Michael Richardson: Crouching tiger hides its claws overseas

What does a Southeast Asian country do when it is small but has a big Air Force? In Singapore's case, it disperses its planes, and indeed some of its ground forces as well, to many different places around the world for training, including New Zealand and Australia.

Singapore has by far the largest and most potent air force in Southeast Asia. It is part of the Government's longstanding "poison shrimp" defence strategy which is intended to warn any larger country that trying to swallow the island-state would be painful.

Singapore carries a big stick but chooses not to flaunt it. One reason the Government keeps a substantial part of the country's military force abroad is to avoid alarming or provoking its neighbours, particularly Malaysia and Indonesia. Yet in a crisis, the overseas-based aircraft could quickly be flown home.

As a prosperous island-state in the middle of a turbulent region, Singapore has long maintained a strong defence force. But keeping it well-trained and combat-ready is a constant challenge.

For example, Singapore's Primus heavy artillery guns, which are mounted in armoured turrets on tank-like tracked vehicles, have a range of about 30km - about the width of the main island of Singapore. Because they cannot safely be test-fired in Singapore, six of the guns were shipped to New Zealand for a live-firing exercise last February at the NZ Army's range in Waiouru. The exercise, involving about 460 Singapore troops and codenamed Thunder Warrior, is held annually in New Zealand.

With a total land area of just 660 sq km, Singapore has correspondingly small airspace, making it impossible to give Air Force pilots extensive training or flying experience within national boundaries. The pilots must turn into a narrow transit corridor that takes them to one of only two relatively large training areas available.

One, over the Indonesian island of Sumatra, is the result of an agreement with the Indonesian Government. The other, over international airspace in the South China Sea, is jointly administered with Malaysia. But in 1998 - in one of a series of spats between the two countries - Malaysia alleged that low-flying Singapore military planes were spying and banned them from its airspace.

Singapore's airspace is congested because it is a busy civilian aviation hub. Such factors, combined with erratic tropical weather, are severe constraints.

As a result, at least a quarter of Singapore's force of about 150 planes and helicopters is stationed abroad at any one time, mainly in the United States, France and Australia.

Short-term training for its military pilots is done in Indonesia, Thailand, South Africa, Bangladesh, Brunei, New Zealand and Canada.

Faced with competing demands for land for industry, business, housing and recreation in Singapore, the 50,000-man army and 300,000 reservists also face a space crunch. They, too, have to train and exercise overseas regularly, mainly in Australia, Brunei, Taiwan, Thailand and New Zealand.

Singapore is also developing closer military ties with India and earlier this year reached an agreement with New Delhi to start training Singapore Air Force and Army units in India.

The costs involved in transporting troops and equipment over such long distances, and of paying for the foreign training rights, are a significant part of Singapore's annual defence spending of some S$8.6 billion ($7.36 billion), or about 5 per cent of GDP.

The need to move the Army and Air Force regularly over long distances has also been cited by officials as one of the main reasons for getting new equipment in recent years. It includes four locally-built, missile-armed naval transports, and four long-range KC-135 tanker aircraft from the US. The tankers can refuel all types of fighter aircraft in the Singapore Air Force while they are flying.

Military ties with the US are especially close. The Singapore Air Force has five separate training detachments at different US bases. Two are for its F-16 fighters, and once each for its CH-47 Chinook heavy-lift helicopters, its Apache Longbow attack helicopters, and its KC-135 tankers.

Singapore some years ago shifted its entire basic jet training unit to the Australian Air Force base at Pearce, near Perth, and it stations 12 Super Puma helicopters at the Australian Army base of Oakey in Queensland.

"Increasingly close defence relations with the US, Australia, New Zealand, Britain and France have helped to anchor these friendly powers' regional security presence in Singapore, improving the city-state's security by complicating the calculations of likely aggressors," said Tim Huxley, senior fellow for Asia-Pacific Security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and author of a book on the Singapore military.

* Michael Richardson, a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.