This year’s budget confirmed that the government is either deeply delusional or clueless regarding strategic and defence matters. The increase of 0.78% against inflation of more than 4% is a decrease in real terms, as is the estimated 3% growth over the medium-term expenditure framework period.
This just as the peace enforcement mission in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has failed, largely due to chronic underfunding of the SA National Defence Force (SANDF), which could not provide the air support the mission clearly needed.
It is not as if there were not ample warning: The mission in Bangui suffered unnecessary casualties for lack of air reconnaissance and armoured personnel carriers; the mission in Cabo Delgado failed to produce any worthwhile result in large part for lack of air support. And every minister of defence, every chief of the SANDF and most of the service chiefs have regularly warned that the SA military is losing capabilities.
In 2009 parliament’s joint standing committee on defence warned that the SANDF was in “a fatal downward spiral” and called for defence to receive an allocation of at least 1.7% of GDP. Instead, funding continued to decline to below 1%, with the inevitable result. It must now be clear to all that the SANDF is no longer fit for purpose:
- Most air force aircraft are grounded for lack of support, which also means pilots cannot fly enough to remain current, let alone fully effective.
- Most navy ships are tied up pending overdue refits, which also means their crews cannot cohere into effective teams for lack of sea time.
- Most army equipment is in storage pending overhaul, and almost all of it dates from the 1980s and 1990s. And the army is short of deployable troops.
The 2025 defence budget of R55.94bn will worsen the situation: that is simply not enough to restore aircraft, ships and army combat equipment to a serviceable state, let alone modernise or upgrade it. And not enough to close capability gaps such as the lack of maritime aircraft and stand-off weapons for the Gripens, Hawks and Rooivalks, or to begin replacing the antiquated army equipment. Nor is there enough money to rebuild stocks of munitions and key spares, or even to conduct all the individual, unit, formation and joint training essential to an effective defence force.
To put that R55.94bn budget in perspective, the defence budget of 2009, when the joint standing committee on defence issued its warning, would be R68.7bn in today’s rand. The defence budget of 2011, the year in which the defence review committee found the SANDF to be 50% underfunded for its mission set, would be R67bn today. Then add the falling rand, which affects the cost of fuel, support contracts and spares, and the cost of acquiring equipment to close critical capability gaps.
The result is not just declining capability but an accelerating decline that will, if not checked, see the SANDF become little more than a militia, without the capability to control our airspace or waters or counter guerrillas in our region. This is while there is a spread and escalation of conflict and tension in Africa, including in our own region, and while the world is entering an era of renewed major power competition and armed conflict.
Meanwhile, the government blunders on, allocating ever more tasks and missions to the SANDF while cutting defence funding — despite having undertaken in the 1996 white paper on defence to “request from parliament sufficient funds to enable the SANDF to perform its tasks effectively and efficiently”.
It has also quite clearly chosen to ignore the undertaking that “government will take account of the professional views of senior officers in the process of policy formulation and decision-making on defence”. And, as so visibly demonstrated in the DRC, the undertaking that “government will not endanger the lives of military personnel through improper deployment or the provision of inadequate or inferior weapons and equipment”.
The first bills have been presented in the form of casualties and failed missions. There will be more and bigger bills. One could come from piracy in the Mozambique Channel, and a bigger one should insurgency spread in Mozambique. And then there will be the economic cost of being unable to help counter insurgency and terrorism in Sub-Saharan Africa, increasingly an important export market for our manufacturing industry.
It is worth bearing in mind the response of a former chief of the Angolan Navy when asked how much the navy cost: “What will be the cost of not having a navy?”
• Heitman is an independent security and defence analyst.
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