“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 fallen due to being boastful, e.g how an impoverished nation like Vietnam defeated the mighty USA.
Singapore spends 25 percent of its annual budget on defence. 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 that of Singapore – spent just $5bn in 2012.
Vietnam is a good example where one does not need to have expensive state-the-of-art weaponry to defeat its enemy.
With military leaders who are supposedly scholars, how can one be stupid? In this case our leaders are stupid and we are paying a heavy price for their stupidity. Let us analyze the two sayings of father and son above. Compare with recent invasions, e.g. Iraq on Kuwait. Neighboring Indonesia has a 200m population; we are just a tiny dot.
Face facts; can we really defend against Malaysia or Indonesia invading us? The answer is really a big NO!
We are being fed by our local propaganda machines with their lies. It is time to wake up and re-look at the whole defence spending. We can instead have a medium defence force like Iceland or Costa Rica, together with the US, British and Australians having their bases here. Even if you pay them $5b, it is still better than the huge $25b that we are spending now.
Would Indonesia or Malaysia invade us if we have a huge presence of Americans on our soil? They will think 1000 times. At present we are vulnerable .
We as citizens feeling the pain of huge daily cost of living that we have to bear. Our most important survival and the only resource, trade will be slowly eroded as all the money will be sucked into defense spending. Singapore government social help is near to negligible. The huge money spent on the military could be better spent on the aged, the poor, education, hospitals and upgrading of skills of our fellow men and women.
Imagine the huge land areas that the army is occupying. Could this be used for housing, hospitals and recreational purposes?
For once I hope the government would think seriously what I have said but I think it will not happen as we have too many fat parasite army boys in our cabinet and key positions in the government-linked companies. It will surely fall on deaf ears.
aziz kassim