The SAAF Forum

SA Army
1) Motorised infantry battalion (9 SA Infantry Battalion);
2) Composite armoured car squadron (1 Special Service Battalion and 1 SA Infantry Battalion;
3) Light artillery battery (1 Light Artillery Regiment);
4) Air-mobile anti-aircraft battery (10 Anti-Aircraft Regiment);
5) Composite signal squadron (1, 2 and 5 Signal regiments); and
6) Sub-sub-units from 2 Field Engineer Regiment and 1 Tactical Intelligence Regiment.

SA Air Force
1) 2 Gripen;
2) 2 C-130BZ transports;
3) 2 Rooivalk;
4) 2 Oryx; and
5) 2 Agusta A-109 helicopters.

SA Navy
1) 1 boat squadron and accompanying marines; and
2) MRS and support elements.

SA Military Health Service
1) Medical task group; and
2) Level two hospital.

SA Military Police
1) 1 Platoon.

All well and good, but where's the quick response without airlift? As Bangui proved, chartering is not good enough when (a) urgency, and (b) a hot zone, are factored.
My humble suggestion: with the Defence Review stalled in Parliament and no prospect of Treasury loosening the purse strings, how about giving up the silly games and co-operate with Africom? Hell, they just raised up their own Air Command this week!

And the Navy will shortly be tasked with patrols on the West Coast of Africa/Gulf of Guinea - a worthy mission in my view, considering the increasing oil imports from this region and the rising piracy.

Then the current missions in DRC, Darfur, Mozambique Channel and Border Patrol.

Any other decent military faced with such demands and this starved of funds, a few conscientious generals - for the good of the military and the country - would have resigned and gone public with their concerns of the perilous way in which the SANDF is getting over-stretched.

What does the rest of the AU Crisis Response Force look like?

Does any other African air force have a proper heavy airlift capability?
According to the Operators list on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilyushin_Il-76#Operators - the African military operators of Il-76s are Algeria with 18 and Congo (Brazzaville) has only 1. (Angola used to have a few but the less said about them the better.) There are a number of civil operators throughout Africa but they can obviously not be relied on for crisis response. Algerian Ilyushins are obviously of very little use to us at the opposite end of the continent and I rather doubt the Congolese one would really be available often.

The problem with US Africom is that they are based in Germany so "rapid response" is rather bit of a stretch.

So basically the crisis response force exists only on paper until somebody (that would be the SA government) gets their heads out of their rear orifices and buys the necessary airlift capacity.

Africom at very short notice, without dedicated air assets, was able to help the French and the Chadians get into Mali; ditto the Burundians into CAR. The SA government needs to dispense with the pretence that they only deal directly with the Pentagon, and not Africom!

On a more charitable note, if they're serious with all these new deployments, could this be a plan to present Treasury with a fait accompli and force them to fund the Defence Review?

ACIRC is folly in my view. It's not heavy enough to be a true intervention force like that which the French sent to Mali, nor is it specialised enough to fulfil the light rapid-reaction intervention role.

That's without even getting into the lack of airlift, which is the achilles heel of this idea. Worse still, the SA government and AU have seemingly refused to approach Africom for assistance with airlift and have approached the Russians, who do not have spare capacity or any presence in Africa, instead.

The whole idea is a knee-jerk reaction to Africa getting embarrassed by its inability to act in Mali, but it has not been properly thought-through or planned. However much we may boast about 'African solutions to African problems' the continent still lacks the infrastructure, funding, training and multinational experience to field a force like this just yet.

The smarter option would be instead to focus on operationalising the African Standby Force, which is based more sanely around regional brigades, and to grow a rapid response capability out of that as experience is gained and common standards adopted.

President Zuma's decision to commit the SANDF to ACIRC, at a cost to the DoD of R4 billion, shows very clearly that his government prioritises its continental boasting rights over the sustainability of the SANDF and the lives of its soldiers. After all, they made no attempt whatsoever to approach Treasury for ad hoc funding for this mission.

well if the other 4 or 5 countries that are part of the ACIRC provide a similar force we may be able to do something.


Only SADC ever conducted a full African stand by force exercise. The rest are just so fractured, poor, inept or a bad combination of all 3 to pull it of.

The SANDF will form the entirety of the ACIRC for the first standby period, which could be anything from three months to a year, depending on when or if the few other African countries who have signed up can contribute their own troops.

The original idea was that all the contributing countries would provide their commitments upfront, so that there would be a pool of 5000 troops to draw from and so that rotation periods could be as short as possible. But South Africa is the only country to have actually committed anything.

That raises the disturbing possibility that the ACIRC could be deployed to some awful conflict zone and not be rotated out because there are no follow-on forces ready to take over. Nor will there be sufficient airlift to remove those 1500 troops in a hurry.

On top of that, the ACIRC mandate is dangerously vague and confused with no clarity on which circumstances might justify its use. For instance, Uganda has already said that it wants to withdraw its forces from South Sudan, where they've been helping keep the peace to some extent, and that the AU will replace them with ACIRC forces. If that's true, it means ACIRC will not be a short-deployment rapid-reaction unit but will be a hugely expensive open-ended deployment for the SANDF in an area that lacks the supporting UN infrastructure.

Then there's the question of funding. It's now very clear that the AU doesn't have the money to pay for any part of ACIRC, so rather than wait until foreign donor funding could be secured South Africa has gone ahead and paid for the first period itself. That's apparently amounted to R4 billion in costs, all taken out of the already-overstretched defence budget, so far in training and force prep alone. A deployment may cost much more, again to be paid by the SANDF out of its own budget.

I agree that the ASF is flawed, what with the SADC Brigade being the only part to have done any real joint training and the final proving exercise (Amani Africa II) having been indefinitely postponed, but that should make us more cautious of concepts like the ACIRC. As a continent we clearly aren't yet ready to take on this level of commitment, so it would be far wiser to continue evolving the well-established ASF structures in order to first build capacity there. Only once we've proven that within the AU we can sustainably create real joint intervention forces can we think about something the size of ACIRC.

A fascinating US study of the French intervention in Mali. Are SANDF officers conducting similar analyses?
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR770.html

I would bet that the answers is yes

I would agree with you 25 years ago sob.
With what happened in CAR, or the issue of troops getting stuck on their way home from the DRC, one doe not know what they are doing that should be done in the SANDF.

I based it on what I know the navies guy study fro around the world and that we looked at other case.

Sob, because I can't find such SANDF studies, I asked earnestly. For example, the SA Journal of Military Studies, hosted by Stellenbosch University, has a number of articles examining Iraq and Afghanistan. Useful, yes. But where are the studies from which a constrained military like SA can learn valuable lessons?

I daresay not in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the expeditionary campaigns France has conducted in Mali and CAR. Further, the afore-mentioned Journal seems to have a dearth of research papers by serving officers.
Looking at the background papers used to craft the current Defence Review, most of the footnotes cite papers by Reserve Force officers. Again, where is the intellectual thought of serving officers?
In conclusion, France has an entire "Lessons Learned Centre" in its equivalent of Joint Ops. Does similar capacity exist in SA, or as I suspect, it's done on an ad-hoc basis?

well the French intervenstion only just took place. Any study may not be public yet.

My bet is any thing a serving officer writes will be at least classified restricted if not higher. I Roland de Vries book he points out that he received requests to translate a lot of his papers from Afrikaans to English so it shows that the current army is willing to learn from the mistakes and success of others.


The SANDF took great strides to stress that they adapt there training post Bangue. So I fully suspect there is some kind of system in place.

I agree SOB, Roland probably wrote the manual on modern bush fighting and we have more than enough experience from the border war. Even the Americans have studied his tactics, there is a post on this elsewhere in this forum. If anything the tactics used by Executive Outcomes operation in Sierra Leone should be studied, they did in a few weeks what no one else could do. I'm still looking for Eben Barlows book on EO.

I don't think the SANDF can any longer speak of what was known as "border war experience". Any of the former SADF personnel left in the N version are now approaching retirement. The few former SADF members that may still be in uniform will have to rekindle experiences from 25+ years ago, so your "experience from the border war" will be no more than a 'braaivleis gesels' these days. There surely can't be anyone left in the SANDF from your 2SAI in Walvisbaai ....

Sierra Leone - no discussion on fighting there can be complete without crediting the British Army and their Operation Palliser in May 2000 and onwards.

I think those experiences have long been put into training manuals and are used as the basis for our training. Also remember that Dickie Lord wrote the fighter training manual for the USAF, so I'm sure he would have helped to shape ours.

I don't know about the British, maybe Neall Ellis will beg to differ but if you can provide any links I'd be grateful.