Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Taiwan to end conscription
TAIPEI - TAIWAN will phase out its decades-old military conscription policy over the next five years, the defence minister said on Monday, amid warming ties with China.
Currently all men aged over 20 are required to do one year's military service.
But Defence Minister Chen Chao-min told reporters that the structure of Taiwan's military manpower will undergo a dramatic change over the next few years.
'From 2011, the number of conscripts will be reduced by at least 10 percent each year, to be replaced by professional soldiers,' Mr Chen said.
'That is to say, eventually, conscript measures will come to an end by 2014.' Critics have argued that the island's armed forces have struggled to enhance their defence capabilities because conscripts are unable to become proficient in high-tech weaponry in their short military service.
However, the new proposals sparked concerns over whether the defence ministry would be able to recruit sufficiently qualified professional soldiers at a monthly salary of NT$35,000 (S$1,550).
The plan to phase out conscription was a campaign pledge of President Ma Ying-jeou during the 2008 election.
The number of service personnel in Taiwan stands at around 275,000, down from a peak of 600,000 during the Cold War.
Taiwan's relatively large army is a legacy of decades of tensions with China, which has regarded the island as part of its territory awaiting reunification since the two sides split at the end of a civil war in 1949.
However, ties between Taiwan and China have improved dramatically since Mr Ma's Kuomintang party took office last May promising to boost cross-strait trade and tourism. -- AFP
http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Asia/Story/STIStory_347888.html
That must be nice. Taiwan has China, who has openly threatened to invade her and referred to her as being part of China, is going to end conscription soon. Now compare to Singapore, whose neighbours have.. hmm.. almost never done that? We still have conscription. And a longer service term too. I still say the reason for SAF is to provide cheap labour and have an excuse to pay people a lot of money to do stuff that is otherwise worthless in the real world.
Currently all men aged over 20 are required to do one year's military service.
But Defence Minister Chen Chao-min told reporters that the structure of Taiwan's military manpower will undergo a dramatic change over the next few years.
'From 2011, the number of conscripts will be reduced by at least 10 percent each year, to be replaced by professional soldiers,' Mr Chen said.
'That is to say, eventually, conscript measures will come to an end by 2014.' Critics have argued that the island's armed forces have struggled to enhance their defence capabilities because conscripts are unable to become proficient in high-tech weaponry in their short military service.
However, the new proposals sparked concerns over whether the defence ministry would be able to recruit sufficiently qualified professional soldiers at a monthly salary of NT$35,000 (S$1,550).
The plan to phase out conscription was a campaign pledge of President Ma Ying-jeou during the 2008 election.
The number of service personnel in Taiwan stands at around 275,000, down from a peak of 600,000 during the Cold War.
Taiwan's relatively large army is a legacy of decades of tensions with China, which has regarded the island as part of its territory awaiting reunification since the two sides split at the end of a civil war in 1949.
However, ties between Taiwan and China have improved dramatically since Mr Ma's Kuomintang party took office last May promising to boost cross-strait trade and tourism. -- AFP
http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Asia/Story/STIStory_347888.html
That must be nice. Taiwan has China, who has openly threatened to invade her and referred to her as being part of China, is going to end conscription soon. Now compare to Singapore, whose neighbours have.. hmm.. almost never done that? We still have conscription. And a longer service term too. I still say the reason for SAF is to provide cheap labour and have an excuse to pay people a lot of money to do stuff that is otherwise worthless in the real world.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
The Flaw of Military Conscription
Punished for assault
By Teh Joo Lin
RILED by a soldier's poor work attitude, three of his colleagues beat him up one evening, with one of them hitting him with a helmet, umbrella and broomstick until the 19-year-old lay on the floor, semi-conscious and vomiting. And when a medic later advised that the victim be taken to hospital immediately, two of the perpetrators loaded Mr Jagjeet Singh - who held the rank of recruit - onto a trolley, wheeled him to his bunk and dumped him on the floor. On Wednesday, the three assailants were sentenced by a military court for the Dec 17 beating, which was so severe that the victim is still in hospital over a month after the incident in Bedok Camp 2 at Upper East Coast Road.All three pleaded guilty.
The main culprit, Lance-Corporal Nur Hilman Kassim, 23, was jailed three years and ordered to be caned six times. He will serve time in a civilian prison. Corporal Muhammad Fahmi Ibrahim and Recruit Hong Zhi Sheng, both 22, were sent to the detention barracks for six and four months respectively.During the hearing at the Singapore Armed Forces' Court Martial Centre, the court heard that the three storemen had confronted their colleague at about 6.30pm on Dec 17, annoyed that his poor work attitude had landed them in trouble with their superiors.
The face-off was verbal at first, but it spiralled into violence when they became agitated by his blank stares and uninterested responses.
There's no love lost between me and the SAF. Even though I'm out, I still think it's a big waste of time. One flaw is because it forces people who have literally nothing in common to come together to work together. Case in point. I can actually understand what the 3 guys went through when they get screwed over because of something someone else does and through no fault of theirs. The whole everyone pays the price kind of mentality sucks. It might have worked for an older generation, but for the current generation, punishing everyone? That's not going to work. SAF needs an Obama..Labels: SAF
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Charting the psychology of evil, decades after 'shock' experiment
From CNN.com
(CNN) -- If someone told you to press a button to deliver a 450-volt electrical shock to an innocent person in the next room, would you do it?
Common sense may say no, but decades of research suggests otherwise.
In the early 1960s, a young psychologist at Yale began what became one of the most widely recognized experiments in his field. In the first series, he found that about two-thirds of subjects were willing to inflict what they believed were increasingly painful shocks on an innocent person when the experimenter told them to do so, even when the victim screamed and pleaded.
The legacy of Stanley Milgram, who died 24 years ago on December 20, reaches far beyond that initial round of experiments. Researchers have been working on the questions he posed for decades, and have not settled on a brighter vision of human obedience.
A new study to be published in the January issue of American Psychologist confirmed these results in an experiment that mimics many of Milgram's original conditions. This and other studies have corroborated the startling conclusion that the majority of people, when placed in certain kinds of situations, will follow orders, even if those orders entail harming another person.
"It's situations that make ordinary people into evil monsters, and it's situations that make ordinary people into heroes," said Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University and author of "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil."
How Milgram's experiments worked
Milgram, who also came up with the theory behind "six degrees of separation" -- the idea that everyone is connected to everyone else through a small number of acquaintances -- set out to figure out why people would turn against their own neighbors in circumstances such as Nazi-occupied Europe. Referring to Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, Milgram wrote in 1974, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"
His experiment in its standard form included a fake shock machine, a "teacher," a "learner" and an experimenter in a laboratory setting. The participant was told that he or she had to teach the student to memorize a pair of words, and the punishment for a wrong answer was a shock from the machine.
The teacher sat in front of the shock machine, which had 30 levers, each corresponding to an additional 15 volts. With each mistake the student made, the teacher had to pull the next lever to deliver a more painful punishment.
While the machine didn't generate shocks and a recorded voice track simulated painful reactions, the teacher was led to believe that he or she was shocking a student, who screamed and asked to leave at higher voltages, and eventually fell silent.
If the teacher questioned continuing as instructed, the experimenter simply said, "The experiment requires that you go on," said Thomas Blass, author of the biography "The Man Who Shocked The World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram" and the Web site StanleyMilgram.com.
About 65 percent of participants pulled levers corresponding to the maximum voltage -- 450 volts -- in spite of the screams of agony from the learner.
"What the experiment shows is that the person whose authority I consider to be legitimate, that he has a right to tell me what to do and therefore I have obligation to follow his orders, that person could make me, make most people, act contrary to their conscience," Blass said.
An update
Because of revised ethical standards for human subject research, this kind of experiment cannot be replicated exactly. But Jerry Burger, professor of psychology at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, made some tweaks to see if Milgram's results hold up today.
His study's design imitated Milgram's, even using the same scripts for the experimenter and suffering learner, but the key difference was that this experiment stopped at 150 volts -- when the learner starts asking to leave. In Milgram's experiment, 79 percent of participants who got to that point went all the way to the maximum shock, he said.
To eliminate bias from the fame of Milgram's experiment, Burger ruled out anyone who had taken two or more college-level psychology classes, and anyone who expressed familiarity with it in the debriefing. The "teachers" in this recent experiment, conducted in 2006, also received several reminders that they could quit whenever they wanted, unlike in Milgram's study.
The new results correlate well with Milgram's: 70 percent of the 40 participants were willing to continue after 150 volts, compared with 82.5 percent in Milgram's study -- a difference that is not statistically significant, Burger said.
Still, some psychologists quoted in the same issue of American Psychologist questioned how comparable this study is to Milgram's, given the differences in methods.
The idea of blind obedience isn't as important in these studies as the larger message about the power of the situation, Burger said. It's also significant that the participant begins with small voltages that increase in small doses over time.
"It's that gradual incremental nature that, as we know, is a very powerful way to change attitudes and behaviors," he said.
Stanford Prison Experiment
This idea of circumstances driving immoral behavior also came out in the Stanford Prison Experiment, a study done in 1971 that is the subject of a film in preproduction, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Work on the film will resume in 2009 after McQuarrie's "Valkyrie" is released, his spokesperson said.
In this study, designed by Stanford's Zimbardo, two dozen male college students were randomly designated as either prison guards or prisoners, and lived in the basement of the university's psychology building playing these roles in their respective uniforms.
Within three days, participants had extreme stress reactions, Zimbardo said. The guards became abusive to the prisoners -- sexually taunting them, asking them to strip naked and demanding that they clean toilet bowls with their bare hands, Zimbardo said. Five prisoners had to be released before the study was over.
Zimbardo's own role illustrated his point: Because he took on the role of prison administrator, he became so engrossed in the jail system that he didn't stop the experiment as soon as this cruelty began, he said.
"If I were simply the principal experimenter, I would have ended it after the second kid broke down," he said. "We all did bad things in this study, including me, but it's diagnostic of the power situation."
Turning the principle around
But while ordinary people have the potential to do evil, they also have the power to do good. That's the subject of the Everyday Heroism project, a collection of social scientists, including Zimbardo, seeking to understand heroic activity -- an area in which almost no research has been done, he said.
Acts such as learning first aid, leading others to the exit in an emergency and encouraging family members to recycle are some heroic behaviors that Zimbardo seeks to encourage.
"Most heroes are everyday people who do a heroic deed once in their lifetime because they have to be in a situation of evil or danger," he said
I'm fairly familiar with Milgram's Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment having read about it and studied it before. However, I never saw the link that the Stanford Prison Experiment had with things that are happening closer to home. The thing about people in authority being abusive to those who are under them sounds very much like life in the armed forces. Where people not necessarily much older than you are given authority to rule over you and punish you as they see fit. People in higher positions probably know about it but for reasons or other, turn a blind eye. Why? Because they believe that they have the mandate to do it. Especially in a place like Singapore where the "sheeple" are so docile, such things are probably going to become more common.
(CNN) -- If someone told you to press a button to deliver a 450-volt electrical shock to an innocent person in the next room, would you do it?
Common sense may say no, but decades of research suggests otherwise.
In the early 1960s, a young psychologist at Yale began what became one of the most widely recognized experiments in his field. In the first series, he found that about two-thirds of subjects were willing to inflict what they believed were increasingly painful shocks on an innocent person when the experimenter told them to do so, even when the victim screamed and pleaded.
The legacy of Stanley Milgram, who died 24 years ago on December 20, reaches far beyond that initial round of experiments. Researchers have been working on the questions he posed for decades, and have not settled on a brighter vision of human obedience.
A new study to be published in the January issue of American Psychologist confirmed these results in an experiment that mimics many of Milgram's original conditions. This and other studies have corroborated the startling conclusion that the majority of people, when placed in certain kinds of situations, will follow orders, even if those orders entail harming another person.
"It's situations that make ordinary people into evil monsters, and it's situations that make ordinary people into heroes," said Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University and author of "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil."
How Milgram's experiments worked
Milgram, who also came up with the theory behind "six degrees of separation" -- the idea that everyone is connected to everyone else through a small number of acquaintances -- set out to figure out why people would turn against their own neighbors in circumstances such as Nazi-occupied Europe. Referring to Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, Milgram wrote in 1974, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"
His experiment in its standard form included a fake shock machine, a "teacher," a "learner" and an experimenter in a laboratory setting. The participant was told that he or she had to teach the student to memorize a pair of words, and the punishment for a wrong answer was a shock from the machine.
The teacher sat in front of the shock machine, which had 30 levers, each corresponding to an additional 15 volts. With each mistake the student made, the teacher had to pull the next lever to deliver a more painful punishment.
While the machine didn't generate shocks and a recorded voice track simulated painful reactions, the teacher was led to believe that he or she was shocking a student, who screamed and asked to leave at higher voltages, and eventually fell silent.
If the teacher questioned continuing as instructed, the experimenter simply said, "The experiment requires that you go on," said Thomas Blass, author of the biography "The Man Who Shocked The World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram" and the Web site StanleyMilgram.com.
About 65 percent of participants pulled levers corresponding to the maximum voltage -- 450 volts -- in spite of the screams of agony from the learner.
"What the experiment shows is that the person whose authority I consider to be legitimate, that he has a right to tell me what to do and therefore I have obligation to follow his orders, that person could make me, make most people, act contrary to their conscience," Blass said.
An update
Because of revised ethical standards for human subject research, this kind of experiment cannot be replicated exactly. But Jerry Burger, professor of psychology at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, made some tweaks to see if Milgram's results hold up today.
His study's design imitated Milgram's, even using the same scripts for the experimenter and suffering learner, but the key difference was that this experiment stopped at 150 volts -- when the learner starts asking to leave. In Milgram's experiment, 79 percent of participants who got to that point went all the way to the maximum shock, he said.
To eliminate bias from the fame of Milgram's experiment, Burger ruled out anyone who had taken two or more college-level psychology classes, and anyone who expressed familiarity with it in the debriefing. The "teachers" in this recent experiment, conducted in 2006, also received several reminders that they could quit whenever they wanted, unlike in Milgram's study.
The new results correlate well with Milgram's: 70 percent of the 40 participants were willing to continue after 150 volts, compared with 82.5 percent in Milgram's study -- a difference that is not statistically significant, Burger said.
Still, some psychologists quoted in the same issue of American Psychologist questioned how comparable this study is to Milgram's, given the differences in methods.
The idea of blind obedience isn't as important in these studies as the larger message about the power of the situation, Burger said. It's also significant that the participant begins with small voltages that increase in small doses over time.
"It's that gradual incremental nature that, as we know, is a very powerful way to change attitudes and behaviors," he said.
Stanford Prison Experiment
This idea of circumstances driving immoral behavior also came out in the Stanford Prison Experiment, a study done in 1971 that is the subject of a film in preproduction, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Work on the film will resume in 2009 after McQuarrie's "Valkyrie" is released, his spokesperson said.
In this study, designed by Stanford's Zimbardo, two dozen male college students were randomly designated as either prison guards or prisoners, and lived in the basement of the university's psychology building playing these roles in their respective uniforms.
Within three days, participants had extreme stress reactions, Zimbardo said. The guards became abusive to the prisoners -- sexually taunting them, asking them to strip naked and demanding that they clean toilet bowls with their bare hands, Zimbardo said. Five prisoners had to be released before the study was over.
Zimbardo's own role illustrated his point: Because he took on the role of prison administrator, he became so engrossed in the jail system that he didn't stop the experiment as soon as this cruelty began, he said.
"If I were simply the principal experimenter, I would have ended it after the second kid broke down," he said. "We all did bad things in this study, including me, but it's diagnostic of the power situation."
Turning the principle around
But while ordinary people have the potential to do evil, they also have the power to do good. That's the subject of the Everyday Heroism project, a collection of social scientists, including Zimbardo, seeking to understand heroic activity -- an area in which almost no research has been done, he said.
Acts such as learning first aid, leading others to the exit in an emergency and encouraging family members to recycle are some heroic behaviors that Zimbardo seeks to encourage.
"Most heroes are everyday people who do a heroic deed once in their lifetime because they have to be in a situation of evil or danger," he said
I'm fairly familiar with Milgram's Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment having read about it and studied it before. However, I never saw the link that the Stanford Prison Experiment had with things that are happening closer to home. The thing about people in authority being abusive to those who are under them sounds very much like life in the armed forces. Where people not necessarily much older than you are given authority to rule over you and punish you as they see fit. People in higher positions probably know about it but for reasons or other, turn a blind eye. Why? Because they believe that they have the mandate to do it. Especially in a place like Singapore where the "sheeple" are so docile, such things are probably going to become more common.
Labels: abuse of power, interesting article, SAF
Friday, March 14, 2008
Funny.. But True
Friday, February 15, 2008
Brings a tear to my eyes
Came across this interesting website.
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Singapore_Armed_Forces
It's mainly for guys or people who have had experiences with the SAF. You may think it's really funny, but u'll cry when you realise that it's all true.
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Singapore_Armed_Forces
It's mainly for guys or people who have had experiences with the SAF. You may think it's really funny, but u'll cry when you realise that it's all true.
