Changing international realities and the configuration of the South African National Defence Force in the 21st century

English: The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) is currently in the process of evaluating its policies, strategies and force design in order to ensure that it is optimally postured and configured to successfully carry out its ordered tasks in the 21st century. Success will depend on how well the SANDF analyses the environment in which it will have to function, as well as how well it prioritises its objectives when making decisions about the most appropriate approach to the development of a national security strategy, force planning and the role of the military as one of the components of national power. The study examines developments in the South African defence debate since 1994. Two key policy documents, namely the South African White Paper on Defence of 1996 and the South African Defence Review of 1998, established the national defence posture and defined the functions and tasks of the Department of Defence. The primary organising principle behind these documents was its commitment to designing the SANDF for its socalled primary role, namely the preservation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of South Africa against an external military threat. This principle was ultimately used as a yardstick to determine the SANDF’s force design, force structure and capability requirements. The focus on the primary tasks of the SANDF has, over time, proven to be misaligned with the governmental objectives to be achieved and it has become evident that the force design and structure as prescribed in these documents fail to adequately address the current and future operational requirements of the SANDF. Furthermore, many defence analysts have pointed out that critical issues such as the continuing misalignment between the allocated defence budget and expected defence outcomes have also not been addressed. This has created a dilemma in which the SANDF, despite the acquisition of state-of-the-art air and naval assets in 1998, is still not optimally configured, adequately trained or equipped or sufficiently funded to execute and sustain its required operational tasks. Furthermore, due to significant changes that have taken place in the security environment since 1994, it has become evident that the principles on which the SANDF was originally designed might no longer be relevant to current defence requirements. The study includes an analysis of the 21st century’s security environment – a threat environment that is, and will be, characterised by political and social complexity and a variety of modes of warfare that will converge in unexpected ways. Defence forces will have to develop capabilities to conduct a wide range of missions simultaneously while retaining the capacity to operate across the full spectrum of warfare – from traditional warfighting and peacekeeping to disaster management and support to other government departments. These requirements demand a reassessment of the current SANDF force design and force structure as the current frameworks have proven to be misaligned with current Government deployment requirements and the characteristics of the prevailing African security environment. The study is based on the premise that significant changes should be made to the current SANDF force design and structure. The 2014 Defence Review highlights the fact that the SANDF is, and will be, expected to play a variety of roles in Africa, and that it will often be deployed in ‘secondary’ functions such as peacekeeping, border management and humanitarian support. Despite this shift to a more holistic and multifunctional approach to defence, which addresses both traditional and non-traditional roles of the military during Joint, Interdepartmental, Interagency and Multinational (JI2M) operations, the 2014 Defence Review continues to structure the SANDF in accordance with traditional single service organisational structures. These structures, the SA Army, the SA Navy, the SA Air Force and the South African Medical Health Services are not optimally configured to meet the demands of JI2M deployments. Defence planners refer to the adage that structure follows strategy, therefore, if the SANDF is expected to function in a joint environment, its force design and force structure should reflect this ‘jointness’ as the essence of its design principles. The study concludes that the logical cost-effective solution to the configuration of the SANDF would be the adoption of a modular force design, based on composite brigades that could be utilised as interchangeable building blocks which can be tailor-made for specific deployments, rather than to continue with the cumbersome traditional practice of using the services as building blocks. Modular force design will enable the SANDF to have a mass organic, scalable, joint precision effect, at an increasingly higher level than before, and enable the SANDF to balance the principles of concentration of force with economy of effort.