Too many generals and oupa troopers

LAST weekend, at a braai, I spoke with a professional soldier, a high-ranking officer in the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), about his life and career. Before 1994, he was a young officer in the previous military, the SADF.

I know him as a patriot who had always been optimistic about South Africa, even though he sometimes struggled with many issues and problems, especially in the military. He always felt growing pains in such a complex project were inevitable. He also said he accepted that the military in South Africa would have a different culture than the military in Britain or Germany and that he enjoyed that.

But when I saw him last weekend, for the first time he seemed pessimistic, because of the tragedy that had unfolded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

He says he can no longer turn a blind eye to the self-important, egotistical mentality in the military's leadership structure – the golf-day mentality, he called it, referring to the generals who played at a festive golf day last week while 14 troops were being shot dead in the DRC.

“You see it in the rollout of new uniforms," he explains. “The generals wear new uniforms, but the troops have to buy their own boots because there's no money to buy boots for them. It's a typical Russian mentality in our military. They are so important that they can't talk to the troops. They are so important that when they arrive at a unit, there are guards of honour, literally red carpets, they are escorted, they are given gifts, they are considered so important that they create a kind of Idi Amin myth."

The conversation stayed with me, so much so that I decided to talk to a military expert Prof Abel Esterhuyse, head of Stellenbosch University's department of strategic studies, about where the SANDF finds itself, and how it can transform itself into a functional force again.

What went wrong in the DRC?

We have been warning for the past year that the deployment to the DRC was ill-considered, that it should not have taken place, because our military can no longer project force over that kind of a distance. We don't have the strategic air capability to support our forces over that distance. When we talk about support, we're talking about four things. To support them with intelligence (which we can't), we also can't support them logistically, nor with air support (specifically close air support), and we can't support them medically.

All four of those realities came true this past week and we must hold our military leadership ethically responsible for the deaths of our soldiers because they were warned about these things and they wiped their arses with it ... excuse me, but I'm getting furious about this.

The fact of the matter is, every military analyst warned about this, the media wrote about this. You didn't need to be a rocket scientist to see a bugger-up was developing here. And it was so sad for me to see in parliament, at the defence portfolio committee session, that the politicians were trying to hold the generals and minister responsible for the deployment, while parliament approved that very deployment!

They don't understand that they made the decision as they approved it, parliament approved it, and now they were asking questions as if the minister and the generals were responsible for it.

I've been wondering how a peacekeeping force ended up so deep in a conflict, fully integrated in a country's military force. Was this a normal peacekeeping deployment?

Not at all. I'll find you the ministerial authorisation, the submission that Cyril Ramaphosa made to parliament, the president himself! He had to explain to parliament why he was deploying the military. If you look at that briefing, you'll quickly realise he set it up from the outset as a combat mission. There's no wording about a peace operation in that document that was approved in parliament. They're lying to the public!

What would South Africa's military look like if you could transform it?

The first point to make is that the military, in terms of structure, personnel and technology, must be fit for purpose for the tasks it needs to do, and secondly it must be aligned with the budget. And then we're not talking about the budget they want, but the budget they receive.

But what is it that the military must do? Is it still the same as 50 years ago?

Well, historically our military has always been linked to three functions. One is that our military had an internal stabilisation role, whether it was the 1922 strike, the apartheid government suppressing black uprisings, or the current government dealing with a service delivery [protests]. Our military has always had an internal stabilisation role.

Even a conservative general like Constand Viljoen resigned because he didn't want to fight against his own people in the townships. Is it a good idea for the military to be involved domestically and perform police functions?

It's not desirable and the philosophical reason is very simple: Militaries work with an adversarial mindset. It doesn't matter where you deploy them, when they do their assessments, they ask who the enemy is. So the moment you deploy them domestically, you work with such an adversarial mindset and that's not good.

That being said, in developing states, the domestic deployment of the military is a given. You can't get away from it. The dream that the police handle domestic security and the military handle foreign security is exactly that, a dream. In developing countries, both the police and the military are underfunded and can't do their work properly, so they must help each other out.

The second function that the military historically fulfilled was dealing with threats from elsewhere in Africa, whether it was Jan Smuts with German South-West Africa, or the apartheid government with Angola, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Part of the problem we're sitting with now is that the government was naïve after 1994 to think that South Africa no longer needed to handle threats from the continent.

The rest of Africa had historically always been a threat to South Africa. It manifests in different ways today. The biggest problem is probably illegal immigrants and instability on the other side of our borders, and I'm specifically referring to the situation in Mozambique.

Thirdly, we must also handle threats from outside Africa, and I'm thinking especially of cyber threats. The military probably doesn't play a primary role there, but the military has nevertheless been designated by the government as the primary agent against cyber threats to South Africa.

I wonder about the severely reduced budget for the military. Could one create this kind of military you're talking about with the right people in charge and with the political will?

Obviously. I think there are militaries in Southern Africa that would love to have our defence budget, but, and this is an important but, then many, many unpopular decisions will need to be made, regarding the restructuring of the military, regarding technology and the personnel situation in the military. I don't know if our strategic decision-makers have the gravitas to make those difficult decisions necessary to align our military with the budget and the will to do the work they need to do. I doubt it.

Where's the jam? Why doesn't it happen?

The problem lies in an interaction between unpopular political decisions that must be made, in other words political leadership, and the fact and problem that strong and effective military leadership is needed. If the political decision is made, very clear military leadership will need to be demonstrated. The essence of the many problems we're sitting with today is the lack of directional military leadership.

In the same vein, how is parliament doing with its oversight role, and how is [defence] minister Angie Motshekga performing?

Dr Wilhelm Janse van Rensburg, the researcher for parliament's two military portfolio committees, did a study clearly showing how parliament's oversight role has diminished over the past 20 to 30 years to the point where the executive authority, the minister and the president, together with the military, essentially wipe their backsides with it. They don't really pay attention to parliament's oversight; in fact, the military holds parliament in contempt.

It was interesting to see yesterday how the portfolio committee for defence reprimanded a general because he has never bothered to appear before the committee. Why doesn't he appear there? Because the minister ... well, let me not get into that.

The other important point to make is that the oversight role over the military, worldwide, has fundamentally changed in the last 40 to 50 years. It has changed to the extent that parliaments are no longer the only oversight mechanism that exists because the role that social media, academics and the media have begun to play in the oversight function has become critically important.

This is exactly what we've seen in South Africa since 1994. As parliament's oversight role over the military waned, the emphasis shifted to the role of academics, media, NGOs and social media. Look at how the general population is reacting on social media to the mess and debacle happening in the DRC. They don't spare the rod when it comes to criticising the minister and the generals.

In 2012 a comprehensive defence review was done under minister Lindiwe Sisulu, which looked like the beginning of good new things, but nothing came of it. Is it time for something like that again?

Oh, I don't even doubt it. The previous defence review was worthless because it was performed within a budget-independent and threat-independent environment. If you ignore the budgets and the threats when you do the review – or rather a new white paper on defence, which I think is needed – then that defence review isn't worth the paper it's written on. Then it's like someone dreaming of buying a R4 million Toyota Land Cruiser but they can only afford a Toyota Tazz.

One has read for decades how the integrated military consists of more officers than troops and that it's a big problem. Is it still like that?

Well, it's worse. Let's first talk about the personnel situation. We're sitting with a top-down problem, a mushroom-like military, with an enormous corporate army in Pretoria. So the Pretoria army is disproportionately large compared to the operational army, the so-called field army. Instead of a triangle hierarchy, we now have an inverted triangle.

There's a history behind this. The apartheid military was structured with a large permanent force headquarters that also consisted of the conscription operational and reserve force footprints, which were exponentially larger than just the permanent force headquarters. Then in 1994, they built on that permanent force headquarters, but the move towards what was supposed to be a small professional army didn't happen.

The personnel management of any military works on the principle of “up or out". It means that if a person isn't promoted after four to six years in a rank, then the military is essentially giving them the message that they should leave the system. Our people simply weren't managed out of the system. So there are troops, corporals, you name them, who were never promoted, who are 50, 60 years old, which is retirement age, but they are troops.

Are there any parts of the military that are still relatively functional, even exceptional?

Oh yes, there are certainly pockets of excellence, I don't even doubt that. The special forces are one of them, and there are still some infantry units that are very good.

However, one of the big problems is the overloaded top management and the skill levels of many of the so-called top people. The other problem is that it's as if we no longer understand that the soldier with the weapon in hand is the essence of a strong military. Where is that soldier's training and his equipment and his discipline?

I think we've driven too many soft issues since 1994, and here I'm specifically talking about the integration process of the military. We've taken our eye off the ball. The things they keep themselves busy with ... they organise all sorts of conferences. The soft issues have become more important than the soldier, and when a military reaches that point where the soldier is not the essence, then we're in big trouble.

Regarding equipment: Do we have the wrong equipment in our military or is it outdated?

I think our military still has good equipment but it hasn't been maintained since 1994 due to the defence budget. That's one side of the truth. There is also certainly equipment that must be replaced, so let me give you an example: Our Samil fleet of logistical vehicles, of trucks, was put into use in 1981 or 1982. They've been through a bush war!

There aren't cars in the public sector that are 50 years old and used daily, and certainly not vehicles that have been through a war. So it's simple things like a logistical fleet that needs to be replaced.

As for the air force, what do we need there?

The air force won't like what I'm saying, but the biggest mistake we made with the purchase of aircraft was buying fighter jets. I say sell the Gripens and buy strategic airlift services. We need cargo planes and attack helicopters.

We've seen in Ukraine how commercial technology, which is relatively cheap, can be used very effectively. The air weapon has increasingly shifted from manned fighter aircraft to unmanned drones. The air weapon is still the air weapon, but there has been a fundamental change from manned large expensive aircraft to unmanned cheap aircraft. An effective drone can cost as little as R25 000.

♦ VWB ♦

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