That explain the shocking standard of the leadership found in armour. During my BX conversion ICT, there were some lao enciks trainers chit chat with us reservists, somehow the topic turn to LHY and their view of him as an armour officer was not good. Even his stint at 46 CO was very short, machiam just long enough to lead the battlion in the vehicle parade for the NDP. After LHY left, the later COs were mostly farmers, my COs there were two ah pek majors while 42 had young scholar LTC.
There is a reason for why LHY is a terrible armour officer. Personally. as a person, he was a nice chap back than. Very friendly and unpretentious. As an armour officer, lets say I would hate to go to war if he was my CO. The reason is that when he was at SOA, he had the most senang training in the history of armour. Old timers who were instructors at SOA at that time, still bitch about his intake. An order came down from MINDEF that LHY must be in bed by 10pm every night during his TOCC course. This is regardless of whether there was night training. This means that all the tanks must be back early and he must be given time to bath and eat and be in bed by 10pm. Since the TOCC batches are very small, usually between 15-20 cadets (and even smaller because some drop out along the way), there is no way to hide the fact that he is in bed while everyone else is still training. So, in order not to show favouritsm, all the other cadets were also ordered to bed by 10pm. Usually, for a TOCC course, its very siong and most cadet sleep on average at 2am, if not even later. As a result, the knowledge and training that he needed to have was not there. In fact, it was not there for the whole batch. some training methods used on other batches were not used on his, again reducing the effectiveness of the training plan.
The funny part about all this is that every night, the instructors would have to clean tank weapons and service the tanks until midnite -1am while the trainees slept!! LOL. They did not have a choice, especially when the course came back late from the field. Imagine the most sadistic and brutal instructors in the SAF reduced to cleaning your weapon for you, your tank, eating cold food, etc. until wee hours of the morning while you slept.And since they were instructors, they have to lead by example and produce a spic and spank fully serviced tank for u in the morning as well as gleaming clean weapons. Wish I had a photo of them. LOL.