UNIVERSITY OF THE
WESTERN CAPE
DEPARTMENT
OF RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT
SOUTH
AFRICAN NAVY KUS INDABA
ANNUAL
MARITIME TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH CONFERENCE
2002-03-05
DINNER
SPEECH ABOARD SAS DRAKENSBERG, SIMON’S BAY
RENFREW
CHRISTIE
How died
Yamamoto? How died the naval genius
that sank a fleet in a morning at Pearl Harbour, while the Americans thought his
carriers were still playing peacefully in the Sea of Japan?
How died Yamamoto?
Admiral
Isoroku Yamamato died of punctuality, and of code breaking. He ran his life to a split second timetable.
He broadcast that timetable, using a top-secret code, which the Americans
read, using IBM machines.
Do not
assassinate your enemy leader lightly. Another
might replace him, better for them, worse for you.
But America’s Admiral Nimitz was advised that Yamamoto was the best
ever. He understood naval airpower.
Exceptionally bright, he was aggressive, determined and quick.
His sailors worshiped him. So
Nimitz ordered Admiral Halsey to shoot down Yamamoto’s plane.
Major
Mitchell and Captain Lanphier flew at wave top height, to avoid the Japanese
radar. The intercept point was at
the limit of their range. They had
no waiting time. But Yamamoto was
always punctual. He died in the
wreck of his bomber in the Bougainville jungle.
His ashes were buried in Tokyo, before an immense and brooding crowd.
His death did for Japan, what Hansie Cronje did for South African
cricket: massive, crippling demoralisation.
Cryptanalysis won a victory.
How won
the Germans at Tannenberg, in August 1914?
They killed 30 000 Russians and took 100 000 prisoners.
This victory gave Hindenburg the popularity to become Supreme Commander,
then Chancellor. Russian morale was
devastated. Historians draw a
straight line from Tannenberg, to the Red Revolution of 1917. This was the first stumble down the slippery slope to the
ruin of Russia’s rulers.
How won the
Germans at Tannenberg? The Russians
broadcast their orders en clair. The
Germans knew every Russian move ahead of time.
Listening won a victory.
I come from
a family of South African Second World War heroes, with bullet wounds and
missing fingers to prove it. Be
clear, I am no hero. They were the
heroes. They bombed the Rumanian
oilfields. They were torpedoed on
the Murmansk run. They trod on
mines in the Western desert and lived to tell the tale.
And tell the tales they did, over their beers, in the nineteen-fifties.
Theirs were the stories of my childhood.
Except Tobruk. The capture
of an entire South African Division, its actual surrender?
Not a word. Until, as an
adult, I read a book.
How fell
Tobruk? Well, the German tanks were
better than the British. No,
really, how fell Tobruk? Well, the
29th Indian Brigade and the 7th Armoured Division used a
radio, on 16 June 1942, talking en clair, to plan their attack from the
El Adem Box, outside Tobruk. Rommel
was listening, Rommel knew their plans, Rommel counter-attacked through the El
Adem Box, Tobruk was surrounded, and Tobruk surrendered to Rommel on 20th
June! How fell Tobruk? To a radio blabbermouth, and my uncles were silent evermore.
I could go
on, and on. David Kahn has written
a wonderful 300 000 word book on it, The Code Breakers (London, Sphere,
1968, 1973), from which the examples above are drawn. By
now you will have de-ciphered my message. Battle
after battle was lost, not to skill, not to bravery, but because some idiot
blabbered on the telephone, speaking either en clair, or in a broken
code, which is the same thing.
Today,
secrecy of communications is ultra high tech, using frequency hopping,
tropospheric scatter, and supercomputer encryption, and yet fourteen year olds
can still hack into the Pentagon with a Pentium IV.
Gifted children like Mark Shuttleworth make billions off encryption, and
go play Spaceman in Russia, for lack of something better to do.
E Business is still too insecure to take off.
Nothing has changed.
The most
important thing a Navy does is to keep its own communications secret, and to
de-cipher those of others. This is not merely a force multiplier using
technology. It is a force
devastator: Ours, or Theirs? This
is not something you let a foreigner do for you.
Do codes yourself! And
don’t trust your own government. Many
battles have been lost because of cracking of diplomatic codes.
Throughout history, Foreign Affairs Departments leak like sieves.
I will bet a bottle of Klipdrift that twenty countries daily read the
Secret Breakfast Thoughts of Deputy Minister Aziz Pahad!
Pity them.
I do not
know how good the SA Navy is at encryption and code breaking.
I do not want to know. It
should be Top Secret! But if you
are not up there with the ten best in the world, then take off your uniforms,
stick your swords in the Simon’s Town Museum, put on grey suits with grey
shoes, and go count mealies with the civil servants in Pretoria!
If the Americans, or the British, or the French, or whoever, can read
your signals traffic, then close the SA Navy, because someone else, who might be
our enemy, will be reading the Americans, or the British, or the French, or
whoever. Secret signals matter
vitally.
You will
also have gathered that I think Navies are not about peace keeping.
If they are good enough at war fighting, they might also keep the peace.
The job of Navies is war fighting. A
peacetime Navy is oxymoronic, a contradiction in terms.
War can fly in the window anytime. I
believe that South Africa, as a country with an economy in the top twenty in the
world, measured by Gross Domestic Product, needs an Army, a Navy, and an Air
Force, or somebody will take that Gross Domestic Product away from us.
Luckily, our Cabinet agrees with me.
We have a Defence Force, or we are somebody’s lunch.
But that
defence force cannot be a million uneducated troepies.
We must use technological force multipliers, so that we release women and
men to do economically more productive things, like building the houses and
schools and clinics that our people deserve.
Large conscript armies spell trouble.
Instead, we have a small professional military, with up to date
technology. That is why the Cabinet
is sticking to the packages through thick and thin. Not that we need 100% cutting edge technology.
Sometimes 80% technology, at 50% of the cost, will do just fine.
A robust AK 47 is better than a fancy M16 that jams if you sneeze. We cannot afford all the whistles and bells, nor should we.
The correct
military budget is an optimum. It
is not too little, nor too much. Too
little, and you give the country to other people. Too much, and your people starve. You need a happy medium amount of it. It’s just like sex.
The present
1,7% of our GDP, spent on the SANDF, is too little.
Even the World Bank recommends more than that, not that the World Bank
has got anything right about African economies in decades.
If the SANDF is to be able to fight a possible War, and to keep the
Peace; if the SANDF is to lead the Transformation, the Integration, and the
Modernisation of our country; if the SANDF is to show us how to be One Nation,
One Renaissance, One Knowledge Economy, and One Rainbow; if the SANDF is to give
True Leadership to Africa, then the SANDF needs more cash.
But why
would anyone give the SANDF more cash, when it spends so much money on Generals
in Pretoria? We have too many
Generals. Why would anyone give the
SANDF more cash, when the arms of service do not work together seamlessly, when
Joint Operations seem to have more to do with smoking dagga joints, or carving
our Sunday roast beef joints? Do we
take military Joint Operations seriously?
This Navy
should never leave port on an exercise, without SAAF aircraft overhead.
You should always have soldiers, fly boys and fly girls on your bigger
ships, if only as liaison officers. Never
go to sea without them. I hope I am
wrong, but the SA Navy seems desperately unconscious of the Air.
It also needs to play with its soldiers more often.
Sixty years
ago, Prime Minister Jan Smuts watched the battleship, HMS Prince of Wales,
in Table Bay Docks. Six hundred
motorcars lined up, to take the sailors of the Royal Navy off, to classic Cape
Town hospitality. Two weeks later,
they were dead. Jan Smuts had
repeatedly telegraphed Churchill, DO NOT SEND PRINCE OF WALES EAST
WITHOUT AIRCOVER. Churchill had
ignored Smuts. The Japanese had
sunk Prince of Wales, and Repulse.
They were dead and drowned.
Sixty years
later, does the SA Navy understand its own Air Force, let alone any other?
Do we exercise together often enough?
Why are our helicopter contracts unsigned?
Are we buying enough UAVs? Why
are we buying too few maritime helicopters?
They break. We should have
two per ship, and four spares. Can
an enemy read our signals communications more easily than the SA Army or the
SAAF can read us? Warfare is six
dimensional: on the sea, under it, by land, in the air, in space, and in the
full electromagnetic spectrum. Do
we think and exercise six dimensional joint ops always?
Or are joint ops like sex, once a year?
Have we got
the Air right, even on the patrol corvettes?
Helmoed Heitman claims that the ejected casings from the 35 millimetre
guns will hit our own helicopter blades. Heitman
says the mounting area for the Special Forces crane is a perfect reflector for
enemy airborne radar. Heitman
believes the heat plume, from the emergency gas turbine exhaust, on the port
side, will bring down our own helicopters, which land from the port side.
Heitman asks whether the heat plume will fry the fire control sensors for
the 35 millimetre guns, thus laying us open to missile attack?
It is ninety years since aircraft first took off from ships, and sixty
years since Smuts warned about HMS Prince of Wales’s vulnerability to
the Air. Has the SA Navy got the
Air right yet? I do so hope so.
Because we must
have a Navy. At the absurdly cheap
price we got the first four, we should have purchased eight patrol corvettes.
We still could: Germany wants us to have a Navy.
That is why the price is so low. We
should have bought four submarines, not three.
Even the best German steel leaks, and needs sticky putty stuck in it now
and again. I know.
I drive old Mercedes Benzes. We
need another Soviet Ice Breaker, but then I am a sucker for seriously robust
ships at insanely cheap prices. We
need maritime air. We should
persuade our Air Force not to sell the Boeings that might otherwise enable the
Gripens to give air cover to our Navy.
I also think
we may not have given enough thought to coastal and littoral operations.
In the coming decades we are going to have to put soldiers onto a hot
beach, or take them off. The Law of Concentration of Force says that Half a Battalion
will die, where a Brigade Group might live.
Our sealift capability is too small.
In short, we
need a bigger defence budget. But
we do not need more Tanks. We have
got enough Tanks. We need more
Ships. The money is there.
Look at the millions unspent from the Lotto, the billions unspent from
the Skills Levy. Spend it on the
Navy, and, because of the fall in the Rand, tell the Navy to spend some of it on
home grown technology.
Given the
tiny budget we spend on it, the SA Navy is pretty good! It is smart, it is technologically advanced, and it is
stealthy. It is transforming well
(but it could do better?) It is
getting new ships and submarines. Above
all, the SA Navy has a fine bunch of skilled, committed people in it.
The heart of a Navy is its officers and sailors, its men and women.
I have been watching the people of the SA Navy very carefully since 1990,
and for my money the people of the SA Navy are damned good.
As one more ordinary South African citizen, I thank you for the excellent
work you do. We notice, and we are
grateful.
PROFESSOR
RENFREW CHRISTIE, DEAN OF RESEARCH, UWC, PRIVATE BAG X 17 BELLVILLE 7535.
PHONE
021 9592949, EMAIL RCHRISTIE@UWC.AC.ZA
Professor Renfrew Christie D.Phil Oxford
Dean of Research
University of the Western Cape
Private Bag X 17
Bellville 7535
South Africa
Ph work : +27.21.959 2949
Fax work : +27.21.959 3170
Ph home : +27.21.686 4722
Email : rchristie@uwc.ac.za