Quora Answer: Why Does Singapore Invest Heavily in the Military?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Why does Singapore invest so heavily in the military?  Where do they expect threats from?” 

Singapore’s defence budget is around 3.4% of GDP in 2021.  This is almost a historical low, and well down from the almost 5% in the early 2000s.  By any measure, Singapore’s defence budget is not a lot.  In terms of monetary value, Singapore’s defence budget is just under US$12 billion. 

However, if we were to compare this, in real terms, with the budgets of our neighbours, the difference is stark.  Malaysia’s defence budget for this same period, is US$3.5 billion.  Indonesia’s defence budget is US$7.5 billion.  This means Singapore’s defence spending is slightly more than both its nearest neighbours combined. 

When analysing defence budgets, we do not merely look at these numbers.  We must also consider the nature of the expenditure.  Indonesia, Malaysia, and every other nation in the region, is spending on maintaining their existing capabilities, with some left over for buying new equipment, not new technology.  There is not much left over for funding significant research and development, for maintaining strategic deterrence on regional rivals, for running live firing exercises, or even securing their own EEZ.  Much of that is wastage due to endemic corruption, and an inefficient bureaucracy. 

Singapore, in contrast, has evolved its military strategy to address a major concern: the low TFI.  This means there is greater emphasis on drone technology, automation, and efficient processes requiring less manpower expenditure.  In terms of theatre, Singapore is more than capable of winning a short conventional conflict with any regional power due to the massive qualitative and technological edge.  Instead, the concern is the growing assertiveness of China in the South China Sea, and the Andaman Sea, two ends of the Malacca Straits.  This would explain the investment in naval and air power projection into these theatres, and a defence strategy emphasising securing littoral waters.  That would explain the ADF, for example. 

Since the SAF is building from a position of strength, much of that budget goes to the acquisition and assimilation of new technologies, and developing this strategic potential.  As such, there is little scope for a direct comparison of Singapore’s defence budget with her neighbours.  Indonesia, Malaysia, and other nations are in the early stages of modernisation.  Singapore is preparing to fight a different sort of war, against a regional power, in our near abroad, if it ever came to that.

Eisenhower’s Warning: Sixty-Five Years Later, & He Undersold It

President Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, in his farewell address to the nation on 17^th January 1961, said the following: “Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry.  American makers of ploughshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well.  But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defence.  We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.  Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defence establishment.  We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.”

He continued, “Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.  The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government.  We recognise the imperative need for this development.  Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.  Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved.  So is the very structure of our society.”

And the warning itself: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.  The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.  We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.  We should take nothing for granted.  Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

He was prescient.  He was, if anything, too restrained.

The Numbers, Sixty-Five Years On

House Republicans have advanced a fiscal year 2027 Pentagon budget exceeding US$1 trillion, the largest in American history, a US$234 billion increase over 2026 alone.  The broader defence request for the year, including nuclear weapons appropriations and reconciliation funding, has reached approximately US$1.45 trillion, with Washington banking on Congress to approve a further US$350 billion through reconciliation on top of the regular process.  Coverage of the Pentagon’s contractor landscape now openly uses the figure US$1.5 trillion, and the phrase “largest Pentagon budget in history” has stopped functioning as a headline and started functioning as an annual ritual.

The Lobbying Machine Eisenhower Predicted, Now Quantified

Defence sector lobbying recorded its biggest spike this century in 2025, and lobbying activity jumped a further 10% in the first quarter of 2026 alone compared to the same period the year before, according to OpenSecrets.  Lockheed Martin spent US$15 million on lobbying in 2025 and had already spent over US$4 million in the first quarter of 2026.  Six contractors particularly positioned to benefit from the current weapons spending surge spent a combined US$21.2 million on lobbying in that same quarter.  Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman rank among the all-time top lobbying spenders in Washington, having collectively spent over US$1 billion on lobbying since 1998.  Eisenhower described influence as “sought or unsought.”  There is nothing unsought about US$21.2 million in a single quarter.

The Revolving Door is Not a Metaphor

A former deputy chief of staff to Senator Roger Frederick Wicker, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, now lobbies on behalf of one of these contractors.  This is not an isolated case.  Contractor lobbying teams are routinely staffed with former personnel from the very congressional committees that oversee military spending, a structural arrangement that turns Eisenhower’s abstract warning about “unwarranted influence” into a literal, named job description.  Contractor political action committees donate directly to the campaigns of lawmakers sitting on those same oversight committees.  During one recent election cycle, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee received more from the military sector than any other member of the panel.  Nearly three-quarters of Lockheed Martin’s net sales in a recent year came from the US government alone.  That is not a supplier relationship.  That is a subsidiary relationship dressed up as a marketplace.

The clearest evidence that Eisenhower’s warning has been realised, rather than merely echoed, sits in a live 2026 legislative fight.  Senator Elizabeth Ann Warren, with bipartisan support from Senators Josh Hawley and Mike Lee, proposed Section 815 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which would bar the Pentagon from contracting with firms that buy back their own stock or pay shareholder dividends while failing to meet delivery and performance standards.  The provision would codify an existing presidential directive targeting contractors who fail to invest their own capital into production capacity.  The US Chamber of Commerce is now leading a lobbying campaign to strip the provision out entirely; on behalf of exactly the contractors it would constrain.  Congress attempts to require that a company delivering weapons late and over budget stop simultaneously enriching its own shareholders with taxpayer money.  The company’s response is to lobby against the requirement, not to fix the delivery problem.  Eisenhower worried about misplaced power distorting the meshing of defence machinery with peaceful goals.  He did not need to imagine a contractor lobbying against a rule requiring it to actually build the thing it was paid to build.

Representative Rohit “Ro” Khanna, casting the lone dissenting vote against a US$886 billion defence authorisation, pointedly asked how a television news programme had uncovered more Pentagon waste and fraud than the congressional committees whose actual job that oversight represents.  He was referring to investigative reporting that detailed profiteering among the largest contractors, including Raytheon, since renamed RTX, and Lockheed Martin.  When 60 Minutes is outperforming the House Armed Services Committee on its own core function, the “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” Eisenhower called for has been reduced to a broadcast audience, watching an oversight failure rather than participating in an oversight success.

The Verdict

Eisenhower did not merely predict the military-industrial complex.  He predicted the mechanism by which it would entrench itself: economic dependency across every Statehouse, political influence purchased through donation and lobbying, and a citizenry too disengaged to notice the meshing had gone wrong until an outside institution had to point it out.  Sixty-five years later, the dollar figures have simply caught up to the warning.  A trillion-dollar budget, a lobbying spend rising faster than the budget itself, a revolving door staffed by the overseers’ own former employees, and contractors lobbying against the one bill designed to make them behave.  He was prescient.  The tragedy is how little of the warning anyone bothered to act on.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code