Kuala Lampur, Sept. 10 -- The Defence Ministry is undergoing changes listed in a White Paper that will fundamentally alter its operations and procurement, said Deputy Defence Minister Liew Chin Tong.

In an exclusive interview with the New Straits Times, he said one of the changes include ensuring big-ticket defence procurement programmes will no longer be vendor-driven.

In its place, weapons system acquisition programmes and the like will be purely on a needs basis of the Armed Forces' three branches, via a careful and thorough demonstration/evaluation phase.

"If you look back at under the previous government, quite a number of these big-ticket defence projects were vendor-driven, often against the end-user's advice, and sometimes agai...