National service.....

Today i was in the office with boss discussing about some OE recertification stuff. He pop up and told me, hey, from today on wards, NS will be reduced to two years across the lines. All NSF will only serve two years only, regardless of A level or N level. On 1500hrs today, Defence Minister announced in the Parliament.
Definitely as the NSF who is serving currently will be happy, he will be the one benefitting from this scheme. However i as a regular officer, i do have some views on this. Singapore military system, goes as below, recruit 2.5mths, Officer 10 mths, follow by 12 mths service and 2mths clear leave. This would a rather standard progression, i use this as an example, because this is the highest echelon of NSFs, using this would be of most appropriate. So SAF uses 10 mths to train a full fledge Officer. According to research, do you know that Singapore is a country that uses the shortest time to train a Officer?? American Military School WEST POINT uses 2.5years to train one. Great Britain SELHURST uses 2 years too. This two countries are probably the ones that has been through real war time situations, and through real time experience, they set the time frame to be as above.
Been through the officer cadet course of SAF, i feel that what i learn and acquired in the course is not leadership. What i learnt instead are initiative, endurance and knowledge. So those the three above qualify as leadership qualities?? In my opinion, no. We have to be aware of the fact that there's so much too teach in the 10 mths. Knowledge by itself is taking about 99.9% of the time, not including all the out field training. And we are using that 0.1% of the time left to teach leadership?? To be frank until today, i can stand up and say that leadership is not something that you are learn through teaching, instead you can only gain it, through experience and also personal atitude. After ten months of gruesome training, you will be rewarded with the rank of second Lieutanent, and you think you are ready. SO are you really ready??
Defence Minister's decision to cut the service years is something not up to me to judge. However we really wonder what trigger this change?? Are we suffering from the after effects of the Commando incident?? Or are we suffering from the economical upset?? Recently i read on the papers, that the malaysian NS was suffering some haevy setback, there's was a heavy and high case of AWOL, which could be due to the lack of education and also emphasis on the issue. Then i hereby posed this question, isnt it the case that when your aggressors are suffering from internal problems, it should be the time for you to train harder to pull the distance between your strength away from his as far as possible?? On the contrary, what we are practicing now is, okie now they are resting, why not we rest too?? I am not trying to be sarcastic or mean, but thats the impression i am getting in a very comic manner.
Now that this is announced, there are certainly a lot of qns not answer, i myself is awaiting a satisfied answer on why, but in my heart i know that no matter what they say, there's always a qn mark that can never be answer.

regards
dreamwaters