SAR-21 and Bionix you mentioned is what i consider PAP corruption and incompetence, inefficiency and unproductiveness. I don't know much about the SR-88 as it was hardly issued to SAF units, safe for a few specialized units. I just understand that it was a CIS product. If this Peter Law designed this weapon from scratch, then I have to say he is really a talent. But going back to the issue of PAP corruption, here is how it works at a GLC like say ST or the old CIS. You need a standard issue weapon for your army. Its the start of the big NS boom and height of the cold war and the Vietnam war. So, you arrange licensed production of M16S1 from Colt Industries. fair enough. You don't like the price you have to pay for the license, but you set up the factory already and are making it. So far so good. Well, the initial batch of 200,000 rifles are completed and the factory is sitting idle. So, what do you do? You want to continue to make M16 so you can sell them overseas for money. Except that the licensing arrangement does not allow you to do this. But you need the factory to continue to operate or else, you will be laid off, and your staff of cronies and yes men along with you. You are desperate to avoid this. So, what do you do? You then decide that you should buy the rights to the Sterling SAR 80 and build it here with the idle factory. But this thing is a piece of shit. Its is so bad that Sterling gave up on it and was already written it off as lost R & D. They were more then happy and a little puzzled why CIS would want this dud, but money is money. If the suckers from singapore want it, they can have it. So, certain CIS jiak liao bees continue to have a job, expense account and bonus by putting this dud into production. Please note at this point, the SAF did not ask for or want this weapon, but were forced to buy 20,000. But the idiots at CIS thought they could always sell it overseas to countries looking for a cheap 5.56mm weapon. Except, no large sales were forthcoming, because why? ................It was a piece of crap. They ended up selling them in small batches to warlords and embargoes countries and what not. So, again, the problem remains. How to keep the factory active and their jobs and positions intact? Well, it turned out that the SAF had a requirement for a Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW). The GPMG they had was too heavy and was used as an company level support weapon. They needed a weapon that put out high volume of sustained fire and could move with a section or a platoon, and therefore use the same 5.56mm ammo as the rest of the platoon, and not the 7.62mm used for the GPMG. This was not an unusual requirement as other armies had arrived at the same conclusion. The SAF wanted the Belgian FN Minimi. A proven weapon which could hold a 200 round box. Instead, they were told that they should wait while CIS developed its own SAW, the Ultimax 100. The Ultimax was at least 2 years late in entering service. The SAF could have gotten the Minimi they wanted in 1980, but had to wait till 1982 to get the Ultimax and even then, it had a lot of teething problems such as jams in the drum mag, overheated barrels, etc. it wasn't until the late 1980's that the Ultimax was refined into an acceptable SAW, but even then, it had a 100 rd drum mag instead of the Minimi's 200 rd. This already puts it behind the Minimi forever. But the main purpose of the development of the Ultimax was once against keeping the jiak liao bees employed and well fed at the trough. The cost of retooling the factory to make Ultimax 100s, the cost of R & D, the $1 million paid to the designer Jim Sullivan, etc makes the per average cost of the Ultimax just as expensive or more so then the Minimi. Once again, forget about saving the taxpayer money, forget about what the SAF really wants, its more important to keep their jobs and privileges as the first priority. So once again, we have the situation where the production runs of Ultimax 100 have come to a close, and again foreign contracts are not forthcoming, and mostly sales having shown up in 3rd world countries like Zimbabwe, the Yugoslav wars and what not. The SAF is interested in replacing the M16S1 it has received under the initial licensing agreement with Colt. So, what does CIS do? make more M16s? that would be the logical answer, right? And here is something else the taxpayers were not told. The AR-15/M16 patents had expired by 1988, when the SAF started asking for replacement for its M16. In other words, anyone and everyone can make and sell the M16 without paying royalties and without paying licensing fees and without threat of legal action. You don't believe me, just look online. The civilian market in the US is full of companies like Bushmaster, Diemaco (canada), FN (Belgium), and even Chinese companies like Norinco, making and selling copies of the M16s. the US army actually ordered a batch made not by Colt but by Fabrique Nationale of Belgium. Guess who had a factory that used to make the M16 in Singapore? But did they start up production again? Of course not. Too simple, too cheap, not enough chiak liao bees to be employed for such a simple endeavour. So, what do to? Well, what would cost the taxpayer the most money, what project can we do that would employ the most amount of chiak liao bees and PAP cronies, and what could they do that would keep them in hog heaven for a long time. Of course the answer is to develop a new weapon for the SAF. And Of course, it has to be something so radically different that the bean counters cannot say, why don't you buy it off the shelf. Never mind that we could have made the M16 without a license, never mind that there was a weapon already developed by the CIS called the SR 88 that was a vast improvement on the SAR 80. By now, you guess its the SAR-21. A rifle that costs 3 times as much to make as a M16, much heavier, and relies on a battery operated sighting system that is shit useless without batteries, and has issues with the location of the selector switch, is much heavier, and has a host of other problems. basically there is nothing that a SAR 21 can do that a M16 with a picatinny rail and a scope cannot. But of course, CIS/ ST has to add to its profit margin, making a M16 they cannot sell it for as much as a SAR-21 and at the same time, they can employ an army of jiak liao bee designers, engineers, retool the factory, etc. Once again, no one is buying it, so the export market is dead. But their main goal of preserving and enhancing their privileges have been met. In the past, Goh Keng Swee, Minister of Defence knew nothing about weapons and let them get away with it. Then BG Lee, whose wife was running CIS also let them get away with it. As you can see from above, lots of deliberate measures not to save money, but spend it. This is the PAP corruption style with no oversight. Ownself take care of ownself, taxpayer can pay for it. Multiply this by the number of unnecessary equipment purchases and the number of unnecessary defence orgs and you see why the budget is $14 billion for defence. Into this, is born Whore Jinx, a product of a CIS system so screwed up,sg so inefficiency and so full of cronyism that she knows no other way then to introduce this to Temasek. Now multiply what is going on at CIS/ST with other GLCs and you see why this country is so fucked up.
