“This was one incident, I think the only conclusion we can generally make is that that soldier does indeed come across as soft and pampered,” said Bernard Loo, an expert on military affairs at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.
But he said it was unfair to generalize the picture, and that current servicemen were actually fitter than their predecessors.
“I think the statistics probably would tell us that by and large, the average national serviceman is physically fitter today than his counterparts were, say 15, 20 years ago,” Loo told AFP on Wednesday.
The defence ministry said it was investigating the matter, as online design wags went to town with parodies of the photograph.
One superimposed the image of the burdened maid onto a poster of a soldier firing a rocket inside a military vehicle.
Another had the maid with the backpack striding across a battlefield behind a tank as a soldier fires his gun into the distance, with the caption in capital letters: “My Maid, Our Army.”
Local daily the New Paper also surveyed 23 national servicemen and found that 22 of them had their maids wash and iron their army uniforms, while 17 had their domestic helpers clean their rooms for them.
Close to 200,000 maids — largely from Indonesia and the Philippines — were estimated to be working in affluent Singapore last year.
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