http://www.dso.org.sg/home/about/about_story.aspx
Speech by Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien
Loong at the 25th Anniversary Dinner & Dance of DSO
National Laboratories on 3 October 1997
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a great pleasure to join you tonight for the
Silver Jubilee celebration of DSO National
Laboratories of Singapore.
MINDEF set up DSO, then known as ETC, in 1972. Later
it became known as Defence Science Organisation, and
now DSO National Laboratories. The initials ETC were
believed to stand for Electronic Test Centre, a
suitably opaque name. The head of ETC was the late Dr
Tay Eng Soon.
It was a very hush-hush outfit. As a young officer I
used to attend meetings in MINDEF, where Dr Tay would
be a mysterious civilian presence. We all wore
security passes, but Dr Tay's pass was special. He was
so secret that instead of a colour photograph, his
pass had a blank patch on it. It took me a long time
to find out where he came from, and how he fitted in.
But there was a good reason for the security and the
mystery. Singapore was young and vulnerable. We could
not risk betting our survival by depending on others
to defend us. We had instituted National Service, and
were building up the SAF. But the SAF could never
overwhelm an opponent by numbers. It would have to
fight smart. And mastering electronic warfare was an
important way to develop a qualitative edge over
potential threats. This edge depended on our efforts,
and results, being kept absolutely secret.
It was a bold decision for MINDEF to commit some of
our ablest engineers and scientists to defence science
and technology, and to build up its expertise in this
area systematically year after year. Looking back, it
was one of the wisest decisions we have made.
In the seventies, DSO played a key role building up
the SAF's electronic warfare capabilities. It also
provided MINDEF with scientific and technological
advice, to enable it to make intelligent decisions on
new technologies for the SAF.
In the eighties, DSO enhanced the advanced hardware
the SAF was acquiring, such as the E-2C Hawkeyes, and
helped the SAF make the best use of the hardware.
The nineties saw DSO developing state of the art
equipment for the SAF, and making major investments in
the underlying technologies. DSO had built up
significant capabilities. This has led to
opportunities for foreign collaboration on substantial
projects, considerably broadening the technology
available to the SAF.
The edge won by DSO's efforts for the SAF is
valuable, but ephemeral. Once the advanced countries
release for sale a more capable missile or radar,
using sophisticated technology which they previously
withheld, what we have may be rendered obsolete. Then
no matter how much effort DSO has put in to tweak our
old equipment, it has to press on to work on the next
generation, to develop a new edge. The payoff from
doing these projects is not just the indigenously
developed hardware. It is also in the people and
capability to understand fully the systems of that
class that we will sometimes make, but often buy, and
will almost always upgrade and reconfigure to our
particular needs.
Besides providing crucial scientific and
technological services to the SAF, DSO also nurtured
many of the engineers in MINDEF and Singapore
Technologies. Even though they left DSO, they took
with them valuable experience, which helped them to
build up the Defence Technology Group and the defence
industries.
The state of technology in Singapore today is vastly
different from what it was in 1972. Then, MINDEF was a
pioneer in R&D. It was the first major user of R&D,
and also the first major supplier. Today many MNCs as
well as Singaporean technology companies do R&D here.
The Government has set up a series of research
institutes which do research at one remove from
commercial applications, of which the first was the
Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology. The National
Science and Technology Board disburses funds to build
up research programmes in institutes, centres and the
universities; as well as to help private sector R&D
efforts.
This is a different environment for DSO. To attract
the most talented and ambitious young scientists and
engineers, DSO must offer research opportunities which
are as exciting, demanding and rewarding as any in the
private sector, enthuse and inspire them into taking
up the challenge.
In principle this should not be difficult. The SAF
has a wide range of complex operational needs, and
demands sophisticated technological solutions to its
problems. Indeed the SAF's needs far exceed what DSO
can provide in-house. The problem for DSO and the SAF
is to identify those projects
(1) with the greatest operational payoffs,
(2) which are within DSO's capabilities, and
(3) which are worthwhile to do in-house rather than to
source elsewhere,
either because we want to keep our secrets secret, or
because we cannot obtain them from other suppliers.
There is, however, one difficulty: so much of DSO's
work cannot be publicly discussed. It used to be that
when we recruit an engineer, we could not tell him
what he will do in DSO. When he was in DSO, he could
not tell others what he was doing, not even his
spouse. And after he had left, he could not write,
publish his efforts or list his accomplishments in his
CV.
The BBC World Service recently broadcast a programme
about the Soviet space programme. It recounted how the
Soviet Union launched the Sputnik, then sent a rocket
to the moon, put Yuri Gagarin in space, and so on,
each time keeping a step ahead of the Americans. The
mastermind of the whole effort was a scientist named S
P Korolyov. His achievements were never acknowledged
during his lifetime. He was frequently decorated, but
was not allowed to wear his medals. When Yuri Gagarin
returned to earth after the first manned flight into
orbit, the picture shows Nikita Krushchev warmly
welcoming and congratulating Gagarin, with Korolyov an
insignificant figure in the corner. But when Korolyov
died in 1966, Brezhnev himself carried his ashes to be
emplaced in the Kremlin Wall.
However, DSO has opened up significantly in recent
years, not at the expense of secrecy, but because of
the increasing research and technology content of DSO
work. Today, DSO engineers and scientists publish
papers, deliver lectures, collaborate internationally
and participate fully in conferences and seminars.
Thus, despite this problem of secrecy DSO has
succeeded over the years in recruiting a strong team.
It helps that people often know of DSO by reputation,
even if they do not know what exactly DSO is doing.
However, finding talent is a never ending process. The
SAF's needs grow year by year, and DSO must continue
to recruit and to keep up with new fields of defence
science.
DSO therefore needs to get some of the best
engineering and technology graduates each year. Some
will have studied on DSO scholarships. Some will be
recruited upon graduation. And some will have been
recruited abroad, to reinforce our home-grown talent.
Even in as sensitive an outfit as DSO, we must find
ways to integrate and use foreign talent. This is one
aspect of the national problem - gathering enough
talent in Singapore to make this our best home. But
from MINDEF's point of view, it is not a
inconsiderable aspect.
This problem of deciding what work to undertake and
what to farm out is not unique to DSO. Indeed
countries with far larger defence budgets and far more
comprehensive research establishments face exactly the
same dilemma. The Israelis embarked on a very
ambitious and extremely expensive programme to develop
the Lavi, an indigenous fighter aircraft, in the 1970s
and 1980s, before finally cancelling the project in
1987. One Israeli scientist I met told me this
cancellation was the best thing that happened to
Israel's high-tech sector, because it released so many
engineers to be creative and productive in startup
companies and other high-tech firms.
This is not the right occasion to discuss exactly
which projects DSO should or should not do. Suffice it
to say that no Lavi-equivalent project is underway in
DSO. Within our constraints, with the man-years of
engineers and scientists that we have available, we
have deployed our resources well and obtained good
value for money.
DSO's corporatisation in April this year does not
change its primary mission - to support the SAF. There
is always a certain tension between the research
establishments, who need freedom to think, innovate,
and do creative scientific work, and its customers, in
DSO's case the SAF, who want prompt, scientific,
solutions to practical problems. Fundamental insights
do not occur on demand; nor do they always lead to
immediately useful solutions. But without the longer
range thinking, the engineers will just be hacking at
individual problems, and will not make breakthroughs.
The challenge is to manage this creative tension, to
give the scientists and engineers enough room to
explore and understand, yet provide them enough
guidance, incentives, and perhaps even a little
pressure, to deliver practical results. Outstanding
research institutes like Bell Laboratories or the IBM
Research Laboratories have managed this. IBM would not
have developed Deep Blue to beat Garry Kasparov, if it
did not believe that there would be a payoff, albeit
an indirect one, from this project to its principal
business and bottom line.
I doubt DSO is developing any chess playing
computers. But DSO too must achieve this balance
between freedom and accountability, and must make its
contribution to the SAF's bottom line, which is the
security and defence of Singapore.
However DSO and the SAF establish this balance
between free-ranging exploration and pencil-beam
inquiry, as a research organisation DSO will need
autonomy in personnel, finance and management, to
allow it to function properly and to serve Mindef and
the SAF more effectively. Proper systems of
accountability are always necessary; but excessive red
tape is especially burdensome to a research
organisation. DSO's corporatisation will give it
greater latitude and flexibility, to manage, develop
and motivate its staff. DSO should make use of this
freedom fully but wisely, to grow into a national
research institution.
DSO's accomplishments in its first quarter century
have been significant. But your goals for the next
quarter century will be even higher. If you do your
work well, perhaps in 2022 some of you will attend the
golden anniversary dinner of DSO National
Laboratories, by then renamed something else. Then you
can tell your younger colleagues war stories of how
primitive we were 25 years ago, and how much more
progress we have still to make.
____________________________________________________________________________________
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