In my previous two articles I argued first that President Donald Trump’s hostility towards South Africa should not be dismissed as mere bluster and second that his use of tariffs, coercive diplomacy and overt military pressure in theatres such as Iran and Venezuela reflects a wider return to hard power in international affairs (“Trump’s SA fixation is not absurd, it’s strategic”, April 14 and “Trump’s trade war is not economics — it is gunboat diplomacy by other means“, April 23).
The essential point was not that South Africa faces imminent invasion. It was that assumptions of a more innocent era are eroding and that countries that cannot make coercion difficult, uncertain and expensive are becoming more vulnerable.
How, then, should South Africa respond in practical terms? The uncomfortable truth is that South Africa is not thinking seriously about defence at all. Certainly not in proportion to its strategic exposure, its geography or the evident deterioration of the international environment. Defence is still too often treated either as an embarrassing residue of the past or as a budgetary burden to be deferred and neglected.
That is a serious mistake. In a less stable world defence is not a niche concern. It is the organised protection of national life: ports, power stations, dams, bridges, telecommunications, leadership continuity, maritime access, industrial capability and the broader credibility of the state.
For South Africa the right question is not whether it can match a major power weapon-for-weapon. It plainly cannot. The right question is whether it can build the kind of layered capability that makes aggression slower, riskier, more uncertain and more expensive. That is what deterrence means for a middle power.
If South Africa is serious about that task, the clearest place to begin is with a homegrown unmanned systems industry. Drones have altered the economics of defence. They are cheaper than many conventional platforms, faster to field, easier to adapt and capable of performing a wide range of surveillance, logistics and defensive functions.
They are also well suited to a layered deterrence strategy in which the aim is not to dominate every battlespace but to widen awareness, complicate hostile planning and impose cost. For South Africa a domestic drone sector would have strategic value well beyond the military. Properly structured, it could also become an engine of industrial renewal, skills development and employment.
That matters because South Africa’s defence problem and its economic problem are not separate. The country faces mass unemployment, especially among the young, while its defence-industrial base has been allowed to atrophy and shed scarce skills. A serious drone programme could begin to address both. It would create demand not only for advanced engineering and systems integration, but also for assembly, maintenance, testing, battery integration, electronics handling, software support, logistics and quality control. In a country with deep technical underutilisation and catastrophic youth joblessness, rearmament should not be discussed only as expenditure. It should also be discussed as industrial policy.
Ukraine has demonstrated how quickly an unmanned systems ecosystem can expand under pressure. The lesson for South Africa is not that it should imitate a wartime economy. It is that useful capability can be built faster and more broadly than many traditional defence planners still imagine. A national drone ecosystem does not need to depend on a single giant factory or a single state champion. It can and should be organised as a network.
South Africa already has some foundations on which to build. Denel retains elements of experience and technical capability in the unmanned and broader defence space. Armscor has an important role to play as a co-ordinator of acquisition, testing, standards and systems integration. The private sector also matters. Paramount Group is an obvious example of an established South African defence company with the seriousness and technical breadth to be part of a national effort.
There are also capable engineering firms outside the traditional state structure that should be drawn in where they can add value. The country should not be thinking in terms of a monopoly solution. It should be thinking in terms of a federated model in which public institutions, private firms, universities, technical colleges and specialist workshops all contribute to an integrated deterrence ecosystem.
That ecosystem should cover a range of unmanned vehicles and associated systems: reconnaissance drones, maritime surveillance platforms, infrastructure-security systems, support and logistics unmanned vehicles, and other relatively low-cost systems that increase reach and awareness. The precise mix would have to be shaped by doctrine and affordability, but the broad principle is clear. South Africa should prioritise systems that support surveillance, denial, resilience and distributed defence rather than prestige projects for their own sake.
At the centre of this effort must be the retention of people. South Africa cannot rebuild a defence-industrial base while continuing to lose engineers, artisans, technicians, project managers and experienced military personnel. The steady bleeding of human capital from the defence and armaments sector is a strategic failure in its own right. A serious action plan would therefore need to include retention incentives, bursaries linked to local service commitments, apprenticeships, reserve pathways for retired experts, and a deliberate effort to rebuild technical depth in-country. The issue is not simply whether South Africa can assemble drones. It is whether it can preserve the human base needed to design, maintain and improve increasingly important systems over time.
This is also where the employment dimension becomes especially important. Labour-intensive elements of drone assembly and support can, with proper quality control and training, be distributed far more widely than most traditional defence manufacturing. There is no reason South Africa could not use technical colleges, supervised community workshops, small assembly hubs and targeted industrial incubators to create thousands of entry-level and semi-skilled jobs linked to the unmanned systems sector.
The same logic applies to infrastructure hardening. If South Africa wishes to deter coercion it cannot focus only on the coastline. Any serious aggressor would also look inland at critical vulnerabilities: power stations, substations, dams, bridges, fuel depots, rail chokepoints, data infrastructure and telecommunications nodes. The hardening, duplication and protection of such assets should form part of a wider deterrence plan. That in turn would support construction, engineering and maintenance work on a substantial scale. If South Africa is compelled to spend more heavily on self-protection it should do so in ways that strengthen resilience and create productive employment rather than merely importing finished systems.
All of this points to a broader conclusion: South Africa should place deterrence at the centre of defence policy. That would be a significant shift. For too long defence policy has drifted between symbolic peacekeeping ambitions, bureaucratic inertia and fiscal neglect, without a sufficiently clear answer to the most basic question: what is the primary purpose of the republic’s defence effort? In a harsher world the answer should be straightforward. It is to protect the sovereignty, continuity and functional life of the state by making aggression and coercion unattractive.
That requires institutional reform as much as fresh spending. Additional funding, if simply poured into existing structures without discipline, will achieve little. A credible action plan would require protected programmes, measurable outputs, independent technical oversight, procurement discipline and stronger insulation against corruption and patronage. South Africa’s defence problem is not only one of insufficient money. It is also one of insufficient seriousness.
There is also a deeper strategic issue that cannot be ignored forever, though it must be approached with care. South Africa must be willing to revisit strategic assumptions that a more innocent age treated as closed. Any debate about ultimate deterrence would have to be conducted with exceptional caution, not least because an adversary could seek to portray even defensive reassessment as aggression. For that reason the immediate emphasis should remain on conventional denial, resilience and uncertainty of outcome.
The broader point is that South Africa no longer has the luxury of treating deterrence, industrial policy and employment as separate matters. They now belong in the same sentence. A homegrown drone industry will not solve every strategic problem the country faces, but as a first step it makes sense on almost every level. It addresses defence capability, strengthens industrial capacity, creates jobs, retains scarce skills and supports infrastructure protection.
That is the transition South Africa now needs to make. The age of rhetorical comfort is ending. The age of practical preparation has to begin.
• Elliott is MD of Bearfish Strategic Services.
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