Howitzer’s Design Flawed, Says Consultant
A management consultant, Mr Raymond Ng, recently shared his thoughts about Corporal First Class (CFC) Aloysius Pang’s death on Facebook. The post has since garnered over 5,000 shares and over 1,500 comments.
He attributed the actor’s unfortunate death to the “flawed design” of the Self-Propelled Howitzer — an armoured vehicle involved in the accident.
You must be wondering, who is this Raymond guy?
Mr Ng admitted that he has never operated a Howitzer before, but nevertheless attempted to establish his credentials.
During his service years, he supposedly received awards for “productivity and process improvements”. Currently, he practices management consulting — or in simpler terms, he helps improve the performance of companies by solving their organisational problems.
According to him, the operating principles of the Howitzers are not so different from those of business management.
No amount of SOP will help
A number of points were made in Mr Ng’s post. We’ll try to sort and flesh them out more clearly.
First, he wrote that the space where CFC Pang was standing should never be occupied, given that anyone there would be crushed by the machinery.
Next, he took issue with personnel, aside from the one doing the repair work, being able to operate the gun barrel.
Raising a common work place safety practice called “Lock Out, Tag Out” (LOTO), Mr Ng argues that no one other than CFC Pang should have been able to operate the gun barrel.
Netizens mostly disagreed
Many netizens expressed their disagreements with Mr Ng’s argument in the comments section.
One obvious contention was that Mr Ng knew very little about the Howitzer — he had never operated or dealt with one before. This means he should have no business talking about it with such confidence and certainty.
Another netizen blatantly disagreed with Mr Ng’s argument, saying that the death was caused by human, not machine error.
The Howitzer has been around for such a long time. Surely, if there was a critical design flaw, someone would have noticed.
Finally, one netizen expressed intrigue at the fact that Mr Ng should liken business management principles to the designing of a war machine.
There were, however, some who supported Mr Ng — though they were few and often gave no more than a passing praise.
Some extended Mr Ng’s conclusion with unfounded speculations.
No reason to speculate
Mr Ng already made it clear that he has no experience dealing with Howitzers or any similar war machines. His entire argument rests on “commonsense”.
So if there’s anything to learn from his post, it should be to exercise judgement and not believe unfounded assertions.
Perhaps there is some truth to Mr Ng’s argument, but until official statements are released by experts, we should not affirm speculations.
Featured image from Twitter.
