The state of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), coupled with a command vacuum at the very top of the state, renders the country vulnerable to unprecedented security risks.
The SANDF has never been weaker. Thanks to sustained nominal and real budget cuts, the state has failed to invest adequately in defence for the whole of the 21st century so far. This neglect was compounded by the impact of corruption through state capture in state-owned arms companies Denel and Armscor.
It is not as if there had been no warning. The 2015 Defence Review offered, in masterly detail, a diagnosis of the problems. But its sensible and far-reaching recommendations went nowhere.
Frustration within the SANDF has boiled over in unprecedented public comment by senior generals and admirals.
During a visit to the SANDF headquarters by then deputy defence minister Thabang Makwetla last year, South African Navy chief Vice Admiral Monde Lobese described the country’s armed forces as being in “intensive care”.
“The navy is now unable to provide combat-ready vessels at the required capability levels for the republic’s defence or meet its international duties and commitments,” he said. Last month in parliament, Lobese accused the National Treasury of “sabotage” due to the chronic underfunding of the SANDF.
Only one of the navy’s four Valour-class frigates, SAS Amatola, is operational, and it is limited to low-intensity patrol tasks. In May 2025, the Indian navy visited South Africa to conduct joint submarine operational sea training. However, training was curtailed when SAS Manthatisi, the only one of the navy’s three Heroine-class submarines considered semi-operable, was unable to submerge due to technical faults.
Our borders are porous, and they’re porous because you, the politicians, have decided you want a Mickey Mouse defence force
— Ntshavheni Maphaha
In February, surgeon general Lt-Gen Ntshavheni Maphaha hit out at politicians: “How many of you will build a beautiful and expensive house and not fence it and protect it? I don’t think any of you will do that. Constitutionally, the SANDF is mandated to protect and defend the country.
“We are sharing our grant for the poor with people who are not supposed to share the grant, and that is because we are not protected. Our borders are porous, and they’re porous because you, the politicians, have decided you want a Mickey Mouse defence force.”
Such candid public expressions of opinion by serving officers are unprecedented in the history of South African civil-military relations, and highly unusual elsewhere. They reflect a disturbing degree of professional frustration — and a lack of political grip.
The argument against higher defence spending has historically been that South Africa does not face external threats and must prioritise social spending. But the strategic picture has changed.
Externally, the nature of warfare is shifting.
“Global insecurity is rising sharply,” says African Defence Review director Darren Olivier. “The US is moving back from being a world policeman. The US, Russia, China and other countries are in essence rejecting the post-World War 2 moratorium on annexing by force. You have a lot of countries seeking to capture territory, to change the status quo, to really use force in a way that hasn’t been seen in a long time.”
China, India, Russia, Pakistan and most European countries are beefing up their military capabilities or signalling their intention to do so.
For South Africa, the gloss of the “rainbow nation” has faded. The country’s deteriorated relationship with the US, still the world's No 1 military power, predates the Trump era and leaves South Africa needlessly isolated.
This vulnerability comes as the leadership of the SANDF and defence analysts are perceiving growing external as well as internal threats. They argue that the country has not faced a more perilous security environment in the democratic era.
They cite the Islamist insurgency in northern Mozambique and its potential for a refugee influx to South Africa due to porous borders. Aside from the situation in Cabo Delgado in Mozambique, it is crucial for South Africa to ensure the Mozambique channel and its own coastal waters are safe from threats of piracy.
“Something like 90% of South Africa’s goods by economic value goes and comes by sea,” says Olivier. Threats to commercial traffic could cause supply constraints and increase insurance costs. Vital fishery interests are now unprotected.
South Africa also has an international obligation to police a vast area across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, all the way down to Antarctica. It is currently incapable of discharging these responsibilities, as confirmed publicly by Lobese last year.
Internally, the ANC’s loss of the 2024 election and the country’s entry into coalition territory have resulted in an explosion of political forces scrambling for dominance. The need for a professional, apolitical, well-funded and constitutionally grounded defence force has never been more urgent.
The SANDF should also play a social role, as in dealing with inevitable natural disasters, likely to intensify given the climate crisis. When floods hit the Eastern Cape recently, it took a week to dispatch a single helicopter to support rescue efforts.
The 2015 Defence Review acknowledged all these realities and responsibilities. It put forward five scenarios for the future, with the most basic being a plan to “arrest the decline”. This would have entailed increasing defence spending in real terms, just to enable the SANDF to mark time — that is, maintain capacity as it stood then.
The review was endorsed by the defence minister at the time and none of its analysis or recommendations was refuted or challenged. Yet “not a single milestone in that 2015 Defence Review was actually ever achieved”, says DA spokesperson on defence Chris Hattingh.
“So we sit now in a situation where we barely have an air force. We used to be effective in our international operations because of our equipment, what remained of that, but also with the quality of our soldiers and their commitment.
“But it all fell apart, as we’ve seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC]. There was no close air support and we were humiliated. We couldn’t even move our injured soldiers out. It took a month to get even the critically injured soldiers to 1 Mil [1 Military Hospital in Tshwane].” Troops had to be brought home in a chartered Tanzanian civilian aircraft.
Altogether 24 soldiers were killed and 174 were wounded in the DRC, prompting a humiliating withdrawal. The SANDF’s structural problems were laid bare during the second Battle of Goma, where 14 casualties occurred.
The deployment, under the Southern African Development Community mission in the DRC, was intended as a peace enforcement operation to support Congolese forces in neutralising armed insurgent groups.
However, the government treated it as a peacekeeping mission, a fundamentally different mandate, requiring less force and fewer resources. From the outset, analysts warned that the mission lacked air support, appropriate weaponry, transport, medical evacuation capability and the force density necessary for success.
Those warnings proved prescient: the gap between South Africa’s regional peace ambitions and its military capacity was now clear. The SANDF performance in the DRC is widely seen as a strategic and operational failure. Public anger flared after photos emerged showing the chiefs of the army and air force playing golf as news of the casualties broke.
SANDF chief Gen Rudzani Maphwanya’s tribute to the fallen soldiers in SA Soldier magazine indicated that emotions and tempers ran high within the force over the DRC mission.
“Each of you must rise above the turmoil and lean on the values that have guided us through challenges before. We are duty-bound to control our emotions and maintain integrity. Voices may attempt to sow division or question our purpose. I say to you: do not be distracted. This is not the time for grievances or debates that undermine our unity.”
Military experts and international relations scholars are united in their assessment. Effective deterrence, they argue, rests on capability and credibility.
South Africa’s failure to fund and structure its military accordingly has undermined both.
Through the drafting of the 2015 review, Nick Sendall, then chief director for defence policy, repeatedly warned that funding cuts could not continue and would have disastrous consequences. Despite this, cuts were supported in the cabinet and continued all the way through to recent budgets.
The operational capabilities of the SANDF have deteriorated to such an extent that some may be permanently lost.
The internal security threat is no less worrying. Rivonia Circle executive director Lukhona Mnguni says South Africa’s social fabric is at a breaking point due to rising poverty and inequality, and growing frustration at poor or nonexistent service delivery. Mnguni says it’s a ticking time bomb that could explode at the slightest provocation, requiring the SANDF to step in — yet there are serious questions about its capacity to do so.
The decline of the SANDF can be laid squarely at the door of the ANC during its three decades of political hegemony.
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s hands-off leadership style has created a serious vacuum, according to Mnguni.
“The challenge with political vacuums is that at some point you might want to deploy the police or the army, to restore order in society. And then maybe they just don’t do it, because they’ve lost confidence in the political leadership,” he tells the FM.
“Where we are now is whether the political vacuum we have come to witness under this president breaks the chain of command. The more you make people feel continuously vulnerable under your leadership, the more they are likely to take matters into their own hands — to push you to vacate office, or to demonstrate to bring the country to a standstill, to demand a sense of leadership.”
At some point you might want to deploy the police or the army, to restore order in society. And then maybe they just don’t do it, because they’ve lost confidence in the political leadership
— Lukhona Mnguni
Deputy defence minister Bantu Holomisa, himself a former army general, does not see “tanks rolling in from Swaziland, Lesotho or Zimbabwe”, but rather the potential for protests being hijacked. “My main worry is the eruption of civil disobedience, which can be hijacked by third forces.” If the army is asked to assist the police on any meaningful scale, will it have capable commanders, enough troops and the right equipment?
Holomisa recalls how in July 2021, during the mayhem in KwaZulu-Natal after the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma, “I saw troops being carried by civilian buses instead of military trucks”. At that time the SANDF’s lack of logistics capacity was further exposed when commanders were reduced to buying KFC and pizza takeaways to feed soldiers on duty.
Defence analyst Dean Wingrin says post-democratic South Africa has had a very strong separation between civilian and military leadership. However, “in the past couple of years, the defence force being apolitical has started to slip”.
He cites the increasing political commentary coming from speeches by SANDF officers. As if to confirm Wingrin’s point, last week Maphwanya was reprimanded by both the president and the defence minister for stepping into the political terrain on a military visit to Tehran — yet he has been retained in the position.
Still, Wingrin does not see the risk of a coup attempt by the SANDF. Apart from anything else, it would require coherent command and control, a substantial number of fit soldiers, as well as functioning equipment — hardly likely, given the state of the SANDF.
Clearly the SANDF requires an urgent overhaul, but analysts warn that the process will be lengthy and the country is unlikely, even in the next decade, to reach the capabilities to defend itself, its citizens and its economy which it possessed in the 1990s to early 2000s.
Holomisa says social services will remain a priority, but there are discussions taking place between the department of defence, the Treasury and the presidency over addressing the situation. “We are just hoping we will find each other.” The defence department is seeking to close a funding shortfall of about R38bn, to push its allocation to about R200bn in order to “close the gaps”.
The gaps are huge. The South African Air Force (SAAF) has most aircraft grounded due to lack of skills, maintenance backlogs and shortages of spares. Of particular concern is the impending expiry of the maintenance contract for the fleet of Gripen fighter aircraft, scheduled for the end of August 2025 — now just a few days away. So far, no new agreement has been announced.
In a recent response to a parliamentary question, defence minister Angie Motshekga confirmed that the SAAF’s Oryx helicopter fleet now stands at 39 aircraft, though two have been written off due to accident damage. When asked how many of the remaining 37 were operational, she refused to provide a figure. The reply also noted that while the 1996 defence white paper had called for 94 Oryx helicopters, only 50 were ever procured.
In the army, the long-delayed Project Hoefyster has effectively collapsed.
The project, intended to provide 264 Badger infantry fighting vehicles to partially replace the ageing Ratel fleet, has been in development for 18 years. Hoefyster has become one of the lesser-known casualties of state capture, plagued by cost overruns and failed delivery milestones.
The government is believed to have withdrawn its guarantees for the project, effectively signalling its termination. In response, the Council for Scientific & Industrial Research has issued a request for proposals aimed at extending the service life of the Ratel fleet, which first saw combat in the 1970s during the war in Namibia and Angola.
Defence analysts have described the situation as “unsustainable”. Olivier says the best way forward is a “serious and immediate intervention”, but with a recognition that the SANDF will never return to the capabilities it once had. It is not simply funding that is required, but an overhaul of the entire structure.
The SANDF has to be empowered to make decisions faster, Olivier says. “It cannot be that it takes five years just to decide whether to acquire something new. Items go to the minister's desk and sit there waiting for months and months for an answer.
“If you were to try to envision a scenario in which the defence force was intentionally destroyed, vs what’s currently happening through complete neglect, they’re the same.”
Olivier says the quality of ministers and key departmental staff has also been found wanting over the years.
Hattingh says Motshekga’s appointment as minister was inexplicable, given that she had been in the education sector since being appointed to the cabinet in 2009. He says the furore over Maphwanya’s Iran jaunt was due to poor leadership at ministerial level.
Hattingh and analysts canvassed by the FM say former minister Thandi Modise had been thought the most likely to make a positive difference. She showed a keen understanding of the difficulties and was prepared to move with speed to address them — but was replaced by Motshekga after the 2024 elections.
“No matter what Motshekga says and what she does, she’s not going to be the person to turn things around in the defence force, and I think she knows that,” a senior defence insider tells the FM.
From a parliamentary perspective, Hattingh agrees, saying that the minister appears to take cues from the generals when she answers questions.
The force is also ageing, with no succession planning, resulting in talented young officers resigning to join the private sector, says Wingrin.
“There are some very good officers, from all backgrounds, who have the SANDF’s wellbeing at heart. They are bright, well-read — but they’re totally demotivated because of leadership issues and the lack of promotion opportunities. A lot of them are resigning to go to the private sector, because they just can’t take it any more.”
Denel, the state-owned aerospace and defence company, lost a significant chunk of its engineers and technicians during the state capture years, with resignations estimated to be as high as 57%. Many were lost to similar companies in Middle Eastern countries.
Holomisa says it is not too late to get them to return, adding he is working on a proposal to engage these exiles on a possible return to beef up the company.
Analysts and parliamentarians agree that national defence policy and practice is being undermined by outdated assumptions, poor leadership and a lack of institutional competence.
This concern was glaringly confirmed during a parliamentary hearing this year on the department of defence’s 2026 annual performance plan.
The new strategic framework, “Journey to Greatness”, was intended to address gaps identified in the unimplemented 2015 review and offer a pathway to rebuild the force. After multiple delays and mounting pressure from parliament, the document was finally presented.
It was then admitted by Motshekga that “Journey to Greatness” was not a concrete plan. Rather, she described it as a “discussion process” still under development. This came after the joint standing committee on defence had convened a dedicated session to scrutinise the document, expecting a fully fledged strategy.
This embarrassment has further eroded confidence in the department’s leadership and strategic planning capacity. Defence experts have described the situation as symptomatic of a wider institutional drift, with no clear doctrine or implementation mechanism driving military renewal.
Critics agree that simply throwing money at the SANDF would be misguided.
International military practice dictates that roughly a third of a defence establishment’s budget should go to salaries, with a third to purchasing and maintenance of equipment and a third to training and exercises
Yet the SANDF now spends 68% of its budget on salaries, many of them to support ageing and nondeployable members who would have been worked out of the system in other defence forces. In effect, for a quarter of a century the SANDF has prioritised welfare over warfare.
Olivier says South Africa should cut its losses and design a trimmed-down force with capabilities within the budgetary confines. Wingrin agrees, saying there are no quick fixes — any attempt at restoration needs proper planning, avoiding “throwing money” at the problem.
Unless the structural, administrative, leadership and staffing issues within the SANDF are fixed, more money would not make a dent. In any case, reforms now would begin yielding results only in five to 10 years’ time.
In the meantime, South Africa’s vast territorial waters, air space, land mass and its citizens will strongly resemble sitting ducks.
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