Start-up Nation

Yet the capacity of U.S. corporate recruiters and executives to make sense of combat experience and its value in the business world is limited. As Jon Medved explained, most American business-people simply do not know how to read a military résumé. Al Chase told us that a number of the vets he’s worked with have walked a business interviewer through all their leadership experiences from the battlefield, including case studies in high-stakes decision making and management of large numbers of people and equipment in a war zone, and at the end of it the interviewer has said something along the lines of “That’s very interesting, but have you ever had a real job?”

In Israel it is the opposite. While Israeli businesses still look for private-sector experience, military service provides the critical standardized metric for employers—all of whom know what it means to be an officer or to have served in an elite unit.

CHAPTER 5

Where Order Meets Chaos

Doubt and argument—this is a syndrome of the Jewish civilization and this is a syndrome of today’s Israel.

—AMOS OZ

ABOUT THIRTY NATIONS have compulsory military service that lasts longer than eighteen months. Most of these countries are developing or nondemocratic or both. But among first-world countries, only three require such a lengthy period of military service: Israel, South Korea, and Singapore. Not surprisingly, all three face long-standing existential threats or have fought wars for survival in recent memory.¹

For Israel, the threat to its existence began before it had become a sovereign nation. Beginning in the 1920s, the Arab world resisted the establishment of a national Jewish state in Palestine, then sought to defeat or weaken Israel in numerous wars. South Korea has lived under a constant threat from North Korea, which has a large standing army poised just a few miles from Seoul, South Korea’s capital. And Singapore lives with memories of the occupation by Japan during World War II, its recent struggle for independence, which culminated in 1965, and the volatile period that followed.

Singaporean National Service was introduced in 1967. “We had to defend ourselves. It was a matter of survival. As a small country with a small population, the only way we could build a force of sufficient size . . . was through conscription,” explained Defense Minister Teo Chee Hean. “It was a decision not taken lightly given the significant impact that conscription would have on every Singaporean. But there was no alternative.”²

At independence, Singapore had only two infantry regiments, and they had been created and were commanded by the British. Two-thirds of the soldiers were not even residents of Singapore. Looking for ideas, the city-state’s first defense minister, Goh Keng Swee, called Mordechai Kidron, the former Israeli ambassador to Thailand, whom he had gotten to know while the two men were working in Asia. “Goh told us that they thought that only Israel, a small country surrounded by Muslim countries, . . . could help them build a small, dynamic army,” Kidron has said.³

Singapore gained independence twice over the course of just two years. The first was independence from the British in 1963, as part of Malaysia. The second was independence from Malaysia, in 1965, to stave off civil war. Singapore’s current prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, described his country’s relations with Malaysia as having remained tense after an “unhappy marriage and acrimonious divorce.” Singaporeans also feared threats from Indonesia, all while an armed Communist insurgency was looming just to Singapore’s north, in Indochina.

In response to Goh’s pleas for help, the IDF tasked Lieutenant Colonel Yehuda Golan with writing two manuals for the nascent Singaporean army: one on combat doctrine and the structure of a defense ministry and another on intelligence institutions. Later, six IDF officers and their families moved to Singapore to train soldiers and create a conscription-based army.

Along with compulsory service and a career army, Singapore also adopted elements of the IDF’s model of reserve service. Every soldier who completes his regular service is obligated to serve for short stints every year, until the age of thirty-three.