1) Most of their advanced air force consists of American hardware. That automatically means they're behind the US in technology.
2) You can't attempt to claim that title without long-range bombers. B1? B2? B52? Anything? The tech, targeting and global deployment capabilities to support all of it? Nope, Singapore has nothing there.
3) Their drone programs are very far behind what the US had ten years ago. They're relying on weak, short-range Israel UAV tech. The IAI Scout is the core of their drone capabilities and it's 40 year old tech. It can only fly to 15,000 feet and at 109 mph. Then the IAI Searcher, which is only capable of 20,000 feet and 125 mph. Those are toy drones.
The Global Hawk goes to 60,000 feet, and 357 mph. And that's considered old US tech.
4) Their global air force integration capabilities are non-existent. That includes complicated logistics and the ability to fly anywhere globally, and refuel for long-range strikes while ensuring the safety of all planes in question.
That means the Singapore air force can be destroyed locally without ever posing a threat. That's not an advanced air force, it's a sitting duck. China would dismantle their air force in a matter of a few days.
5) They have no space capabilities at all. That includes the ability to shoot down satellites, a required capability for the next 20+ years to claim an advanced air force. They have no ICBMs, and no other long-range missile capabilities.
6) They don't have a fraction of the global spying and data gathering (targeting, situation awareness, et al) capability the US air force has.
7) They don't possess the F22, which is the best fighter jet in existence.
8) They're incapable of producing the bulk of the hardware that makes up their own air force, including the planes, UAVs, missiles, helicopters, etc. That means they're always behind and always will be by default.
it's quite bad enough that they keep claiming that they're using the best technology when in fact, they just typically bought it from somewhere else.
It has a quite a bad propaganda which you guys can't even tell from it unless you really think deep about it.
Cars here are so expensive also. On top of that, you need to pay more to "own" the car. For some cars, that cert cost even more than the car itself. Not only that, we have road tax, erp, parking fee, etc, etc whatnot.
Income inequality is quite prominent, even though they claim that they have high GDP. Of course you can say your country has it worst...but hell, you wouldn't claim your country has no beggar if there's someone in the streets picking up cardboard and begging for money, would you?
last but not the least, the population is so dam high and i think like...40% are foreigners? I can't tell who are foreigners anymore.
There are more things that I can think of, but I just end it here in case I get arrested for saying "wrong" things
But 200 years ago the island had about 1,000 people living there, almost all of them indigenous Malays. Current population of 5.5 million, mostly ethnic Chinese, likely does not have very many who would be descended from them?
Yes, they would.
(edit:typos)
Singapore is ~$300 billion.
Not sure why Indonesia's GDP keeps getting over-estimated by such a dramatic amount in this thread.
Sorry, that was just a bit careless looking up of numbers. $850 billion is nominal GDP, $2.8 trillion is the PPP adjusted figure.
For Singapore, the nominal and PPP adjusted values are much closer to each other ($300 billion vs. $450 billion).
Powerful armies are nothing more than logistics organizations, with 80-90% of members operating supply chains and maintenance to enable the 21st century weapons systems and their elite operators to destroy things.
300,000 guys with assault rifles and crappy Air Force are no match against 75,000 with modern technology and precision munitions.
I'd love to see the reasoning behind that statement - particularly when they are compared with the likes of Israel, which isn't that much bigger.