Samuel Chan's book is the first dedicated study of Singapore's ‘military elite’, which in Chan's definition comprises flag officers — the 170 men (as of 2018) who are now or were once entitled to wear at least one star on their shoulder as a badge of rank in the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) (pp. 11, 23). The book is ground-breaking and welcome, especially since it has a particular focus on the 68 ‘scholars’ among these flag officers who began their military careers by winning SAF Overseas Scholarships (SAFOS). As Chan makes clear in his very personal and fascinating preface, these men form a mysterious and near-sacred elite within the broader military elite.
The author has combined a study of public documents with 28 research interviews with retired flag officers. He explains that he deliberately excluded serving officers and those who are now enjoying a second career as cabinet ministers because he expected their inputs would be less candid than the others. Worryingly, however, he has not reflected on how this limitation might have skewed his sample. Nor did he think to count how many of his interviewees were recipients of SAF scholarships. I had to cross reference his list of interviewees (pp. 466–7) with Appendix A (pp. 362–411) to discover that only four of his interviewees are SAFOS winners. He probably could not help this distortion in his sample, but he should have reported it and considered its impact on his research, especially since deflecting criticism of the scholar-officers is the most constantly recurring theme in his inquiry.
This lack of self-reflection on research methodology turned out to be a harbinger of a bifurcated product. On the one hand, the data are fascinating and valuable contributions to the field, and Chan has used them to build a structural-institutional study that is revealing and informative. The early chapters are dominated by the interviews and they cover the establishment and structure of the military, flag officers’ recruitment histories, their reflections on their sources of commitment to military service, and the promotion process and structure. Towards the end of the book there is a chapter dedicated to the question of scholars, followed by one that considers ‘character’ issues in the military and in society more broadly, including passages on the impact of myopia and other fitness issues on recruitment, as well as an exploration of the profile of reservist defaulters.
I thought the early chapters were the most interesting: the pre-history of the Singapore military in the late-colonial and Malaysia periods; the politics and the mechanics behind the creation of the SAF and the SAF scholarships; the interviews with generals who grew up in poor families and joined the army only because they did not have a better option.
At least as important as the interviews are the 104 pages of appendices that follow the main text. The thoroughness with which Chan has tracked the educational and career trajectories of nearly all 170 flag officers is worthy of a medal in itself, starting with what school they attended and concluding with their status as of 2018, even if they had left the military decades ago.
On the other hand, the qualitative analysis is patchy and shallow, displaying a consistent proclivity to follow the lead of his interviewees and other establishment interpretations. At some points Chan seems to have pointedly avoided pathways of analysis that might lead to conclusions he would find uncomfortable. Take, for instance, chapter 5, on ‘The Ascension Process’. Early in the chapter he reported without comment that throughout the 1970s, Defence Minister Goh Keng Swee used to promote and sideline officers at will — based entirely on his personal instincts about the candidates and in complete disregard of institutional processes (pp. 196–7). The following section is about the professionalisation of the promotions system introduced in 1982 by one of Goh's successors. This section is dominated by interviews with retired flag officers and the analysis passively follows the flow of the most benign reading of the testimony presented. Yet those interviews explicitly raised concerns about ‘cronyism’, ‘cliques’ and ‘favouritism’ (pp. 209, 213). One referred to problems that ‘arise when individuals change [a candidate's] ranking without explanation’ (p. 209) and another complained about the ‘halo’ of protection surrounding scholar-officers: their non-scholar commanding officers might be ‘hesitant to take action’ against them because they know ‘they are destined to rise to high positions’ (pp. 214–15). This evidence from the 1980s and 1990s suggests that perhaps the culture of personalism introduced by Goh in the 1970s has survived as an unwelcome legacy, and may have even been magnified by the ‘halo’ of protection around scholars. At the very least it presents a worrying pattern that runs contrary to the benign narrative of professionalism that Chan is presenting. Chan does consider the possibility that cronyism is still a problem, but concludes without much evidence that the risk is being managed.
The later chapters also mostly stop short of asking hard questions, and consistently shy away from giving hard answers. To be fair, Chan questions the miraculously rapid rise to one-star flag status of a very young Lee Hsien Loong (leaping past several officers more senior to him) and his expedited retirement 82 days later so that he could stand for parliament. Yet having asked the question, Chan's response was to hint at two equally unsatisfactory justifications: ‘At Singapore's Golden Jubilee one could appreciate that he was an officer well ahead of his time ….’; ‘Critics were silenced by Teck Ghee constituency … which approved of Lee's candidacy with 80.4 per cent of its votes on Election Day 1984’ (p. 295). This is disappointing scholarship, but fits with Chan's cavalier treatment of inconvenient evidence throughout the book — such as when he dismisses my research highlighting the 100 per cent exclusion of Malay candidates from SAF scholarships over more than four decades as ‘one-sided’, ‘increasingly anachronistic’ and ‘parochial’, followed by the irrelevant and rather patronising claim that Malays are doing much better in the SAF now (pp. 16–17).
This book certainly has shortcomings, but it is nevertheless an invaluable resource that contributes a wealth of new data to an understudied field.
