SINGAPORE — To meet the looming demographic crunch, the Republic of Singapore Navy (RSN) will be stepping up efforts to recruit from non-traditional sources, such as women and mid-career professionals including even lawyers, Chief of Navy Rear-Admiral (RADM) Lai Chung Han said. 

At the same time, more efforts will be made to make a naval career family-friendly, including providing married servicemen a choice to go on shorter deployments, and connecting family members with servicemen out at sea. 

“You know, (for) lawyers who end up running restaurants, or people who (switch careers and) go into the teaching service, why not the navy as a viable second career?” RADM Lai said. “They must bring value. Those in engineering, those in the merchant navy, those who work in the industry, precision manufacturing … Lawyers even, because going forward, I think a good understanding of law, international law, how that applies in periods of tension — all those are valuable skills.” 

While the navy’s recruitment numbers over the past year have exceeded target levels, RADM Lai pointed out that successive cohorts of National Servicemen will shrink by 20 to 25 per cent a decade from now. “That is one quarter,” he said. “The navy is largely (made up of) regulars but it is from the same pool that we recruit. So if that pool shrinks, that also makes it far more challenging for us.”

To attract more people at mid-career, the navy will be going beyond recruitment efforts in schools and targeting more recruitment websites, he said. Currently, about one in 10 navy personnel are recruited mid-career, some through the Military Domain Experts Scheme (MDES).

Acknowledging that the job market will be competitive, RADM Lai said remuneration will be attractive but he stressed that the navy is looking for people with a sense of calling and conviction to serve.  

Apart from mid-career professionals, RADM Lai said he also wants to double the proportion of women in the navy within 10 to 15 years. Women currently comprise less than seven per cent of all naval personnel, a proportion which is “far too low”, he said. 

“If you look at our numbers, going forward if you don’t recruit more women, we can’t man all our positions,” he said. 

Attitudes about having women in the navy, as well as the support structures and human resource practices, need to change in order to meet the target, said RADM Lai, singling out family-friendly practices as one area which the navy needs to “push a lot harder”. 

For example, servicemen with families can be sent on smaller ships not meant for long deployments. Servicemen at sea can also be given opportunities to communicate with their family members while out at sea in a way that does not distract them from operational duties, RADM Lai said. 

The navy is also looking at training more Operationally Ready NSmen to operate naval craft, and build more unmanned craft as well. Currently, two missile corvettes are manned entirely by NSmen instead of regulars, a move that RADM Lai described as a “bold experiment”. 

He hopes that one in four RSN ships will be either unmanned or run by NSmen in the future, including both surface and underwater vessels. “It is a moonshot, but I think we must always try,” he said.