MOSCOW, October 29 (RIA Novosti) — Singapore is strengthening its national security using a tethered surveillance balloon filled with radar equipment, its Defense Minister announced yesterday.
“We need an effective early warning system from threats that can come by air or sea,” said Dr. Ng Eng Hen in a speech at the country’s Ministry of Defense Productivity and Innovation in Daily Efforts (PRIDE) awards ceremony, adding that “Singapore is a small island, we are an air and sea hub, and that potentially increases our threat and we have to take it seriously.”
The Minister referred specifically to the recent disappearance of the MH370 airplane as one catalyst for the new investment, saying that the “incident showed us or revealed to us that international rules for civilian air traffic do not require planes to reveal their positions all the time. Thus, each country must build its own robust air surveillance system and maritime system.”
Dr. Hen also made reference to terrorist attacks in Manhattan and Mumbai as a factor in the defense reasoning, as well as to Jemaah Islamiah, a militant Islamist terrorist group from Southeast Asia which dedicates itself to establishing a caliphate in the region. The group, which has links to Al-Qaeda, is believed to be responsible for bombings in Bali and at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta.
“JI members that were caught like Mas Selamat, told the police that this type of attack, planes against targets in Singapore was indeed one of their plans,” Hen explained in his speech.
The new technology, a tethered aerostat, allows Singapore to compensate for the difficulties presented to its defense capabilities by its small size and terrain. Singapore lacks high mountains from which to survey the airways, and the high cost of using planes to observe the sky around the clock makes this an unattractive option. The new balloon will save Singapore $29 million every year in operating costs.
Tethered aerostats have been used by the US since the 1980s at home and abroad to provide low-cost round the clock surveillance. The blimps were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan during the 2000s, and in the U.S itself to monitor its borders and counter trafficking of people and drugs.
The deployment of the equipment was under threat last year due to Defense Department budget cuts, but the US Department of Homeland Security decided to pick up the tab for the project for 2014. Aerostats are an “important surveillance and command-and-control resource, particularly with respect to the detection, monitoring and interdiction of suspicious low-flying aircraft,” complained members of Congress at the time of the threatened cuts.
