SA’s armed forces are in their worst crisis in decades, driven to the brink of a disastrous loss of strategic capabilities by a fateful combination of an ever-shrinking budget, poor leadership and a dire mismatch between the missions it is required to perform and the resources it is given to do so.
Without an urgent intervention in the next few years we risk the unmanaged loss of several strategic capabilities in ways that will make it difficult, if not impossible, to resurrect them in the near to medium-term future. At best, the SANDF will become largely undeployable, with the personnel component of the budget swallowing up all operational, training and acquisition funds.
This is over and above the looming disaster that is the potential collapse of Denel and much of the other SA defence industries, which will dramatically increase the SANDF’s costs by requiring it to import and outsource more from foreign providers and rob the country of substantial skills and export revenue.
Over the years the SANDF’s budget has dropped sharply, especially in the past decade, while its missions, mandate and force structure have remained the same or even grown.
At a time when the security situation around SA is deteriorating, particular with the emergence of the Isis-affiliated Ansar al-Sunna insurgency in northern Mozambique, allowing the status quo to continue is unacceptably reckless and dangerous.
Over the past few years there has been a fundamental and very toxic breakdown between National Treasury and the department of defence, resulting in debilitating and often nonsensical cuts being imposed on the SANDF on the one hand and the SANDF’s senior leadership refusing to properly engage with Treasury officials on the other. The impasse is untenable, and yet it has continued for years, doing untold damage, with neither the minister of defence and military veterans Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula nor her counterpart as minister of finance Tito Mboweni having done anything of substance to resolve it at cabinet level.
Over the years the SANDF’s budget has dropped sharply, especially in the past decade, while its missions, mandate and force structure have remained the same or even grown. In the late 1990s the SANDF’s budget was about 1.4% of GDP and less than 10% of government spending, and its planners were assured that this would remain the case for the foreseeable future. This was envisaged as being high enough to ensure the SANDF retained a credible “core” set of capabilities while being low enough that it didn’t detract from the far more urgent need for social welfare spending.
Today, the SANDF’s budget stands at just 0.8% of GDP and less than 3% of government spending. Over that same period it has been required to commit to even more missions and tasks, such as increasing its presence on the borders, taking part in peacekeeping missions, and providing standby equipment and personnel for two African Union standby forces. Worse, cuts have often been implemented in the middle of budget cycles regardless of their effect on multiyear SANDF initiatives and acquisitions, forcing those to be cancelled or postponed over and over again. Clearly, this isn’t sustainable, and it makes planning impossible while causing tons of waste.
Parliament’s portfolio committee on defence and military veterans (PCDMV) has attempted to broker some common ground between the two departments, and in its annual Budgetary Review and Recommendations Report (BRRR) asked National Treasury to consider ring-fencing additional allocations specifically to increase the number of army companies allocated to the border, to fund the urgently needed refits and upgrades of the Navy’s frigates and submarines, and to fund the military’s exit mechanisms so as to reduce the cost of personnel. National Treasury’s response to all three requests was overly dismissive, rejecting all three and claiming (wrongly) that the SANDF could just meet its mission goals by reprioritising internal funds.
This is not to say that National Treasury should be forced to allocate more funding to the SANDF, or that the SANDF is being entirely responsible with what it already receives. Instead there’s a serious need for a decent working relationship between the two departments and the existence of an external framework that guides that relationship while establishing a certain level of funding certainty for longer-term defence planning. That framework is supposed to be found in defence white papers and defence reviews, but the cabinet and National Treasury have completely ignored the most recent defence review of 2015, leaving it unfunded even as the SANDF is required to somehow implement its recommendations.
What’s needed is a new defence review that includes National Treasury from the beginning and binds both departments into a more stable budget cycle that allows for proper planning within the SANDF. One option may be to peg the SANDF’s budget to the GDP, perhaps at about 1%, for at least 10 years.
The personnel cost problem is a difficult one without an easy solution in sight. Despite claims made by public figures at various points, you can’t solve the problem by “firing or down-ranking half the generals”, “just reducing personnel”, or paying soldiers less. The first option, while desirable for its own sake, would result in only relatively small savings, the second can’t be done without an authorised change to the SANDF’s overall structure, and the last is impossible.
While it is no doubt extremely difficult to run a defence force with zero funding certainty, there is much that the SANDF’s top brass could have done but chose not to.
The key thing to understand is that every uniformed person in the SANDF is part of an authorised force structure with a named and numbered post meant for a specific role and purpose within that structure.
The basic idea of defence planning is based on the idea that scaling up an existing capability is many, many times faster, cheaper and easier than re-establishing one from scratch. You need to keep enough on-hand assets available to meet current or near-term needs, such as training, search and rescue, disaster response, peacekeeping, border patrol, support to the civilian authorities and short-term security risks, while preserving strategic capabilities at a high enough level to ensure you have enough fully trained and qualified personnel to not only handle any urgent situation but also be able to form a solid foundation around which you can grow capability in the event of war.
As an example, if the SA Air Force were to sell off its Gripens now but faced a situation in a few years’ time when it really needed fighter aircraft, it would take about 15 to 20 years and be prohibitively expensive to properly re-establish that capability. Whereas with a much lower level of funding it could take only five to seven years to not only fully staff its existing squadron but to double pilot and aircraft numbers to build an entirely new one.
The longer the lead time for scaling up, the more flexibility you need to build into that capability in terms of numbers. A frigate or submarine takes at least four or five years to be delivered after an order is placed, along with another six months to a year in shakedown trials, so it’s not something you can order only as needed. Whatever crisis prompted them would be long over, with the opportunity lost, by the time the vessels arrive. So you have to over-provision somewhat, ordering slightly more capacity than you immediately need so as to provide a reserve buffer in future. This is why the original SA Navy requirement was to acquire four submarines, not three, and five or six frigates rather than the four the budget eventually allowed. On the other hand simple armoured vehicles can be churned out relatively quickly, so it’s more reasonable to plan to be able to order more of those as needed rather than buying enough up front to anticipate all future needs.
It’s also far cheaper to keep existing systems upgraded and operational than it would be to allow them to degrade to the point where they’re retired from service prematurely and have to be replaced. It makes no sense to provide insufficient funding to properly maintain frigates and submarines, as is happening now, when by spending that relatively small amount of money they could have their service lives extended by at least another 15 years.
To be clear, none of this should be seen as absolving the SANDF’s senior leadership of blame or responsibility. While it is no doubt extremely difficult to run a defence force with zero funding certainty, there is much that the SANDF’s top brass could have done but chose not to. They have been far too passive in creating and presenting alternative solutions to the cabinet and the public that aren’t just demanding further funding. They have become less accountable and less transparent, arrogantly believing themselves immune to public scrutiny. They have tolerated corruption, sexual abuse and other problems in the ranks for too long. Their response to the killing of Collins Khosa was despicable, while the scandalous attempt to covertly acquire Heberon and then cover it up afterward is the kind of thing that should have resulted in widespread resignations. They cannot and should not expect the public to trust them when it comes to asking for more funding if we can’t trust them with everything else.
The SANDF is in a crisis of funding, purpose and leadership. It’s time to have a proper defence review, with wide civil society involvement and the promise of firm commitments from government and National Treasury in particular, if we are to have any hope of preventing a disastrous and very costly outcome.
Darren Olivier is a director at African Defence Review, a conflict research consultancy. He has been writing on defence issues, and the SANDF in particular, for more than 10 years.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.