March 12, 2019

The National Service (Amendment) Bill was passed in Parliament on 14 March 1967, making National Service (NS) compulsory for all 18-year-old male Singapore citizens and permanent residents. 9,000 male youths born between 1 January and 30 June 1949 became the first batch of young men to be called up for NS. Today, NS is the cornerstone of Singapore’s defence, and is largely regarded as a rite of passage for its male citizens. How did NS come about, and what were some of the issues that Singapore faced in enforcing NS?

In ‘National Service and Citizen Soldiers: The Singapore Experience of Military Conscription’, a chapter in National Service in Singapore (World Scientific, 2018), Associate Professor Albert Lau from the NUS Department of History traces the historical evolution and administration of NS between 1954 and 2017, focusing on the rationale for NS as well as its underlying principles of universality and equity. Through this, he reveals how post-independence Singapore grappled with the burdens and challenges of foisting common defence responsibilities on its male citizenry, including the backlash by Chinese Middle School students in the mid-1950s, and later, employers and tertiary graduates in the late 1960s. Important changes in the 1990s also affected its NS policy, such as the overhauling of the education system, declining birth rates, greater regionalization and globalization, and changing worldwide trends that opposed conscripted citizen soldiers.

A/P Lau stresses that Singapore’s story of conscription shows that the continual engagement of its citizenry is pertinent to winning the hearts and minds of each generation of Singaporeans, and encouraging them to embrace the concept of lifelong NS.

The chapter is an update of an earlier publication, National Service, which was published as a brief monograph by Pointer, the journal of the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF), in 1992.

Read it here.