Singapore has a number of notable elements. There’s the grey business of the skyscrapers, the glitzy consumerism of the shopping complexes, and the bright colours of the tourist magnets like Sentosa and the Gardens by the Bay. It seems unexpected, then, that another notable feature is the number of military sites. There was one just down the road from where I was staying, surrounded by barbed-wire-topped fences and signs threatening potential intruders. It’s a jarring addition to the other elements, and one that doesn’t seem to make sense in a modern wealthy city-state. I thought that surely there would be no point for such a tiny country to contemplate being a military power.
And yet, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2023 Singapore had the third-highest military spending per capita in the world. That was higher than Ukraine, which was fighting a full-scale war on its own territory at the time. Such high levels of military spending are not new, either, as Singapore’s military spending per capita was the fifth-highest in 2021. It has the most developed arms industry in the region and is also the largest importer of weapons. All Singaporean men, unless they have an exemption, enter National Service when they are 18 – some spend their terms in the police, but most serve in the army. So what I saw was not just me coincidentally coming across a lot of military sites – this really is a militarised society that takes its security extremely seriously.
It seems all the stranger given that Singapore has no imminent threats. No nation lays claim to its territory, it is not a particular target for extremists, and being just one city, it has no restive regions thirsting for independence. Since its own independence from Malaysia in 1965, it has never faced any threat of invasion or any other kind of military action.
But what looms large in the collective awareness of Singapore’s government is that none of these are an automatic guarantee of safety. It remains that Singapore is a tiny country, ethnically different to its neighbours (three-quarters of its population is of Chinese descent), wedged in a strategic chokepoint between Malaysia and Indonesia, and possessing a valuable natural harbour. Being a city-state on an island means it has no farms to speak of and is reliant on the neighbouring Malaysian state of Johor for its drinking water. Despite its strong diplomatic and economic relations with Malaysia – a high-speed rail between Singapore and Johor with a special economic zone is slated to open in 2026 – relations have not always been smooth. There have been periods of turbulence, such as the dispute over ownership of a tiny island in 1979, and each one made the already profoundly vulnerable city-state a little less safe. And it’s not just being entirely reliant on Malaysia’s goodwill that Singapore is attempting to avoid with its outsized military strength – its current build-up is driven by rising tensions between the US and China. Singapore has attempted to stay on good terms with both, but it pays to be prepared when stuck between two superpowers on a collision course.
Singapore’s founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, envisioned their military policy as turning the city-state into a “poisonous shrimp”. Small, but too dangerous for Asia’s big fish to bother. It’s hard to tell if Singapore’s military, small as it is, could actually stand up to the army of a large or even medium-sized country, but it’s sufficiently heavily-armed that finding out isn’t worth the risk. Much easier just to be another one of its customers.
Sources: Financial Times, CIA World Factbook, Singapore: coping with vulnerability by Michael Leifer (2000), Nikkei Asia
Wandering/Wondering 