Better Matching Roles with Soldiers’ Abilities

The Sunday Times

07 March 2021

A review of the Singapore Armed Forces’ (SAF) Medical Classification System (MCS) and PES system, announced by the Ministry of Defence (Mindef) on March 1, could lead to servicemen deployed to more roles that better match their abilities. It comes amid falling national birth rates and a shrinking pool of national servicemen, a trend that has seen the SAF leverage technology and redesign jobs “to be able to deploy servicemen of varying physical abilities in a wider range of operational roles”. Among those who benefitted included university student Ong Li Han. Mr Ong was classified non-combat-fit due to a mild cardiovascular condition, and was initially posted in 2018 to a signals support vocation, before being recruited to the army’s pioneer batch of mobile app developers, where he picked up skills relevant to his passion and current field of study in computer science. Mr Ong, who is a first-year computer science student at the NTU, had jumped at the chance when he heard that the Army Digitalisation Office, located in the same camp he was in, was seeking volunteers to be trained as app developers. Mindef said the review will shift the SAF away from the binary classification of combat fitness, with medical exclusions that used to limit deployments less relevant in today’s operational context. Mr Ho Shu Huang, a Teaching Fellow at RSIS, said while some vocations require outfield and front-line duty, they may not be as physically demanding and could be plausibly performed by a serviceman with a medical condition.

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Last updated on 04/05/2021