A danger of becoming a 'hollow force', writes Helmoed Römer Heitman

Two years ago it was becoming quite clear that South Africa's enthusiasm for taking part in African peace support operations was outrunning its capacity, that the SANDF was facing serious "overstretch".

The situation has worsened; the SANDF faces a very real danger of becoming a "hollow force", a force that has all the trappings, but lacks the ability to conduct sustained operations.

The SANDF today has battalion groups or the equivalent in Burundi and the DRC, a re-inforced company group in Darfur, specialised support elements and a training team in the DRC, and staff officers serving with the AU and UN missions in Ethiopia and Eritrea and with the UN mission in Liberia.

In addition, the government has agreed to be one of four countries to provide troops for an envisaged 10 000-strong force that the AU hopes to deploy in the eastern DRC to finally clear our the Rwandan guerrillas based there.

There are also rumours that South Africa has agreed to expand its force in Darfur, and the president has promised to provide training and other personnel in Cote d'Ivoire.

That is all in line with the government's commitment to Africa and to Nepad, and it all makes perfect sense: South Africa needs a stable and secure environment, which cannot be achieved or maintained without the necessary military commitment.

As the largest economic power in Africa, it is clearly also up to South Africa to make at the very least a commensurate contribution to that military commitment.

The problem is that South Africa is attempting to make that commitment without providing its armed forces with the funding they need for the purpose.

The key issue here is that while the SANDF's operational commitments have steadily expanded since 1998, its operating budget has steadily declined in real terms over the same period. That is a formula for failure.

Far worse, every new operational commitment has seen the SANDF forced to meet the initial cost out of its current budget, additional funds only being voted later.

That money cannot be taken out of salaries, nor can equipment contracts be cancelled; so money is taken from training, from mainten-ance or from the already inadequate R&D budget. Each time that happens, it creates a hole that is never filled.

Even the partial reimbursement from the UN - the AU cannot afford to reimburse - is just that, a reimbursement: First there is a hole to fill, then, at some time in the future, a portion of that money is reimbursed and may find its way to the armed forces - if the treasury does not squirrel it away in its notorious B7 account, never to be seen again.

The result has been that for the better part of a decade the SANDF has not been able to train properly, to maintain its equipment properly, or to maintain its infrastructure.

The army, for instance, last ran a full brigade-level exercise a decade or so ago, while the air force and the navy lack the flying hours and sea-days to be truly proficient in even their primary roles; and at the level of individuals, there never seems to be quite enough money to present promotion courses for all of those who need to attend them.

Another major problem is that the SANDF does not have the personnel strength to be able to meet the demands of its current operational commitments without difficulty.

It has been forced to deploy some of its personnel for six months in eighteen, and a few particularly unlucky ones for six months in twelve.

That does nothing for family life; means they cannot attend courses and therefore can't be promoted; it means proper unit training is almost impossible, causing operation-al capability to decline.

The result is, inevitably, that some members attempt to dodge deployments and others begin to look for other employment, causing the SANDF to lose critical expertise and ex-perience that it cannot replace quickly.

Other armed forces have been down this road and have learned the lessons. They try to keep the sustained deployment cycles of operational units to about six months in every three years.

The army suffers the most in this respect. Its lack of personnel strength results partly from a force design that is inadequate for the commitments, but also from the fact that too many in its junior ranks are over-age, unfit or ill and not deployable.

They cannot, however, be shed because there is no workable "exit mechanism", and there is no money to recruit sufficient younger personnel.

All of the services are also suffering from the usual drain of technical and other highly skilled personnel that all armed forces suffer in times of peace and economic growth.

Here it has been aggravated by affirmative action policies that have driven too many white personnel out of the armed forces and side-lined others - and their expertise and experience with them - before they could pass on to the new generation of officers and NCOs what they learned in two or three decades of service.

The bill for that will be presented in some future operation, when the lack of experience, in particular, will make itself felt at an inopportune moment.

While it is going too far to say that the SANDF is falling apart, it does find itself in an unsustainable situation that must be resolved, lest it does result in terminal decline.

The solution cannot be to cut back South Africa's regional security role. That would be to turn our back on our neighbours, quite apart from undermining the very regional stability that South Africa needs for its own development.

The solution also cannot lie in stopping the re-equipment of the armed forces.

The SANDF must be re-equipped if it is to be credible and effective, and we owe it to our troops to provide them with the equipment that enables them to perform their duties at acceptable risk.

The solution must be to provide the defence force with the funding that it needs to train, equip and maintain, and to conduct the operations assigned to it.

That will require a sustained expenditure of around 2% of GDP, quite possibly with a small hike above that in the short term to undo the damage done since 1990.

It is also imperative that the government sets aside contingency funds to cover the first phases of future peace support operations so that those can be launched without the armed forces having to disrupt training and maintenance to do so.

That is the bad news. The good news is that much of the additional funding would be spent inside South Africa, and most of it on recruiting young people to give the army the strength it needs for its role.

With acknowledgements to Helmoed Römer Heitman and the Daily News.