Singapore to acquire three Gulfstream maritime surveillance aircraft

MELBOURNE — Singapore’s defense minister announced today it is acquiring three maritime surveillance aircraft based on the Gulfstream G550 business jet as it continues efforts to strengthen its capabilities in the maritime domain.

The news comes after Singapore announced in September 2025 that it had selected the Boeing P-8A Poseidon multi-mission maritime patrol aircraft, with Defense Minister Chan Chun Sing saying the G550-MSA will complement the P-8A’s capabilities in replacing nine Fokker 50 maritime patrol/light transport aircraft.

Speaking in Singapore’s parliament during a budget debate, Defense Minister Chan Chun Sing provided few other details of the new aircraft, although Singapore’s defense ministry issued a news release alongside his speech that said that the aircraft will be equipped with a maritime surveillance radar, Electro-Optical/Infra-Red sensor, and a self-protection suite.

Artwork of the aircraft released by the ministry showed the G550-MSA to have conformal housings on both sides of its fuselage and an enlarged nose and tail cones used to house sensor arrays, similar to the G550 Conformal Airborne Early Warning aircraft (CAEW) developed by IAI and operated by Israel and Singapore.

The specifications provided by the ministry suggest that the G550-MSA will be similar to IAI’s Oron special mission aircraft, which is described by the company as a Wide-Area Persistent Surveillance aircraft that is able to “performing real-time tracking of both ground and maritime targets under all weather and visibility conditions.”

IAI says the Oron is “equipped with groundbreaking sensing and communication systems that provide…unprecedented intelligence capabilities,” including the ELM-2024 Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar and Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) suite. Breaking Defense has reached out to the ministry and IAI to inquire if the company will be converting the aircraft for Singapore.

The G550-MSA is the latest in a series of major defense acquisitions announced by Singapore for the maritime domain in recent years, with the Republic of Singapore Navy in the process of commissioning six Invincible-class submarines built by Germany’s TKMS.

It has also launched the first of six Victory-class multi-role combat vessels in December 2025, and has also contracted Germany’s Fassmer to build four Offshore Patrol Vessels. The southeast Asian island nation, whose economy is highly dependent on the maritime trade plying the sea lanes running through the narrow Strait of Malacca and the South China, has put renewed emphasis on the maritime domain beyond its territorial waters.

Chan had emphasized this aspect when he spoke at the Maritime Security Spotlight panel during the Munich Security Conference in Germany earlier this month, where he stressed on the need for the international community to address emerging challenges in the maritime domain together.

These included the security of underwater infrastructure such as undersea cables, many of which run to and from Singapore

“Maritime security affects the whole world because our supply chains are so interconnected,” he said. “An attack on one part of the system is an attack on all of us. It behoves us to work together to try to counter such threats as a group rather than as individuals.”