Defence Against Hybrid Threats
GOH Yong Jing, School of Computing
As a third-year computer science student, I never imagined expected to collaborate with the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) on total defence as part of an NUS course. I initially enrolled in GEN2002 to fulfil the Communities & Engagement requirement, but the course turned out to be far more fascinating than I anticipated.
GEN2002 focuses on the threats to Singapore’s total defence, including disinformation and hybrid threats from non-state actors. We learned how strengthening national identity and enhancing social and psychological resilience can counter these challenges. As part of course, we were tasked with identifying a specific threat and design a community-based solution to mitigate that threat.
The project work placed a strong emphasis on practicality. In the early stages, many groups came up with creative ideas, but after receiving feedback, it became clear that some ideas faced significant real-life limitations. Our team initially proposed an all-in-one website to combat scams and strengthen digital defence, but the costs of hiring experts and maintaining a server were prohibitive.
We then pivoted to using Discord, a more cost-effective social media platform. We created community forums where users could ask and answer questions, and we developed a bot to aggregate news on scam tactics in Singapore. For our pilot run, we engaged friends as representative members of the wider community to trial the product and test their ability to identify whether images of certain emails and text messages were scams.
To our delight, we were invited to showcase our work at the Total Defence (TD40) Convention on 25 Apr 2024, at NUS Shaw Foundation Alumni House (see Photo). The convention featured community-driven ideas for strengthening Total Defence, with opportunities to partner with MINDEF to implement these ideas.
I was impressed by the diverse audience at the event, which included professionals from the Singapore Police Force, Channel News Asia. We received valuable feedback, such as the suggestion to create separate channels for different languages to broaden our reach.
The project work was challenging, involving a range of tasks such as liaising with stakeholders, conducting research, preparing reports, designing posters, while continuously improving our Discord platform in preparation for the TD40 convention.
But I am proud of our accomplishments. GEN2002 challenged our ideas against real-world standards and provided a rare opportunity to prototype a deployable solution that could contribute to Singapore’s Total Defence while gaining valuable skills along the way.
Photo: (Top) Our booth at the TD40 Convention, 25 Apr 2024. (Bottom) Our team at TD40, together with course instructor (rightmost).
On that day, I was surprised at the large crowd of professionals from different sectors attending the convention, and interacted with members from Channel News Asia, the Singapore Police Force, as well as Senior Minister of State Mr Zaqy. The event really demonstrated the power of the community in strengthening total defence, as we received useful feedback for our solution (e.g., maintaining separate channels for different languages) to widen our reach and target audience.
This course was no doubt challenging due to the higher-than-expected workload in completing many small but important tasks, such as designing posters, banners, group logos, communicating and liaising with different parties, on top of delivering graded course deliverables such as improving our Discord group, doing research, writing reports and preparing for presentations. Nevertheless, I am proud of the hard work we put together to ensure a successful presentation at the TD40 convention. Through this course, I learnt that total defence is something that ordinary citizens can play a part in. We can simply look around us and put together existing tools to make a difference in our community, just like we did by building a community using an existing social media platform.
To my juniors planning to take this course in the future, do make the best of it as not many courses evaluate your project ideas and solutions so insightfully based on real world requirements and standards. I would also like to encourage you to look for gaps in existing solutions and brainstorm for ways to solve them. Although the workload is higher than you might expect, it is important to spend more time in order to properly build and refine your solution. This is a very rare opportunity to present your ideas to make a substantial difference for total defence in Singapore, while gaining new skills and knowledge.