RSAF 40th Anniversary

It’s the RSAF’s 40th anniversary this year. The last couple of years, the RSAF (and to some extent Mindef as a whole as well) seems to be making lots of effort to reach out to its “men” in more personal ways, to re-invent itself and to run itself like a modern private corporation. This is not bad, of course, since there are certainly some things that military organizations can learn from the private sector too.

So I was not surprised to receive their 40th anniversary commemorative book which charts its history and progress in the last 40 years. I think of all the things that we (Singaporean men) hate about serving national service, I must admit that the RSAF seems to have run things well. Even in the trivial little things, like TV advertisements. I thought the RSAF TV advertisements where inspiring and makes us feel proud of what they do. The Navy advertisements make naval warfare look like fun and games. Not quite the right image to project, I’d think, but they are nevertheless quite good too. The Army advertisements are rather uninteresting (at least to me).