The Business of Constraint — How Ng Eng Hen, mastered the art of being small, needed, and impossible to ignore

All quotations have been drawn from a recorded interview and have been edited minimally for readability.

Dr Ng Eng Hen is preparing to leave politics after nearly 24 years in Parliament and an unprecedented 14 years as Singapore’s Minister for Defence, a span that has made him the Republic’s longest-serving defence chief. In one of his last long-form interviews before retirement — the former oncological surgeon returns, with surgical directness, to a theme that has anchored his public life: a small state survives only when its social compact is airtight.

The catalyst arrives at the end of a 90-minute interview Dr Ng gave to local media at the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) headquarters on Tuesday, May 13. Asked about the persistent claim that the Government still hesitates to appoint Malays to senior combat roles because of doubts over their loyalty, Dr Ng declines to treat the charge as a mere personnel dispute. Instead he widens the frame: “To view society in totality through race alone — then you’re setting yourself up for certain kinds of comparisons, certain kinds of outcomes.

The remark lands because the history is complicated. For the first decade after National Service began in 1967, Malay servicemen were rarely posted to combat arms; only in the late 1970s did that ease, and it was 2015 before Dr Ng could announce that Malay sailors were crewing ships that ventured beyond Singapore’s territorial waters. Critics still cite the earlier exclusions as proof of systemic suspicion; MINDEF counters with data on Malay fighter pilots, naval officers, brigade commanders.

While such debates risk reducing complex national security considerations to demographic scorecards, they illuminate the delicate balance Singapore has maintained between acknowledging ethnic diversity and upholding merit-based advancement. Singapore’s foundational compromise, Dr Ng says, was to accept that “race and religion are part and parcel of Singapore life, and we must treat them with sensitivity,” while enthroning meritocracy as the non-negotiable organising principle: “Someone who is capable must never be held back because of race or identity.” That clarity has spared the city-state the identity-based gridlock now paralysing older democracies, but Dr Ng views it as a perishable advantage rather than a cultural birth-right.

His worry is that imported culture-war lexicons — cancel culture, woke politics, affirmative-action maximalism — tempt voters to “tilt the whole system toward viewing outcomes through the lens of race, religion, and identity.” The endpoint, he warns, is a politics of polarisation: “If you choose that kind of politics, you get what you vote for.” It is a characteristically blunt assessment, delivered without the hedging qualifiers that diplomats usually deploy when addressing domestic sensitivities.

Dr Ng’s stance is not philosophical posturing; it is doctrine forged during crises. When the Nicoll Highway collapsed in 2004 and other workplace fatalities roiled the Ministry of Manpower early in his Cabinet career, he used systemic safety overhauls to demonstrate that equity depends on competence rather than quotas. 

That same conviction undergirded his later decision to overhaul SAF training after a series of military deaths in 2012-13: every lost soldier, he told commanders, “is someone’s son,” and the only acceptable benchmark is zero fatalities.

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Today, with global identity politics hardening into geopolitical posture, Dr Ng links domestic cohesion directly to external credibility. Defence ministers and intelligence chiefs, he notes, will only trade candid assessments with a counterpart whose society appears fair. 

The subtler point is that meritocracy furnishes the moral capital Singapore needs to speak honestly to both Washington and Beijing without being dismissed as partisan or captive.

That argument lands because Dr Ng embodies it. The onco-surgeon-turned-politician entered Parliament in 2001, held the Manpower and Education portfolios, and then assumed Defence in 2011, converting medical precision into strategic discipline. 

He is also the rare Cabinet minister who quotes Thucydides to explain the city-state’s world-view. The Melian Dialogue’s stark lesson — “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must” — is, for Dr Ng, not fatalism but a prompt to build unity so airtight that no adversary can prise it open.

Hence his allergy to “special dispensation” narratives. Singapore’s Constitution already acknowledges Malay interests in specific contexts, he says, but to weaponise that fact as proof of systemic bias is to forget that the same charter guarantees equal opportunity. 

The real test, he insists, is whether the nation remains “fair” in the eyes of its own citizens. Fairness, in Dr Ng’s lexicon, is evidenced by Malay generals commanding brigades, by women commanding fighter squadrons, and by the electorate’s refusal to convert grievances into sectarian tickets at the ballot box.

The stakes are bigger than representation charts. A cohesive Singapore can punch above its demographic weight because it never forces external partners to second-guess who holds the steering wheel. That credibility, Dr Ng will argue, is the precondition for what he calls strategic usefulness: the quiet art of making big powers need you more than they distrust you.

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Runways, ranges and relevance

Strategic usefulness, Dr Ng Eng Hen stresses, starts with “something quite physical.” Since the 1990 Memorandum of Understanding, “we’ve allowed American ships and planes to use our bases. They’ve found that useful.” 

The accord — inked by Lee Kuan Yew and U.S. Vice-President Dan Quayle after Subic Bay’s closure — gave the Seventh Fleet a logistics node at Sembawang Wharf and flight-line access at Paya Lebar. Washington has renewed it repeatedly, most recently for fifteen more years in 2019, underscoring how a base-less city-state became the western hinge of U.S. Indo-Pacific posture. 

Logistics, though, is only the scaffolding. Singapore’s outsized training estate now sprawls across four continents. Under the Australia–Singapore Military Training Initiative, the SAF occupies slices of Queensland the size of greater London, running armour manoeuvres and live artillery in bushland “space Singapore will never have,” as Dr Ng likes to joke to visiting MPs. 

Further afield, Republic of Singapore Air Force detachments fly F-16s with the 425th Fighter Squadron at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona — celebrated last year as a “thirty-year partnership” between two air forces that now treat each other’s pilots as peers. Similar fighter and tanker rotations train over Guam’s Pacific ranges and France’s Cazaux base, weaving Singapore into NATO and Pacific air-power circuits despite its miniature skyline. 

Geography turns inside-out in humanitarian crises, and Dr Ng is quick to list relief flights as proof that access benefits more than admirals. 

SAF C-130s were among the first foreign aircraft into Phuket after the 2004 tsunami, ferried aid into Tacloban after Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, and air-dropped medical kits into Nepal’s Pokhara valley within forty-eight hours of the 2015 earthquake. Each sortie deposits political credit that can be drawn on later when hangar doors or port berths are at a premium.

The Five Power Defence Arrangements — Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom — extend that logic. Born in 1971 as a post-colonial stop-gap, the FPDA now stages yearly Bersama exercises that string frigates and fighters across the Malacca Strait. 

At the 40th-anniversary drill in 2011, Dr Ng hosted four foreign defence ministers at Changi Air Base and quipped that the “Durian Pact” was still the only standing multilateral defence guarantee in Southeast Asia. The FPDA neither obliges combat intervention nor bans commercial rivals, but it keeps the Republic’s runways wired into Commonwealth command networks — a quiet insurance policy should storms gather in the South China Sea.

Bigger states accept Singapore as a postage-stamp partner because we do not charge any political premium. When Xi Jinping and Ma Ying-jeou met in 2015 — the first cross-strait summit since 1949 — they trusted Singapore to choreograph history without leaking talking points. When Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un wanted neutral ground in 2018, Sentosa’s Capella resort was ready in six weeks flat. 

Dr Ng insists the republic “never proactively offers” to host, yet the same neutrality makes a Humvee convoy in Queensland or a P-8 Poseidon refuelling stop at Paya Lebar feel unthreatening to neighbours. Access, then, is Dr Ng’s first lever of usefulness: concrete, steel and airspace converted into diplomatic currency. 

The second lever — candour — is invisible but, he argues, ultimately more valuable.

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Candour without illusions

“You know you’ve made an impact,” Dr Ng says, “when the other side puts down their notes… then, within limits, you can start exchanging real information.” He calls this the moment a meeting ceases to be theatre. It is also the heart of Singapore’s defence diplomacy: if foreign principals trust its minister to speak plainly, the city-state’s runways and ranges graduate from convenience to necessity.

Dr Ng’s favourite example is an Aspen Strategy Group session with the late Joseph Nye. Asked to explain why Taiwan is “a deep red line” for Beijing, he replied with the bluntness familiar to ASEAN ears but rare in Washington’s echo chambers. 

“Nothing I said couldn’t have been said by someone else,” he concedes, “but when it comes from a small state that doesn’t try to manipulate, it lands with more salience and directness.” 

That style — discard the boilerplate, risk some frankness — travels well. In Shangri-La Dialogue corridors, Chinese generals have queried him off-record about Vietnamese intentions; European parliamentarians have been startled when he reminds them that “China is not Russia, Taiwan is not Ukraine.” Each unscripted exchange enlarges what Dr Ng calls Singapore’s “interlocutor premium”: leaders will ring you when they want a reading unsweetened by ideology.

The ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting is where that premium institutionalises itself. “The ADMM has become the de facto security architecture for this region,” Dr Ng notes — a forum that now convenes ten Southeast Asian defence chiefs plus eight extra-regional powers. 

Under Singapore’s chairmanship in 2018 the ministers adopted the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea, synchronising radio calls and manoeuvre rules among navies that barely agree on whose reefs are whose. Critics called the document toothless; Dr Ng counters that keeping warships predictable is the price of stability in crowded straits.

Facilitation — his third lever — rounds out the model, but Dr Ng is careful to puncture any talk of brokerage. “Personally, I’ve never subscribed to the idea that you could balance big powers… that’s a bit of hubris,” he says. “The US and China don’t need us. They’ll have to deal with each other — because they are superpowers, both of them.” Singapore’s value, then,  lies in reading the room, not rearranging the furniture.

Candour, though, is fragile currency. It depends on domestic credibility — “leaders… are assessing all the time… Did it sync with reality? Was it useful?” It also strains under the velocity of modern conflict. Hybrid threats, Dr Ng warns, “blur peace and war; talking points don’t survive first contact with a botnet.” As information campaigns, drone swarms, and ransomware probe the seams of deterrence, the unscripted back-channel must race them for relevance.

That realisation leads Dr Ng to his next doctrinal pivot: if crises now incubate in civilian networks, the Singapore Armed Forces must be ready before uniforms appear on anyone’s screen. The hybrid battle-space, he says, is the new appointment card: it announces which states still have something useful — and honest — to say.

When war wears civilian clothes

Dr Ng Eng Hen first heard the phrase “hybrid warfare” in a side-conversation at the Munich Security Conference more than a decade ago, when Russian chief of defence Valery Gerasimov’s essay was circulating only among strategists. 

“It wasn’t mainstream then,” he recalls, “but the idea that you could weaponise everything from bank transfers to Twitter feeds — that stuck.” In the years since, the concept has gone from white-paper curiosity to daily operating climate, and the Singapore Armed Forces has had to redraw its battle map accordingly.

“The line between war and peace has blurred,” Dr Ng says. “Others now call it a ‘war between wars’. Someone is trying to undermine your social cohesion… infiltrate your cyber systems, knock out civilian infrastructure, steal sensitive data, or even interfere with your elections.” 

The point is not rhetorical flourish. Conventional trip-wires — uniformed troops massing on a border, formal declarations — no longer provide warning. The conflict is ambient, relentless, often deniable.

Ukraine supplies the cautionary exhibit. “Even if people had anticipated drone warfare, nobody envisaged the scale of it. Ukraine can now produce four million drones a year. Just think about that.” President Volodymyr Zelensky’s projection, delivered in October 2024, hinted at a future where low-cost swarms swamp even the most sophisticated air-defence grids. 

Singapore’s answer begins with structure. In 2017, MINDEF created the Defence Cyber Organisation to drive security across everything from the SAF to the defence industry. Five years later it went further, launching the Digital and Intelligence Service — “the fourth Service of the SAF” — to fuse cyber-defence, signals intelligence, and data analytics under a single command. The DIS has since added specialised units to “sharpen its cybersecurity edge”, a sign that the digital flank will grow as quickly as the threat mutates.

Doctrine has also spilled into the civilian realm. Total Defence exercises, once dominated by armoured columns and live-firing, now script rolling disruptions: water shortages, ransomware, coordinated phishing against small businesses. Exercise SG Ready, carried out in February 2025, blacked out office towers and test business-continuity plans across 200 firms precisely to prove that society, not just soldiers, must absorb the first shock.

This expanded mission has erased the firewall between “peacetime” and “operations.” Terror cells offered the first glimpse; fake-news campaigns and bot-farms hardened the lesson. Intelligence officers who once chased shipping manifests now track narrative cascades, while mixed “ops-tech” teams — the institutional heirs of Dr Goh Keng Swee’s manpower-saving creed — pair software engineers with rifle companies.

That same duality — high-speed technology married to human calculus — drives his uncompromising safety ethic. Drawing on lessons from the Manpower Ministry, Dr Ng ordered predictive analytics on live-firing videos so commanders could spot accident hot-spots before recruits ever shoulder a weapon. Hybrid vigilance, therefore, is not a detour from traditional soldiering but its logical evolution: a defence posture that must be always on, everywhere at once, yet still rooted in the same moral calculus that has governed Singapore’s security since independence. The question that follows — how to scale that vigilance without ceding judgment to algorithms — leads naturally to the SAF’s next frontier.

Machines, mortality and moral calculus

Singapore’s defence establishment has long believed that technology buys leverage where geography withholds it. Dr Goh Keng Swee hammered that lesson into the fledgling Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) in the 1970s when he hand-picked three fresh engineers to found what became DSO National Laboratories, now a 1,800-strong research house working across electronic warfare, sensors and autonomy. 

A generation later, the Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) was stood up as a statutory board on 15 March 2000 to turn prototypes into kit and to knit civilians, soldiers and industry into a single “ops-tech” ecosystem. 

Dr Ng Eng Hen inherited that hardware habit and doubled down. “From a defence point of view, sometimes it’s quite physical… They’ve found that useful,” he says of the runways and dry docks Singapore extends to allies. But silicon, he insists, must now shoulder the heavier lift. 

At the 2025 Committee of Supply debate he told Parliament that the SAF’s regimented drills create the “perfect Petri dish for artificial intelligence” — millions of sensor readings and video frames that can be mined to flag danger before it turns fatal. 

Predictive safety analytics grew out of pain. The 2018–19 spate of training deaths — among them actor-soldier Aloysius Pang, crushed in a howitzer turret in New Zealand — shook public faith and prompted a ministerial pledge that the SAF would be “accountable for every single NSman”. The benchmark became zero fatalities, a goal sceptics called impossible but which the minister frames as moral arithmetic: in a conscript military, the cost of indifference is social licence.

Technology therefore serves a double calculus — force multiplication and risk subtraction. New infantry carriers come festooned with battlefield management tablets; drone swarms train on synthetic ranges where real-time telemetry maps blast radii back to HQ; and every training video is piped through algorithms hunting for the first pixel of deviation.

Dr Ng is quick to stress that software augments rather than replaces judgment: “If you don’t have that fighting spirit — if you don’t believe Singapore is worth defending — then we will lose. The Ukrainians showed us that.”

That creed flows downward. DSO scientists talk of “human-on-the-loop” rather than “in-the-loop” autonomy; DSTA engineers code ethical guard-rails into targeting algorithms; and DIS cyber operators are drilled to assume adversaries can spoof any sensor that lacks corroborating human intuition. 

The point is not to build a thinking machine but to build a thinking soldier amplified by machines.

Defence technology now consumes roughly one-quarter of MINDEF’s S$21 billion budget, a slice that funds everything from quantum-safe cryptography to brain–computer interfaces. Dr Ng frames the spend as insurance against both battlefield shocks and demographic reality: “With falling birth-rates, we cannot afford a manpower-heavy military. Ops-tech is not optional.”

Still, he measures progress not in teraflops but in funerals averted. Training-related deaths have fallen sharply since 2019; the Inspector-General Office created that year now audits every range and rations timetable to a standard borrowed from commercial aviation. 

When critics ask how Singapore will know if its AI-for-safety bet truly works, Dr Ng concedes, “The only true test is a real crisis, real conflict — and nobody wishes that for Singapore.”

On most days, therefore, success is measured in the absence of tragedy: a live-fire exercise ends without incident; a drone aborts its dive because the algorithm spotted an out-of-bounds helmet; an 18-year-old recruit returns home intact. In those quiet outcomes Dr Ng finds the justification for pouring billions into code that will never grace a National Day parade.

Yet technology cannot code for uncertainty at the political level. As Dr Ng prepares to hand the defence portfolio to a successor, he knows the next leadership team will confront both a faster cycle of technological disruption and a slower, more dangerous tempo of great-power rivalry. How to keep Singapore’s strategic engine humming under those twin pressures becomes the question that frames his long goodbye.

Legacy and the long road ahead

Dr Ng Eng Hen laughs when asked whether the decisive election result on 3 May 2025, which handed Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s Fourth-Generation team a stronger mandate than polls had predicted, tempted him to linger in Cabinet. “If I’d known it would be so positive, I could have quit earlier,” he quips, the physician’s dry humour intact even in valediction. The remark is throw-away, but the decision is not: after five parliamentary terms, three ministries, and the longest continuous tour any Singapore defence chief has ever logged, Dr Ng will leave politics when the new Parliament is sworn in later this year.

A fourteen-year tenure at Defence is long enough to have bought, tested, and in some cases retired two generations of hardware. Under Dr Ng the SAF ordered F-35Bs to replace F-16s, commissioned four Invincible-class submarines, fielded autonomous land rovers, and stood up the Digital and Intelligence Service to patrol an ever-thinning cyber frontier. 

The Prime Minister’s valedictory letter credits him with “guid[ing] the modernisation of the SAF, ensuring that it stayed ahead amidst a more complex threat environment and fast-moving technological shifts.” Historians may add that Dr Ng also normalised the idea that a conscript army of fewer than 300,000 could lean on science as confidently as any major-power force.

Dr Ng’s own sense of unfinished business lies not in kit but in political temperament. He worries that the social media dynamics fuelling extremism elsewhere could still poison Singapore’s relative calm. The GE 2025 landslide, he insists, was “an affirmation of rational and progressive politics,” not a guarantee that future electorates will resist culture-war tribalism. His cure remains the one he outlined at the top of this article: keep meritocracy non-negotiable, because strategic usefulness abroad withers if fairness at home falters.

Those twin convictions — unity inside, candour outside — have already been woven into institutional fabric. Senior staff at the Digital and Intelligence Service cite Dr Ng’s insistence that every algorithm must be explainable to the young conscript whose life may depend on it. DSO engineers recall him pulling demolition-range footage into Cabinet presentations to prove that a well-placed sensor could avert grief. The point, as he likes to say, is that “technology is a multiplier; conviction is the base.”

Looking forward, Dr Ng sketches three tests for his successor — tests that, by extension, will measure Singapore itself in the decade ahead. 

The first challenge will be keeping deterrence credible when great-power rivalry turns binary. “The US and China don’t need us,” he has said more than once. “They’ll have to deal with each other — because they are superpowers, both of them.” A Singapore that remains candid, consistent, and indispensable can still trade in the currency of strategic usefulness; a Singapore that slips into partisanship will be priced out.

The second test involves fusing silicon with judgment without surrendering accountability. Though autonomous swarms and AI commanders may reshape the battlefield, Singapore’s social licence for National Service rests on parents believing their sons — and soon, perhaps, daughters — are not guinea pigs for reckless experimentation.

Finally, Dr Ng emphasizes the imperative to defend the commons nobody owns. From submarine data cables to satellite constellations, the choke-points of the 2030s will be mostly civilian and frequently invisible. The SAF’s fourth Service, the Digital and Intelligence Service, is a down-payment; the real cost will be relentless, round-the-clock vigilance in these emerging domains.

Comfort is the silent saboteur

The arc of Dr Ng Eng Hen’s last reflections bends away from hardware and geopolitics and settles on something more fragile: the moral stamina of a society that has known only success. “It’s remarkable how much we’ve progressed, right? And sometimes I speak — and these are facts — from a per-capita of 600 US dollars in the 1960s at Independence to now, even higher than Japan, highest in Asia, six figures.” 

The data backs him up: in 1965 Singapore’s output per head barely cleared US $600; by early-2025 it hovers just under US $94,000, fourth-highest in the world on a nominal basis. That vertiginous climb, Dr Ng warns, carries its own hazard. “There is a price to be paid for that kind of rapid rise. And that price is to believe that it can always continue. That it was pre-ordained, or a given fact — that our trajectory was a given.”

To illustrate how easily conventional wisdom can mis-price the future, he reaches for a story recounted by former prime minister Goh Chok Tong. 

At Williams College in the 1960s, Goh’s seminar of thirty “bright, upcoming leaders” was asked which three Asian countries would dominate the region by the turn of the century. The consensus picks were “the Philippines, Burma, and Sri Lanka.” That misplaced bet, Dr Ng suggests, should inoculate Singaporeans against any sense that prosperity is destiny.

His favourite Chinese aphorism makes the same point with fewer words: 富不过三代  —  “wealth does not last three generations.” “The curse of successful countries,” he says, “is the belief that the set of conditions you’ve inherited will be forever.” Dr Ng’s prescription is less policy than posture: a ceaseless interrogation of first principles, beginning with politics. “First, the people, of course. But politics is core.” A resilient social compact, he argues, is one in which electorate and elected agree that some aspirations are unaffordable, others indispensable, and all must be paid for in discipline as well as dollars.

That sensibility threads back to his defence reforms. The Digital and Intelligence Service was not an expensive flourish but a reminder that the commons of the 2030s will be “mostly civilian and frequently invisible.” The same logic underpins his insistence on meritocracy over identity quotas: complacency erodes faster when citizens believe the playing field is level.

Dr Ng closes with an admonition directed as much to Singaporeans as to the colleague who will soon inherit his chair. “So how does Singapore guard against that? That’s the question we have to ask.” The answer, he suggests, is continual self-scrutiny, anchored in the knowledge that no external guarantor will do the guarding for us. Then, with a surgeon’s brevity, he offers his parting counsel: “I would say to him or her — when PM Wong finally announces it — that you’ll be fine, just do your best.”

After twenty-four years in Parliament and fourteen at the helm of MINDEF, Dr Ng Eng Hen departs convinced that Singapore’s greatest vulnerability is not its size but its capacity for self-delusion. His final plea is therefore a simple one: prize vigilance as much as success, because in the ledger of nation-building, the former is the only guarantee the latter will endure.