Duration of National Service

I was reading this Facebook note here and the author mentioned that he felt 2 years 2 months of National Service was useless because according to his personal experience, he spent only 1.5 years that he felt really doing anything productive. He therefore advoated for a short National Service period.

I actually beg to differ because I think for different units, they actually spend more of these so-called productive time than us simply because of what their units are empowered to do. I shall not go into exact details here but a good analogy to outline this would be say the operations and marketing team of say a retail store company which I shall outline in the next paragraph.

The operations team would have to do shift-work to man the stores while the marketing team has a more 'relaxed' job of promoting the store to potential customers. Using this analogy, one can say that the operations team work more hours while the marketing team do not. Bringing it back to National Service, it is hard for Mindef to implement such a policy because it is a very huge organisation and I do believe that shortening National Service to only 1 year 10 months was already a very huge step forward. If they shorten it further, any units similar to the 'operations team' might not have enough time to prepare their soldiers operationally ready.

However, and this got me thinking, since the period of National Service can be stretched from a minimum of 1 year 10 months to 2.5 years, I was just thinking, why not implement a policy where depending on performance and conduct, commanders are able to release good soldeirs on the dot at 1 year 10 months and to hold back soldiers who chao keng too much or keep skiving up to 2.5 years. This would perhaps weed out more of these chao keng peoeple. Just a random thought, haha. Never really thought of other factors. But I will be glad to hear what others have to say about this.