It provides maintenance and engineering support to the Army by ensuring high operational equipment readiness for the Army and the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) at sustainable budget and manpower resources.

The formation also has collaborations with other organisations such as the Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), ST Kinetics and the National Additive Manufacturing and Innovation Cluster (NAMIC).

In April that year, the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) had introduced the Military Domain Experts Scheme (MDES), a separate rank structure which runs parallel to the SAF's conventional rank system.

MES regulars who have converted to the MDES, or joined after the MDES was introduced, hold ranks from Military Expert 1 (ME1) to Military Expert 8 (ME8).

[3][4][5] The MES formation has provided support to the SAF in disaster relief, humanitarian aid and peace support operations over the years, such as during the 1986 Hotel New World collapse in Singapore, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, and in Afghanistan in 2010 when the SAF's Weapon Location Radar (WLR) engineering team provided field innovation to sustain the radar under harsh environmental conditions.