Last Wednesday, defence & military veterans minister Angie Motshekga stood before parliament as it debated the defence budget vote. While outlining the R57.6bn budget’s priorities, she noted that “strategic work has already been undertaken with government to restore coherence to defence spending”, including a series of strategic papers referred to together as Journey to Greatness.
The document is heavy with jargon, diagrams, bullet points and concepts. Yet buried beneath the language of renewal is a startling picture. The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) is not just in crisis — it has reached a point of institutional collapse.
The military still has uniforms, ranks, headquarters and ceremonial prestige, but it increasingly lacks credible capability. Its own documents admit as much. Aircraft are unserviceable, naval infrastructure has deteriorated. The border is porous and inadequately defended.
Logistics systems are overstretched, with troops lacking adequate accommodation, boots and uniforms. Prime mission equipment is ageing faster than it can be repaired, but operational commitments continue to expand while deployable capability contracts.
Since the release of the 2015 Defence Review, the department of defence has framed its environment as one of decline, with that review setting the first priority as “arresting the decline”. Eleven years later, it is clear the decline has continued.
Of particular concern is not the ambition of the latest strategic plan but its detachment from reality. It imagines a future force built around rapid deployment capability, digital transformation, cyberdefence, border surveillance systems, regional mobilisation areas and long-term defence force evolution strategies stretching over three decades.
A military unable to secure fundamentals cannot pretend to have the ability to plan for 30 years. Long-term defence planning assumes a functioning institutional core, something that no longer exists within the SANDF. Furthermore, the department is trying to project future capability while struggling to preserve any capability at present.
For instance, the Gripen fleet, the main combat capability of the South African Air Force, requires R4.96bn to regain operational status for 26 aircraft. After salaries, the entire air force budget is only R2.7bn.
And armies do not normally launch strategic recovery plans around the provision of boots and habitable accommodation, unless institutional decay has already reached severe levels.
South Africa’s defence establishment has produced no shortage of grand strategy, starting with the 1996 white paper on defence, which focused on transformation. The Defence Review of 1998 laid out defence force design ambitions, centred on the belief that South Africa would never again be involved in conflict outside its borders.
The 2015 review again promised a path towards a sustainable and modern force that could fulfil its constitutional mandate, “to defend and protect the republic, its territorial integrity and its people in accordance with the constitution and the principles of international law regulating the use of force”.
The crisis is not merely the result of insufficient funding, though this remains a core issue. It is also the product of three decades of dawdling, producing strategies and leaving them unimplemented and unfunded.
Policy after policy has identified the same structural weaknesses: unsustainable personnel costs, ageing soldiers and equipment, capability erosion, procurement dysfunction and strategic overstretch. The institution has repeatedly failed to execute any meaningful reform before the next policy cycle began.
This is not austerity; this is national suicide dressed up as fiscal prudence
— Carl Niehaus
Official doctrine still imagines a credible military capable of continental influence, maritime security, regional intervention and sophisticated joint operations. However, operational reality shows a force now focusing its efforts on border patrols, anticrime deployments, election support and disaster response.
The 2026 defence budget offers perhaps the clearest admission yet of institutional failure, with the minister describing a “fundamental and persistent misalignment between mandate, expectations and funding”.
And yet the proposed solution remains another sweeping long-term transformation agenda.
Journey to Greatness aims for a force that is technologically modernised, rapidly deployable, digitally integrated, regionally influential and strategically agile — ambitions not merely difficult but unattainable under current fiscal, political and institutional conditions.
The document imagines that if all goes well, the SANDF can be magically rebuilt with just the right amount of funding. Yet institutions in such a state of collapse do not recover through vision statements and planning frameworks but through ruthless simplification and credible prioritisation, which the defence leadership seems incapable of doing.
Instead, the SANDF continues to believe it can do everything simultaneously. Additionally, it hopes to contribute to youth development, employment and technological modernisation. This is the logic of an institution unwilling to admit its strategic contraction.
Then there is the political problem. South Africa’s governing class still appears reluctant to decide on what kind of military the country wants, and too naive to consider what it might actually need. The constitutional mandate remains expansive, but funding continues to be inadequate.
Thus, the SANDF drifts between rhetoric and reality.
The greater danger here is not merely military weakness or political embarrassment, it is institutional exhaustion. Skilled personnel have been lost and experience has been hollowed out, leading to an absence of organisational memory and internal confidence. Outside the top ranks, troops are exhausted and despondent.
Its leadership is correct about one thing, however — the current trajectory is unsustainable. The EFF’s Carl Niehaus gave a sobering response to the minister’s speech, saying: “This is not austerity; this is national suicide dressed up as fiscal prudence. The SANDF is in the throes of collapse.”
He added that “the so-called Journey to Greatness plan will remain empty rhetoric unless it is properly costed, has proper timeframes for implementation and is fully funded”.
The answer is a far less glamorous process: accepting that much of the old force no longer exists and building a capable, coherent and genuinely functional military from the ground up. The SANDF must learn to walk again before it can achieve “greatness”.
The attempt to preserve every mission has already resulted in a force capable of none at sufficient scale. Real reform would mean that the navy takes central focus, given South Africa’s geography and maritime economy. Perhaps peacekeeping ambitions should be drastically curtailed and the army should focus on irregular warfare and strategic deterrence.
The vagueness of the document leaves many questions unanswered. Aside from quoting ANC statements, which do not give any answers but only prompt further questions about who the SANDF serves, the document reiterates that “the Defence Review 2015 remains the approved defence policy”.
While it discusses force design, which refers to how the defence force and its components are structured, it does not give any details. Instead, the document states: “The SANDF can at present not maintain or achieve the currently approved force design or blueprint force design.” It does not say what such a design entails.
Nowhere in the document does the word “mechanised” appear. Historically, mechanised infantry, mounted on Ratel infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), have formed the backbone of South Africa’s land combat power. The Ratel was a revolutionary design, and as a system proved pivotal during the Border War years. It was the foundation of South African army doctrine.
“IFV” does not appear in the document either. “Artillery” appears only three times, despite the fact that South African artillery technology remains world-renowned and artillery pieces have been lucrative defence exports. The G5 and G6 artillery systems gave South Africa an advantage in Angola that Soviet military planners admitted they had no answer for, and both remain in service.
So, what sort of military does the document envision?
“The military, as part of the national security agenda, will focus on the safeguarding of the nation through military missions and securing the physical sovereignty of South Africa through border safeguarding, maritime security, airspace control, internal stabilisation operations in support of internal security and disaster relief operations.”
This may seem all good and well, but points to a military that does not see external threats, only internal ones. “Deterrence” does appear in the document, but only 11 times throughout the 322 pages, and without definition or detail.
Instead, the document suggests that the desired military is not one that defends the nation but one that could ensure internal stability. It appears the interest is less in a force that can act as an extension of foreign policy and more in one that can prevent an uprising or suppress dissent.
“External” appears 72 times throughout the document; “internal” 170 times. Journey to Greatness does not map a route to regional influence, deterrence or defence co-operation. Is it envisioning a force designed to defend the country’s government, rather than its people?
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