Impregnable, indeed

“Impregnable” is a mighty loaded term, and I’m not just talking about the salacious details of your dating life, either. No, I’m talking about the military context, as here in the Asia-Pacific a 70-year milestone for a very instructive battle is being marked, namely the British surrender of Singapore.

Heck of a story, that. Singapore was said to be an “impregnable fortress,” but wound up being an example of a Western power falling down another notch in its grip on the East. The anniversary was marked in the (U.K.) Telegraph’s Feb. 14 edition, and I’ll put a link to the article on my website.

Drawing from the Telegraph story, “War vets to mark 70 years since ’largest capitulation in British history’ in Singapore,” by Malcolm Moore and David Blair, the basic gig here is that a defensive force of 80,000 British and allied (from their empire) troops were defeated by 30,000 invading Japanese troops. The British surrender delivered its troops to the tender mercies of the Japanese prisoner of war system, and one-quarter of the troops didn’t survive it.

The British Commanding Officer was Lt. Gen. Arthur Percival, and he did survive captivity.

Japan attacked by coming down from the north, sweeping down the Malay peninsula, while, by contrast, the British had geared up to defend against an amphibious attack from the south. I’ll let WWII experts ponder the wherefores on this one, it mystifies me, but maybe we can say that your enemy gets to choose how he comes at you, and he doesn’t have to accept your preferences. If that’s not a lesson that applies to overall life, then what else does?

The main reason cited for the Japanese success was that the Japanese cut off the water supply and captured the British food supply, and the British were also running out of ammo and gas.

Well, as the saying goes, “Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.”

In fact, I wanted to get a professional take on this story, so I ran it by a friend from my military days. I was naval officer, he was an officer of Marines, so this Singapore thing is more in his realm than mine. He sent along some observations, based on his experience and training, which I’ll break into two nuggets of wisdom:

“War is logistics-not all, but easily 80 percent. One good thing about the Marines is they dispense with the romance of cavalry maneuvers and charges. War is basically about smashing the heck out of the enemy, which requires huge amounts of ammunition, fuel, spare parts, food, and water, which is easily forgotten (by amateurs). The British had no supply and no hope of resupply.”

Another observation:

“Percival had no reasonable options. British assumptions about how an attack would go were wrong. As is normal with military matters, the guy on the scene gets the blame even though he had no control.”

Of course, the British weren’t the only big power to succumb to Japanese advances in that epoch. The U.S., too, wound up waving a white flag, specifically in the Philippines, hence the famous “I shall return” declaration of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Fast forwarding to today, this stuff serves as just a couple of reminders, to me, anyway, that the stakes are mighty high in Asia, and that you can’t take anything for granted when things get interesting. I think we’ll see changes as many nations decide that they’d rather have extra defense than a deficit of it. When things move, and they will someday, they will move fast; you can’t order up a defense posture in arrears, there’s no option on the menu for that. That’s why there is an arms race brewing.

Looking back at Singapore, as in modern, sovereign Singapore, it is now one of the world’s greatest economic success stories. And it didn’t get successful by wasting money. Still, Singapore spends around 4.5 percent of its economy on defense, which is a lot compared to most other nations, and, in fact, is roughly twice the global average. Maybe the events of 70 years ago had something to do with this, it sure seems logical to me.

Lessons learned? I’ll summarize four. Nothing is impregnable just because somebody says it is; a guarantee is only as good as the guarantor; you can get hit where you are weakest, not strongest; and logistics is a very big deal.

Visit Ed Stephens Jr. at EdStephensJr.com. His column runs every Friday.