Chapter 5: CENS and the Whole-of-Government Approach

In response to several defining episodes that impacted Singapore in the late-1990s to the mid-2000s — such as the Asian Financial Crisis and the ensuing fall of Suharto’s New Order government, to the discovery of the Al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah terror plot and the SARS crisis — the Singapore government mounted a strategic review of its capacity for dealing with systemic shocks to national security. The result, by 2004, was the launch of the Strategic Framework for National Security, which called for the fostering of a whole-of-government approach to national security. This philosophy was emphasised because it was realised by then that national security no longer meant only the military defence of political sovereignty and territorial integrity. After all, tanks and jet aircraft were equally ineffectual against an extremist ideology or a superbug. Much more creative thinking was needed to sharpen and hone the reflexes of policy elites and the various government agencies — not just the security and intelligence agencies but indeed ‘all-of-government’ — to the more complex and uncertain, strategic environment that had been emerging since the end of the Cold War (1945–1991). To its credit, the government realised that it could not rely solely on in-house research expertise, as national security challenges were increasingly boundary-spanning and interlocking. Hence, it was felt that reaching out to academia was more important than ever. This was not an entirely new idea of course, since the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS) had been set up in July 1996 as the academic partner of the Ministry of Defence. A decade on, however, it was clear that an expanded understanding of national security required additional research investment…