\n<\/p>\n
Moreover, with a more educated national service armed forces, it is important for commanders not just to issue orders, but to explain the reasons.<\/p>\n
“In a lot of militaries, from ancient militaries to now, people have this image that you tell the soldiers what to do, you teach the soldiers how to do. But actually, we have always learnt from the Germans what we call the ‘Auftragstaktik’, you don’t tell the soldier what to do or how to do per se. That’s not the most important.<\/p>\n
“You must tell the soldier why he’s doing what he’s doing. And I have experienced this myself. So, when we give mission orders, you can tell the subordinate commanders, ‘do this, do this, do this’, and then they’ll just execute.<\/p>\n
“But if they don’t understand the intent of what you want to do and achieve with your plan, they can’t make those adjustments when circumstances change. So, this is very fundamental to the training of the SAF soldiers and commanders,” said Mr Chan.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the SAF is not just looking at soldiers, but also how many more people can contribute to Singapore’s defence.<\/p>\n
A new defence volunteer network was launched in May, comprising 10 civilian volunteer schemes and capacity for almost 400 new volunteers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I think many, including the females and the new citizens, they want to feel that sense of being able to contribute to defence, and they may not do what the enlisted NS men have done, but they can contribute in many ways,” said Mr Chan.<\/p>\n
For example, media personalities can help with information operations; doctors and lawyers can assist with their specialised skillsets, or they may want to do something else and manage command and control systems and logistics instead.<\/p>\n
“Different strokes for different folks, but it allows them to have a sense of camaraderie, the sense of solidarity of having served national service in some way or the other,” he said.<\/p>\n
Mr Chan added: “I mean, for us, we are so small, right? I always say there’s no frontline, backline; we are all on the line.<\/p>\n
“We are not waiting for people to come here and take us out, and then we try and figure out how to recover from that. We need to see beyond the horizon.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Moreover, with a more educated national service armed forces, it is important for commanders not just to issue orders, but to explain the reasons. “In…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":65187,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/dam.mediacorp.sg\/image\/upload\/s--frzAfTgT--\/c_fill,g_auto,h_676,w_1200\/fl_relative,g_south_east,l_mediacorp:cna:watermark:2021-08:cna,w_0.1\/f_auto,q_auto\/v1\/mediacorp\/cna\/image\/2026\/06\/30\/ccs_screenshot_3.jpg?itok=KpYc8nFd","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[8293,7860,15895,3730,25741,6681,153],"class_list":["post-65186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-news-sg-global","tag-capabilities","tag-chan","tag-chun","tag-defence","tag-intention","tag-matters","tag-sing","wpcat-2-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/65187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}