The SA Army has unveiled a vision for the next 15 years that will require major changes in the way it thinks and fights. The chief of the army, Lieutenant-General Solly Shoke, said in Pretoria on Tuesday that his Vision 2020 would determine the future direction of the army and also influence what equipment it would buy.
The strategy’s chief writer, Colonel Eddie Drost, cautioned that the vision not be seen as a plan.
Detailed planning would only begin now, he told journalists after briefing defence and arms-industry top brass at the Gerbera officers’ mess in Thaba Tshwane.
Budgeting would only follow after the completion of the planning. The document is set at the strategic level, where nothing was cast in concrete.
Drost said this meant the strategy would and could change as circumstances dictated.
The vision document is the result of 15 months of consultations and study, and is integrated with similar planning in the other services and divisions of the SA National Defence Force.
Likely outcomes of the re-organisation of the army’s structure is the establishing of two field divisions — one mechanised and one motorised — as well as a Special Operations Brigade.
Shoke explained that this brigade would include the army’s parachute capability and would also be able to fight in mountains and make landings on the sea.
The army would also introduce ideas long talked about, but never implemented, such as mission-orientated commands — an approach where junior leaders use their own initiative within a commander’s intent to fulfil a specific mission.
The army disbanded its field divisions and parachute brigade in 2001 as part of a series of business-inspired reforms proposed by Deloitte & Touche, the auditing firm.
This saw the army slim down in the name of cost-saving.
But, said Army Chief Director Force Structure, Lungile Dlulane, the premise that this structure was built on did not include the SA Army supporting South Africa’s foreign policy with large peace-support operations.
As a result, the structure, built on business principles, was found to be unworkable in practise.
”We realised this structure does not give us the capabilities to carry out these tasks [peacekeeping]. This new approach will give us that ability.”
The Army’s main task, as behoves an armed force, is to win, whether in war or in peace.
The Army and its sister services are instruments of national power to be used to achieve South Africa’s foreign policy objectives, particularly the realisation of the African Renaissance and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development.
For this reason, the Army was returning to a more traditional military structure, and will appoint a chief of staff to Shoke. That chief will control a number of subordinate staffs, including personnel, intelligence, training and logistics.
A number of commands will also be created: A ”Forces Command” for force training — meaning large exercises or manoeuvres; a ”Formal Training Command” to supervise the schooling of individual soldiers; a ”Support Command” to look after logistics; and a ”Works Regiment” to train and employ artisans in post-conflict reconstruction and — more prosaically — painting and maintaining the Army’s crumbling buildings.
The Army’s new-motorised division will largely be used for peacekeeping abroad and anti-crime and homeland-security operations at home, while the mechanised division, an all-arms force of infantry, tanks and artillery, backed up with adequate supply troops, will be the Army’s iron fist.
The Special Operations Brigade will be a rapidly deployable, but sustainable force that can quickly deploy anywhere in Africa to put an early end to conflict, but can also stay there more than a few days.
Although Shoke did not spend much time on the origin of the document on Tuesday, he had done so in a paper presented at an Armoured Corps symposium in Bloemfontein in September last year.
”With my appointment as Chief of the Army in July 2004, it became clear that the SA Army had no overarching futuristic frame of reference in place to guide short- and medium-term decisions and actions,” Shoke said in the paper, presented on his behalf by Drost.
”This state of affairs resulted in ‘ad hocery’, inconsistency and non-alignment in our endeavours to achieve objectives which in themselves were incongruent and haphazard.”
Shoke concluded that SA Army Vision 2020 was the destination towards which the army aspired in preparing and providing a professional, dynamic and combat-ready force for the future.
”In democracies, military professionalism involves the basics of soldiering, including adherence to constitutional and national regulations, social responsibility, discipline, expertise, ‘corporateness’ and sound management of resources — all basic contributes that must be in place.
”A dynamic force involves a unique and powerful SA Army that strives to achieve its vision,” Shoke said. — Sapa