South Africans woke up to the disturbing news on Wednesday that military weapons - including heavy machine-guns, hand grenades, explosives, R1 assault rifles and Uzi sub-machine guns - had been stolen from the Simon's Town Naval Base armoury.Equally disconcerting was the revelation by Western Cape community safety MEC Dan Plato that there had been two other burglaries at the base, between March and April.To their credit, specialist investigators from the police and the military sprang into action and arrested two naval officers and recovered some of the arms yesterday.But some of the hardware is still missing and the thieves are believed to have had buyers for the weapons.How is it possible that security at the base - the SA Navy's biggest - has become so lax? Investigators are said to be probing the theory that those behind the heist used military vehicles to smuggle out the hardware. It defies belief that, after penetrating the base, the perpetrators were able to slip out undetected with their loot.Reports of police firearms being stolen have become fairly commonplace, along with break-ins at sensitive state buildings. Has military discipline also been so eroded that heavy weaponry too is ripe for the taking?The stolen weapons, in the wrong hands, would be sufficient to start a small war. What if they were sold to cash-in-transit robbers, druglords or coup plotters? The most fiercely contested elections in our history are just days away.In 2009 the police and military had egg on their faces when their case against the director and two curators of the SA National Museum of Military History - who had been arrested four years earlier for reportedly showcasing working weapons and mobile artillery pieces - fell apart.Instead of hunting for bogeymen at museums, the SANDF would do well to safeguard its bases properly...