Prime Minister's Office (National Security Coordination Secretariat)

The Senior Minister and Coordinating Minister for National Security (Mr Teo Chee Hean): Singapore continues to face challenges to our national security. Traditional threats to national security in areas like terrorism, foreign subversion, and espionage remain. Emergent, cross-domain threats, like the rapid spread of disinformation on the internet, add to and amplify existing vulnerabilities of our multi-racial, multi-religious society. COVID-19 has also added pressure in many areas, including to our supply chains and our social resilience.

The National Security Coordination Secretariat (NSCS) works with Government agencies to identify, assess, and address national security risks. This helps the Government prioritise its resources to strengthen our collective defences against current and emerging threats to national security and keep Singapore and Singaporeans safe and secure.

NSCS complements the work of operational agencies by focusing on crosscutting national security issues. NSCS looks ahead to identify emerging, growing or changing security risks; works across agencies to coordinate and ensure alignment of national security strategy and policy; and adds depth to these strategies and policies by catalysing cross-cutting national security capability development efforts.

In the context of COVID-19, such work has become even more relevant in areas such as economic security, inter-dependencies, and social resilience. NSCS will also work with agencies to draw lessons from COVID-19 to strengthen our long-term capabilities to deal with pandemics.

NSCS works with economic agencies to deal with threats to the flow of essential economic resources, such as goods, manpower, and investments, which enable Singapore to survive and thrive. The COVID-19 crisis has accentuated our need to secure such flows, as countries close their borders and restrict the export of critical goods. Geopolitical tensions in areas like international trade could also affect our ability to secure critical supplies and impact our position as an international transport and trading hub.

NSCS will work with agencies to strengthen resilience of these critical flows to ensure that our strategic interests are not compromised. For example, NSCS will work with agencies to identify and refresh our strategies and planning parameters to prepare for potential future disruptions.

Even though COVID-19 is a public health crisis, it has had cross-cutting impact across multiple domains including the economy, and the functioning of essential services.

NSCS will work with stakeholders to identify and deal with inter-dependencies further upstream, to guide our long-term planning in a coordinated manner. This applies not just to dependencies on external resources but also to in-country networks for the flow of utilities, information and people. For example, we will continue to analyse how disruptions to power or internet connectivity could have a cascading impact across multiple sectors, and how agencies need to work together to address these vulnerabilities.

Social resilience is critical in crisis response, especially for a small, multi-racial, and multi-religious country like Singapore. It is important to build up our collective capacity and cohesiveness to withstand shocks, and to build social capital and social trust so that we can stay united as a people and bounce back from incidents and emerge stronger.

NSCS will continue to conduct and coordinate research on social resilience and share key findings across government to guide policies and initiatives to strengthen social resilience in Singapore. NSCS will also step up education and awareness building for public officers through regular internal outreach, courses, seminars, and milestone programmes, and facilitate information sharing within the Public Service on social resilience issues.

Learning from COVID-19, NSCS will work to strengthen our whole-of-nation capabilities and readiness to deal with future pandemics. These will include enhanced health surveillance, increased capacity for crisis response and healthcare, and more resilient design of key facilities and essential services against pandemics.

We can never be certain when the next security threat will emerge, and what form it will take. As a small country, while we try to influence and shape our external environment, we are also often subject to forces that are beyond our control. We also have to build up our own crisis response capabilities, as we can rely only on ourselves, and cannot count on assistance from others, especially in a regional or global crisis when every country's response capability is under stress. NSCS will continue to work across Government to build up our defences against both traditional and emerging national security threats and help Singaporeans better understand how they can continue to play their part in safeguarding Singapore's future.