Shoring up Singapore's cyber defences

The decision to set up a new branch of the military by the end of the year will allow the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) to counter growing threats in the digital domain. The Digital and Intelligence Service (DIS) - the SAF's fourth service after the army, navy and air force - will be responsible for intelligence, cyber and psychological defence, and for advancing the SAF as a networked force. While the armed forces are no stranger to cyber defence, the new service will consolidate cyber and C4I (command, control, communications, computers and intelligence) units that have been formed over the past decade under a unified structure. The latest move will bring greater administrative efficiency to the task of protecting Singapore's borders from hostile intentions.

It is a truism that a nation's borders today lie as much in cyberspace as they do on the ground. Physical borders have been defended traditionally through a combination of land, sea and air power, but that notion of defence has had to be redefined in today's world. Physical and virtual security threats can and do combine into hybrid warfare campaigns that translate into threats in the intangible digital domain that have severe consequences on the physical terrain. Even the act of disabling a nation's digital infrastructure, which protects essential geographical and economic services such as global positioning systems or automated teller machines, could soften the social ground before a digital attack on military facilities is launched, followed by a physical invasion across the borders. Indeed, cyber attacks can be so lethal as to bring a nation to its knees, with the enemy hardly needing to initially deploy an army of men and material for a physical attack.