Fourth Plenary Session – Setting National Security Priorities – Teo Chee Hean, Minister for Defence, Singapore

 

 

 

1.         The fundamental goals of any country’s national security strategy are to safeguard its territorial integrity and guarantee the safety and well-being of its citizens. This requires close monitoring of all possible sources of threat and maintaining credible forces to deter them and, if necessary, to respond decisively should deterrence fail to deal with these.

 

2.         These will always be the basic building blocks of a national security strategy. However, the challenge of maintaining national security has become far more complex in recent years and it calls for a reassessment of what needs to be done if we want to enhance our national security and set priorities to achieve this.

 

 

3.         The critical element for this shift has been globalisation. The security and economic well-being of all our countries is increasingly tied to factors far beyond our borders. In the economic sector, modern production is based on integrated supply chains that stretch across the world. A consumer product could be made from raw materials from, say Indonesia, components manufactured in Vietnam, and software coded in India. The final stages of manufacturing might take place in China, in a factory equipped with Japanese machinery and financed with American capital, before the end product is exported to markets, say in Europe. There is a similar dynamic of inter-connectedness at work in the fuelling of global supply chains. Oil from the Middle East is transported by an array of multinational firms through the Indian Ocean and the Malacca Straits, to be refined in Singapore, before being moved onward to fuel the growth of countries in Northeast Asia.

 

4.         Disruption at any point of these supply chains would have widespread systemic implications, with serious consequences to a host of countries far and wide. The security of sea lines of communications poses a particular challenge. The bulk of the world's trade and energy is transported by sea, and this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Unlike land routes where jurisdiction and responsibility are clearly delineated along national lines, sea lanes straddle multiple zones of sovereignty and are governed by overlapping national and international regimes. Unlike aviation, where aircraft are carefully monitored throughout their flights, and are critically vulnerable only at the points of take-off and landing, ships traverse the seas in isolation, remaining vulnerable throughout their lengthy journeys.

 

5.         The security of the sea lanes takes on a particular importance in Southeast Asia. Here, the Malacca and Singapore Straits carry over 30% of the world's commerce and half of the world’s oil. Disruption of these vital sea lanes would have immediate economic and strategic repercussions which would be felt far beyond Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific.

 

 

6.         Maritime security and energy security are two critical issues that rank high among many, if not all, of our countries’ national security priorities. These two issues demonstrate how the concept of national security has been transformed by globalisation. Even the largest and most resource-rich of countries have abandoned autarky to embrace global markets and the opportunities they bring. More so than ever before, all of us have critical national interests which are tied to forces and developments far beyond our borders, and beyond our ability to control on our own. 

 

7.         We are all in the global village threatened by similar, if not the same, threats. These threats are as diverse as they are complex, and affect just about every sector. National boundaries no longer protect us in a highly inter-connected world. The fallout of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis spread far and wide, and the impact was not just on the economies of regional countries but also had serious political consequences in some of them. The 9-11 terrorist attacks in the US highlighted not only the threat to our security but also had political, social and economic consequences in many other countries across the globe. After SARS, all of us are now acutely aware that diseases cross borders and oceans all too easily and we now face the very real threat of a bird flu pandemic that could quickly sweep across the world.

 

 

8.         So, globalisation requires that we adopt a new paradigm of national security – one that is founded on shared perspectives and common interests among countries. Contemporary challenges to national security are complex in their causes and effects. They are trans-national in nature, and they are multi-faceted in the sense that they cut across traditional sectoral boundaries.

 

9.         With the complexities and uncertainties of the security landscape confronting us, there is a pressing need for countries to come together to pool our knowledge, experiences and ideas, so that we can understand the nature of the challenges and threats that confront us, and then determine what to do together to tackle them effectively and enhance our collective security. This is true whether the adversary is a terrorist or a virus, or whether we’re just trying to face the forces of nature. While we may not agree on everything, the many areas of agreement provide a basis for the cooperation and collaboration so essential for a successful fight against the threat.

 

10.       The process of using dialogue to nurture an understanding of our shared security priorities is something that the Asia-Pacific region is quite familiar with. A noteworthy example relates to how we have over the last few years deepened our understanding of terrorism. Terrorism emerged as a prominent theme at the inaugural Shangri-La Dialogue in 2002, just nine months after the attacks of 9-11. At that time our focus was, quite understandably, on hard responses – the immediate steps that each of our countries was taking to locate and disrupt terrorist networks and to guard against future attacks. This was the security approach. Over the next two years, our discussions drew in more countries and became more textured and sophisticated. By the 2004 Shangri-La Dialogue, our understanding of the terrorist threat had evolved significantly and we had a rich discussion on the geopolitical and ideological dimensions of terrorism, and the strategic nature of terrorist objectives. We acknowledged the urgent need for hard measures, and also recognised that “softer” issues like social cohesion and inter-faith engagement were just as critical elements of a national security strategy.

 

11.       The Asia-Pacific region already has a number of useful forums that allow defence leaders and officials to come together to  exchange perspectives and work together on security issues. Besides the informal Shangri-La Dialogue, we have the well-established ASEAN Regional Forum (or ARF), which brings together the countries of Southeast Asia and all the key countries that have a stake in the security and stability of the region. Since 2002, the ARF has established a separate defence track that brings together regional defence agencies for a dialogue on regional developments and non-traditional security issues, such as counter-terrorism, maritime security and the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

 

 

 

13.      Multilateral dialogue is an important process for defining and clarifying the regional security agenda. While we cannot expect full agreement on every issue, the areas of agreement are often significant. And where there is agreement, there is a basis for us to move a step forward. That next step must be to productively channel the momentum generated by shared perspectives and shared interests to the development of practical cooperation and the building of capacities to tackle the threats and challenges. We need to look at how we can bring the defence community’s practical and action-oriented focus to bear on the new transnational security threats that we all face, so that the security of all our countries is enhanced through such cooperation.

 

14.      This move from dialogue to practical cooperation is something that the defence community in the Asia-Pacific is well-suited to do. We have among us a thick network of friendships and cooperative relationships built up over many years and nurtured through a multitude of bilateral and multilateral interactions, which include joint exercises and operations. We have seen this at work in the massive multinational humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations after the Boxing Day tsunami and now in Yogyakarta following last week’s tragic earthquate.

 

15.       The progression from dialogue to understanding, and then on to action, is already taking place in our region -- most notably in maritime security. Maritime security has been discussed extensively over the past two years in a number of regional fora, including the ASEAN Regional Forum, the Western Pacific Naval Symposium, the Five Power Defence Arrangements and, perhaps most significantly, at the Shangri-la Dialogue. The frank and open discussions that have taken place at these various gatherings enabled us to come to a common understanding of how maritime security impacted on the national security of all our countries. These discussions also helped us better appreciate sensitivities relating to sea lanes like the Malacca Straits.

 

 

17.       With this consensus, we were able to move quickly from principles to cooperative action. In July 2004, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore bolstered their existing bilateral arrangements with the launch of the trilateral Malacca Straits Sea Patrols. These provide a 24/7 naval presence in the Malacca and Singapore straits and enhance coordination among the respective navies' ground units and operations centres. This was followed in September 2005 by the “Eyes in the Sky” maritime air patrols, an innovative idea for multinational air patrols that was raised at last year’s Shangri-la Dialogue by Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Dato’ Sri Najib Tun Razak. The “Eyes in the Sky” patrols have an innovative design which ensures that the littoral states are in the driver’s seat, while opening up to the participation of non-littoral states in the future. These two initiatives have shown good results as the incidents of piracy in the Malacca Straits have dropped significantly since their inception.

 

18.       The security challenges that confront us are as pressing as they are real. It is critical that countries both in the region and stakeholders from outside the region move from principles to practice, to implement cooperative measures which will create real capacities for prevention, protection and even consequence management. We should sustain the signficant progress that we have made in maritime security, while expanding our cooperation to other areas such as counter-terrorism, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, environmental clean-up and avian flu.

 

19.       It is fortunate that we have a firm foundation of trust to build upon. But we have to do more — for example, to tighten the mechanisms and channels for working together so that the capacities that reside in various countries can respond more quickly and effectively and in a more coordinated way when disaster strikes. We can do this by extending the breadth and depth of multilateral activities among regional armed forces. By conducting more exercises together, for example, we could improve our systems for information exchange, dissemination and warning, procedures for requesting assistance, and agreed standard operating procedures under which multinational forces can work together under proper control of a host state.

       
Conclusion