; Iraq on kuwait. Indonesia having 200m populations, we are just a tiny dot. Face the fact, ask the ordinary citizens, can we really prevent if Malaysia or Indonesia invaded us, the answer is really a big NO!
We are being fed by propaganda medias, of lies, it is time to wake up and re-look into the whole system of defense spending.
What we can have a medium defense force like Iceland or Costa Rica, together by having US, British and Australia having their bases here. Even if you pay them $5b better than the huge $25b, that we are spending now.
Would Indonesia or Malaysia invade us if we having huge present of US on our soil? They will think 1000 times. At present we are vulnerable .
We as a citizen feeling the pain of huge daily cost that we are having to bear. Our most important survival and the only resources; trades will be slowly be eroded as all the money will be sucked into the defense spending. Singapore government social help is near to negligible. The huge money spend on arm forces could be better spend on the aged, the poor, education, hospitals and upgrading of skills of our fellow men and women.
Imagine the huge lands that the army use, could be use for better housings, hospitals and recreations.
For once I hope the government think seriously what I said. I think it would not happen as we have too many fat parasites army boys in our cabinets and key positions in the government link companies. It will fell into deaf ears.
Aziz kassim
TRS Contributor