South African Defence Force

Essentially an economic and a social history, I used the SADFI as a lens through which to explore the canteen and leisure activities of South African soldiers during the twentieth century, commencing with the founding of the South African canteen system in 1916 and ending in 1989 and the end of the "Border War."

A number of South African Defence Force (SADF) veterans have undertaken trips to the erstwhile Angolan battlefields of the so-called ‘Border War’ (1966-1989) in recent years. This paper proposes to examine two projects by SADF veterans who returned to Angola. The first involved the making of a film called My Heart of Darkness that records the journey of former paratrooper Marius van Niekerk who returned to Angola in 2007 in search of redemption from his shameful memories relating to his role in the war. The second is a more recent trip to Angola by a number of SADF veterans who initiated joint ventures and sourced investment to provide employment for Angolan veterans. Such initiatives are framed as exercises in reconciliation between former enemies who celebrate a new-found camaraderie occasioned by their common histories as soldiers. The paper conceives of SADF veterans as ‘transnational agents’ who have crossed borders so as to promote co-operation rather than dwell on past ideological and political differences. It argues that the informal initiatives by SADF veterans might be regarded as attempts to make amends for the absence of formal institutional ones by South Africa and that these ventures have been undertaken in lieu of admissions of culpability for the damage inflicted upon Angola by the defunct apartheid army.

The first formal published research conducted on Retired Special Forces Operators with the direct input of retired and serving Special Forces Operators. The research opportunity, co-operation of the Special Forces League, co-operation of the Special Forces Brigade and co-operation of interviewees was facilitated and managed by Stuart Sterzel. The research itself was conducted by Guy Lamb while at the Centre for Conflict Resolution, and published in Track Two - the quarterly research Publication of the Centre for Conflict Resolution (from Page 39 onwards).

This paper deals with the background, role players, sequence of events, geopolitical considerations and history of the Angolan War which took place from 1975 to 1990 between the Soviet Union and its allies & proxies on the one hand, and the Republic of South Africa and its allies on the other. It also has a section presenting a rebuttal of previously published material on this subject, and a section on disinformation techniques used in and by the Soviet Union.

The South African Defence Force (SADF) made effective use of the horse mounted soldier in the Namibian Independence War or ‘Border War’, 1966 to 1989, in Namibia (South West African) and Angola, in a conflict usually depicted as a series of high profile mechanised infantry operations. Nevertheless, the legacy of the horse-mounted infantryman of the South African War era commando was evident in this unit, which proved competent in the counter-insurgency patrol in the Area of Operations, and subsequently domestic deployment during civilian struggle during the State of Emergency. This article offers an exploration of the Potchefstroom Equestrian Centre’s contribution to horse and rider training and the military use of horses in counterinsurgency and urban peace enforcement operations in the period c.1974-1985.

This chapter seeks to fill something of the historiographic gap, by analysing the role and function of SAWI – known better by the Afrikaans acronym – and examining the measures taken to provide canteen and shopping facilities and leisure activities to South African troops and military families during the Border War era.

At the age of 18, I was drafted in to the South African Defence Force.
I was a reluctant conscript who became increasingly uneasy in the
knowledge that I was being trained to defend the apartheid
system. I was deployed on the Namibian-Angolan border in the
very early phase of what came to be known as the ‘Border War’.
About 30 years later, I began to write about the war in my
capacity as a professional historian. While I sought to produce
scholarly work on the subject, I realised that my personal
experience of having served in the army informed my approach
to writing about the ‘Border War’. Indeed, I was persuaded by
Simon Schama’s view that ‘all history tends towards
autobiographical confession’. Like a confession, my ‘Border War’
project seeks to recuperate my sense of self-worth. To this end,
this autohistoriographical essay about the ‘Border War’ explores
the interstices of experiential knowledge and academic expertise.
It seeks to come to terms with my embodiment as a veteran, with
the modalities of memory that define my experience of military
service and attempt to ascertain how these might have influenced
my approach to the history of the ‘Border War’.

In Different Times is the first attempt to bring together diverse scholars, using different lenses, to study South Africa's Border War. As a book, it is critical in approach, provides deeper reflection, and focuses specifically on the SADF experience of the war. The result is a more complex picture of the war's dynamics and its legacies. Although South Africa is a vastly different country today, the study of the Border War opens a range of questions, also relevant to contemporary deployments such as in Lesotho (1998) and the Central African Republic (2013). It includes the debate on participation in foreign conflicts; on the deployment, design and preparation of appropriate, modern armed forces and their use as foreign policy instruments in far-off theatres; on military planning; and, as the historical controversies regarding the battles at Cuito Cuanavale and Bangui illustrate, on the interface between foreign campaigning and domestic politics.

The South African Defence Force established its own military museums when Fort Klapperkop and the Castle Military Museum were opened to coincide with the 5 th anniversary of the Republic of South Africa in 1966. A dedicated Section Military Museums was soon established and upgraded to directorate status (Directorate Military Museums) in 1973. The establishment of seven more military museums followed on a regional basis and involved the restoration or refurbishment to a number of historic buildings and sites. It was significant that much of this work was accomplished by the military themselves. Museums were established at Martello Tower (Simon's Town), Donkin Reserve in Port Elizabeth, Fort Schanskop, Fort Bloemfontein, Fort Beaufort and Fort Wynyard during the 1970s and 1980s. Organisational changes within the South African Defence Force (SADF) resulted in the museums being decentralised and the Directorate Military Museums (DMM) was downgraded to Section Military Museums. Further rationalisation of the SADF led to the eventual decision to close or transfer most of the military museums during 1992/1993. To date only a very few military museums are still open to the public in South Africa.

This article provides an historic–theoretical understanding of civil-military relations in South Africa and an outline of important influences on South African civil-military relations at present. Historically, a well-developed professional officer corps shaped South African civil-military relations. Africa's post-independence history, though, is full of examples indicating that neglect of the military often translates into domestic risk and a dwindling of military professionalism. Post-apartheid South Africa seems to emulate this example. The South African military may be in the barracks at present. However, there are clear indications that, in the longer term, the military risks promotion of elite interests, patronage and uncompetitive practices rooted in a single political party. This tendency is rooted in a general decline of military professionalism due to factors such as a declining defence budget, obsolete military technologies, a diminishing role of Parliament in overseeing the military function, the nature of operations and institutional factors such as a distorted professional self-image of military personnel.

The Kavango Department of Education, at the behest of the South-West Africa (SWA) Government, ordered the creation of a local youth movement during 1975. The primary aim of the ‘Kavango Jeugbeweging’ was to prevent the spread of communist propaganda, foster a sense of Kavango nationalism, and limit the political influence of the South-West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) amongst the local Kavango youth. The creation of this movement coincided with the start of the South African conventional military involvement in Angola during 1975, and the growing insurgency in northern SWA by the SWAPO. The South African government hence developed a total national strategy to combat this threat in the military, social, political, economic and educational spheres. The aim of this paper is to establish the reasons for the establishment of the ‘Kavango Jeugbeweging’, and to investigate the development of this movement throughout 1975-1985. The effectiveness of this movement as a counterinsurgency tool within the framework of the South African total national strategy will also be analysed.

" Good strategy presumes good anthropology and sociology. Some of the greatest military blunders of all time have resulted from juvenile evaluations in this department. " 1 Abstract By 2013, sufficient evidence had become publicly available to confirm what defence analysts had been suspecting for a while now: the military effectiveness of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) is deficient. This article proposes that this condition is due to strategic failure, brought about by the dynamic interaction between the preferred strategic management model of the organisation and its acquired strategic culture(s). The study on which this article reports, further suggests that a design school strategic management model best explains the method towards the SANDF's current condition of organisational entropy, but that its root cause actually lies in a dichotomous strategic culture. In combination, these two variables conspired to diminish the defence force's responsiveness to its operational context, resulting in the formation of inappropriate strategy that prevented the SANDF from achieving military effectiveness. While the authors consider the article to be hypothesis generating, it also has an exploratory dimension and paves the way for a validational study at a later stage. Part 1 therefore argues towards a strategic management model that could explain the SANDF's strategy formulation process, its method of ensuring that strategic outcomes correlate with strategic intent, and ultimately its weakness in accounting for the external environment in realised strategy. This first part mainly employs inductive reasoning and draws its conclusions from an eclectic literary review that included business studies and dynamic systems theory.

This document represents part of a post-conflict interaction and reconciliation process between retired Special Forces Operators of the South African Special Forces and retired Special Forces personnel of the People's Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN) who fought against one another during the War in Namibia in the 1970s and 1980s.

The analysis reported here focused on the dynamic interaction between a preferred strategic management model of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) on the one hand, and the SANDF's acquired strategic culture on the other. From a theoretical perspective, the analysis draws attention to the fact that the properties of institutional culture inform the extent to which an organisation (such as the SANDF) suffers the deleterious consequences of an inappropriate management model. The article therefore argues that the military's lack of consensus on an appropriate political culture, the lack of a suitable social culture and the lack of an effective military culture have resulted in maintaining the continued viability of two discrete, concurrent strategic cultural paradigms in the SANDF: that of the defunct SADF 2 (initially dominant), and that of the obsolete MK 3 (currently governing). The uneasy coexistence of these two paradigms, each with its own worldview and value system, has confounded the efforts of the SANDF to form an appropriate intended strategy and to realise military effectiveness in its execution. A dichotomous strategic culture has, in effect, reinforced the weaknesses of the SANDF's strategic management model, impeded organisational responsiveness, maximised organisational entropy, and encouraged the defence force's systemic decline – the latter, a fact that the Defence Review 2014 specifically acknowledges in the discussion of the review's first milestone. 4 This part mainly employs deductive reasoning and draws its conclusions from a focused literary review.

This article provides a critical assessment from a strategic perspective of the South African military involvement in the Central African Republic that culminated in the Battle of Bangui. The strategic assessment was aimed at an understanding of the South African armed forces and their government's strategic approach and logic (i.e. strategic ways) through a consideration of, firstly, their strategic objectives and end states and, secondly, a critical reflection on the military means that were available and employed in the Central African Republic. The authors question the logic of South African political and military objectives through an emphasis on the absence of South African interests in the Central African Republic, the failure of the executive to inform parliament, the dubious and blurred intentions of the African National Congress government and the absence of a clear political–military nexus for the operation. The lack of sufficient military capabilities for the deployment was assessed through a consideration of overstretch, obsolescence, neglect and mismanagement of military resources. The article concludes that not only did the government set the military up for failure; it also succeeded in creating the perfect conditions for a strategic fiasco.

The South African attack on Cassinga an alleged South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO) base during the Border War remains highly controversial. For some Operation Reindeer as it was called, was an undisputed military highlight, a most successful airborne operation and a victory over the SWAPO and its military arm, the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN). For others it was an undisputed massacre of civilian refugees in an Angolan town far north of the Namibia/Angola border. The drifting dust and smoke of past battles interfere seriously with seeing a clearer picture. In this review article three different works from different (even serious contradictory) perspectives by three authors are discussed in an attempt to get more clarity on this much disputed event and its outcomes.

An article to the effect that the Angolan War was essentially a Cold War conflict between the Soviet Union and its proxies and the Republic of South Africa and its allies. It therefore did not represent an internecine state of hostilities between different polarised sections of the South African population.
(Note: There is a statistical error in the attached article. The figure of 300 000 Soviet Personnel refers to all Soviet personnel in Angola during that period - not military personnel alone. Soviet military and intelligence personnel in Angola during the period of the Angolan War numbered between 13 000 to 16 000).

O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar as potencialidades de concepção e desenvolvimento de produtos e serviços de Defesa entre duas importantes economias emergentes e atores regionais: O Brasil e a África do Sul. Considerando o recente histórico da Base Industrial de Defesa dos dois países, verifica-se o declínio de sua participação no cenário internacional. Contudo, a julgar pelo recente crescimento econômico, as ambições políticas no sistema internacional, além do know-how técnico-científico herdado historicamente (presente e potencial). Entre Brasil e África do Sul, existem grandes possibilidades de cooperação bilateral e multilateral para concepção, desenvolvimento e produção conjunta de produtos e serviços de defesa, em vários projetos setoriais de armas leves, blindados, meios navais e aeroespaciais, veículos aéreos não-tripulados (VANTs) e outros sistemas de defesa. Estes países poderão despontar como importantes inovadores, produtores, exportadores e provedores desses produtos de defesa para suas necessidades internas, mas também para seus entornos estratégicos na América do Sul e na África Austral.

A paper dealing with post-conflict interaction and reconciliation between combat veterans of the South African Special Forces and combat veterans of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union, who fought against one another during the Angolan War.