Mon séjour en Afrique du Sud (Cape Town)

THE SOUTH AFRICAN NAVY AND NAVAL INDUSTRY

We are buying four patrol corvettes and three submarines. These are too few for the job, which the Navy will have to do. Our Navy effectively has to cope with the coasts and seas of the SADC region. The Southern Ocean is not the Baltic! Four ships and three submarines cannot cope with the defence of our ports, activities north of our borders up to the equator in two oceans, looking after the islands of the Southern ocean, as well as protecting sea bed mining and one of the richest fishing grounds in the world. The better decision would therefore be eight patrol corvettes and four submarines. We need to buy helicopters for the ships. We need Maritime Air reconnaissance. We need UAVs. We need more multipurpose sealift vessels.

A thousand examples from history prove that the existence of a highly trained, technologically advanced, loyal, obedient and representative Navy, afleet-in-being, ready and able to fight a war, and to win it, is central to the peaceful existence of any democracy with oceanic borders. Credible fleets-in-being may prevent wars, because (and only because) they can win wars. No constitutional State, founded upon the notion of human fights, can enforce those rights, without a disciplined Defence Force, capable of winning a war, able to enforce the will of the state upon evildoers. In a coastal State, a part of that Defence Force must be at sea. No Navy at sea? No coastal State. No State? No Democracy, no Constitution, no Human Rights, no Peace. Peace depends on our Navy's being at sea.

Amongst the oldest of human truths is the great one of all the religious, "Thou Shalt Not Kill!" But the job of the warrior is to kill. Because it breaks the Commandment to Life, any Navy is an evil organisation. But we keep Navies because they are less evil than the alternatives, which are starvation, rape, death, conquest and slavery. Read any book you care to on slavery, then know why we have a Defence Force and a Navy! Slavery is worse than money "wasted" on a Defence Budget. This is known in politics as the "theory of the second best". The best would be for humans never to go to war, never to kill, invade, conquer and enslave others.

In the eighteenth century the cynical song went,

"God and the Navy we adore

In time of War

But not before."

Like the rest ofthe military, Navies (and God) come in and go out of fashion.

Fickle public opinion comes to believe in what Helmoed Heitman calls "the thousand year peace"; now thinks war is impossible; mocks the heroism of their mothers' and fathers' war; and thinks the existence of the military is the only cause of war. The new heroes are those who play with little balls. Fashion now believes that the abolition of the armed forces will end poverty, destroy HIV-AIDS, educate the poor, win them the Lotto, distribute the Special Skills Levy, and create heaven once more upon the earth. The Defence Budget is cut to ribbons; the civil servants grow plumper and riper for the plucking; the society grows greedier for bribes and luxuries; the poor remain poor; the plagues continue; and the schools get soggier. Suddenly the Sea-Wolf of War is raging at the door, precisely because the Defence Budget and the Navy have disappeared. This cycle is as old as humankind. Like war, it was with us at our dawn; like war, it will be with us at our doom.

For war is central to humanity. War is central to our being. Say human and you say warrior. Say mechanisation and you say force multiplication. Say technologically advanced society, and you say nuclear warriors. Even in the most powerful State in history, war flew in through the window, one lazy September morning. War is in our DNA. War is in every vertebra and in every spleen. War is genetically inherited. W,ar defines humans as precisely as do mammary glands. wombs, and sexual reproduction. We, the higher apes with the enormous brains. are more vicious, more territorial. more driven by adrenalin, more unforgiving, more suicidal for victory, more patient in revenge, and better able to kill, than any other organism in the solar system. We can now kill every animal upon the earth including ourselves, umpteen times over, at the push of three or four buttons. We call this ability "advanced", and believe it proves our "superiority" and "progress".

Sixty million people died in the Second World War, three-quarters of them civilians. Kipling, the poet who foresaw Armageddon sooner and clearer than any person, put it simply in his poem, "Recessional" (1897): "Lest we Forget, Lest we Forget!"

There was war, there is war, and there will be war. And now the more fickle ofthe public think we no longer need a Navy? There will be war. There will be gangsters, nationally and internationally. There will be warlords. There will be pirates. If, and only if, we have a Navy good enough at war fighting, we may prevent the war, capture the gangsters, kill or cure the warlords, punish the pirates, and in a word, we may make peace. Then our children may enjoy human rights. But without a loyal Defence Force, without a strong Navy working integrally with a trained Army and a proper Air Force, there can be no peace, and our children will enjoy no rights.

SPECIAL REASONS WHY SOUTH AFRICA NEEDS A NAVY

South Africa is geographically large. It is twice the size of Texas. It has an even bigger coastline, and a vastly bigger Economic Exclusion Zone than Texas, because of the ownership of those very special treasures, Marion Island and Prince Edward Island. South Africa has better, more enviable natural resources than Texas, oil excepted, and it leads the world in coal-to-oil production technology. It has three times the population of Texas. If only that population were to be educated, to French or German standards, South Africa would be an economic nirvana in Africa. (If we were educated to Australian standards, we might even be able to play cricket). Therefore the bulk of the government's budget is rightly devoted to education, and to the other social things that make better education possible: health, water, electrification, sanitation, roads, clinics, houses, and information systems. The government has delivery problems in these social fields, spending the money too slowly or inefficiently, but the priorities are right, and the speed and efficiency are improving.

It would be criminal to overspend on the Defence Budget and the Navy, when children starve, and mothers cannot read and write. Yet it would be equally criminal to underspend on the Defence Budget and on the Navy. South Africa owns the twentieth largest economy on earth, measured by Gross Domestic Product at purchasing power parity. Without a Defence Force, and without a Navy at sea, that economy would rapidly become somebody's lunch. Enviable natural resources cannot be left undefended, or we will be doing the envying and someone else will be doing the enjoying. On the one hand, the Defence Budget and the Navy must not be too big; or our children will starve; on the other hand, the Defence Budget and the Navy must not be too small, or our country will be stolen, and our children will be slaves. In mathematics this concept is called optimisation. We must not have too little Navy, and we must not have too much Navy.

How much Defence and Navy budget is enough? Opinions differ. Many "White" South Africans believe affirmative action, for people previously harmed by Apartheid, has gone too far too fast, but many "Black" South Africans believe change has hardly started. I agree with these "Black" South Africans, especially with regard to the speed of Transformation in the Defence Force and the Navy. Of course, I could be wrong on Transformation: perhaps doing it slowly will get it right? Yet I do not believe I am wrong about the Defence Budget and the Navy. South Africa spends 1,7% of its Gross Domestic Product on Defence, which is much lower than even the reforming World Bank recommends for developing countries. Of that budget not even a pitiful ten per cent reaches the Navy. We have 197 General officers, mostly in the Army. The United States has about 300 General officers. We have too many Army Generals, not enough Admirals, and not enough ships. We are spending too little on our Navy, and we are endangering our future thereby.

South Africa has been a modern state for over a century. Deep level gold mining revolutionised our engineering, our chemicals, and our electricity industries. With electrified railways, these in turn formed the basis of modern industrialisation. Three periods of war, the first World War, the Second World War, and the Apartheid War, gave protection to South African industry, way beyond what any tariffs could do. Eskom is now the fifth largest single electricity generator in the world. SASOL recently took over a big German chemicals firm, and soon found that the German chemists completely changed their minds about South Africa when taken on tours of the giant hydrocarbon plants at Secunda. They were large beyond their dreams. South Africa is the largest economy in Africa; it generates over half the electricity in Africa, it has equivalent cell phone and personal computer usage. South Africa is a large modern State. A large modern State needs a Defence Budget and a Navy that is equally modern, and equally large. Or it will cease to be a large modern State!

"Lest we forget!" South Africa was reconquered from the sea a hundred years ago. The Anglo Boer War was a very modern industrial land war, of smokeless powder, rifles, pom pours, machine guns, searchlights, ultra modern Krupp Long Tom 155mm guns, and armoured trains. Kipling foresaw the industrial Armageddon of the First World War by watching the trenches of the Anglo Boer War. It was won, in the words of Ian Hamilton VC, because Kitchener conceived the idea of laying down "all the barbed wire in the world" on the South African veld. But it was also won because the Royal Navy could deliver to Table Bay a total of over half a million invading soldiers, from the four corners of the British earth. Hear Kipling in "The Absent Minded Beggar" (the only poem ever to make half a million golden 1900 guineas): "Fifty thousand horse and foot going to Table Bay!" The most successful invaders of South Africa came by sea, because "they" had a Navy, and "we" did not. "Lest we Forget!"

That sea borne invasion had mixed results. The absolute losers were the "Black" people of South Africa. Without that war, we would not be a modem industrial state, but it reduced the wage paid to "Black" gold miners by a third. It fixed the wage at that low rate for seventy-five years. It continued segregation. It paved the way for Apartheid. It made possible a more rigid compound and pass law system, that was forced labour by another name. It separated woman from husband and father from child for a hundred years, by perpetuating the migrant labour system. In sum the Anglo Boer War re-conquered "Black" South Africans, and made them into oppressed Helots for a century. That war came from the sea.

The price paid by "Black" South Africa for not having a Navy, not having a fleet-in-being and at sea, was a century of servitude in the utmost misery. Such a fleet would have been impossible to achieve, for "Black" South Africans then. They thus had little option but to fight as best they could in the land war, and to go down defeated, but the new non-racial South Africa need not repeat the error. We do have the option of a fleet-in-being. The new South Africa needs a Navy big enough to make any aggressor think twice. We cannot win against superpower aggressors, but we can make them think twice before they mess with us. For that we need a Navy at sea.

Then there were the two World Wars, both with vigorous Naval activities around our shores. Some hundreds of our cargo vessels were torpedoed and sunk off our coasts in the Second World War, "Lest we forget!" Both wars saw our soldiers able to make a difference, for the general good of the world, thousands of miles from home, only because they could get there by sea. Even in the age of the Jumbo jet, sealift is still the most efficient and flexible way of moving heavy armies long distances. If we wish to be able to play our part in the keeping of the peace, or in the making of just war, we need a Navy at sea.

South Africa needs a Navy because over ninety-five percent of its trade, in a globalising, specialising world, goes by sea. It needs a Navy because Durban is the busiest port on the continent, and hugely vulnerable to attack. South Africa needs a Navy because it has so few ports, that its lines of communication are dangerously concentrated. South Africa needs a Navy because it lies astride the most important sea way on earth, the line from the Oil Fields of the Persian Gulf to Europe and America, which, when war or emergency has cut the Suez Canal and the land pipelines, becomes umbilical to tee economies of the West. A South African Na could protect or attack that umbilicus, at the 11 of its leaders. South Africa needs a Navy because it has a natural Naval choke point, between Cape Town and the roaring forties, and because the mixing of the Antarctic and Equatorial waters around the Cape make for perfect submarine warfare. With Naval submarines, hiding 41 between the hot and cold layers, the choke point can be closed or opened with ease.

But what of the Air Force? Surely Navies are outmoded, gone the way of the dinosaurs and the big slow battleship hulks? Could not an Air Force close the choke point, and protect Durban? The answer is yes. The old Navy is sunk, and Air Forces can control the seas in the correct circumstances. But Joint Operations can achieve even better war fighting, and even better defence of our country, by the three services training and working together. Submarines have longer endurance and are more secret in their ways than attack fighters. Ships have longer endurance than aircraft, and can deliver larger attacks, especially ifthey have enough helicopters. There is a place for the new Navy, in Joint Operations.

Warfare is now conducted at stunning speeds in six dimensions: by land, on the sea, under the sea, in the air, in space, and in the whole electromagnetic spectrum. No Defence Force deserves that name unless it can operate jointly in five of these [space is special]. No Defence Force deserves the name unless the vast bulk of its training is jointly conducted.

No Army should be unfamiliar with sea borne operations, or unfamiliar with how to fit tanks into ships, or unfamiliar with the effect of seasickness on troops, or unfamiliar with the remarkable power of naval gunfire. The only way to be familiar with these things is to put Armies into ships. I do wonder how often the South African Navy goes to sea, with soldiers aboard?

No Air Force should be allowed to get away, as the South African Air Force does, with pretending that the sea does not exist, with not budgeting for Maritime Air patrols, with not providing for sea borne helicopters, with not having an air tanker fleet sufficient to give air cover to the whole Exclusive Economic Zone; with not having aircraft overhead whenever its Navy leaves port. Joint Operations must become the norm, not the exception. I do wonder how often the South African Navy goes to sea, with the South African Air Force overhead?

In sum, South Africa needs a Navy, because we have the twentieth biggest economy on earth and must protect that economy, because we know from our history that we have been invaded successfully from the sea again and again, for five hundred years, because we are a coastal state with very special geographical features that lend themselves to naval warfare, and because a Navy is a force multiplier to our Army and our Air Force. But frankly, until our Defence Force takes Joint Operations seriously, it will continue to be a puzzle why we should spend a single cent on the Defence Force. This is the age of Joint Operations, which means the end of inter service warfare, and which means all training must be joint. This is the age of joined up government, in which the Defence Force urgently needs to change its attitudes. Perhaps we need a Navy to persuade the Air Force and the Army that the sea exists.

REGIONAL REASONS WHY SOUTH AFRICA NEEDS A NAVY

The 1978 edition of Mr Thomas Cook's inestimable International Railway Timetable tells us that the land and ferry distance from London to Vladivostok is 12,253 kilometres. It also tells us that the distance from Cape Town to Cairo is 11,300 kilometres. In other words, Africa is extraordinarily large, of the same order ofmagnitude as the whole of Eurasia. This small fact of geography has signal military consequences. The distance from Cape Town to Kinshasa is 6,122 kilometres, about the same as that from London to Tashkent, Vancouver to Halifax, or Moscow to Manchuria. By way of comparison, the distance from Berlin to Moscow, with which Napoleon and Hitler had a little local difficulty, is only 1,892 kilometres. When it is suggested that South Africa might intervene in Kinshasa, one wonders how often the London to Tashkent equivalent distance is recalled. South Africa keeps its tanks in Bloemfontein, which by rail is about the same distance from Harare as Moscow from Berlin. If, heaven forbid, our Defence Force had to rush to keep the peace in Harare using tanks, it should be recalled that Mr. Hitler's tanks ground to a halt in the suburbs of Moscow. I suspect the snow would be absent, and that the Red Army was a different kettle of fish from the Zimbabwean Army, but the distance is the same. It is large.

The SADC states cover 3.7 million square miles. That is three times the size of India, twice the size of Europe, a fifth bigger than Australia, larger than the United States including Alaska, larger than China, and almost as big as Canada, which is 3.8 million square miles. The SADC is the second largest physical polity on earth. For its size it has a tiny population, and tinier military forces. It is a power vacuum, in which evildoers can and do get lost.

The SADC laws make each state responsible for the other, particularly in the face of coups by junior officers. South Africa's rush to the assistance of Lesotho is a case in point: the SANDF found invasion of its captive and smallest neighbour very difficult, and could not prevent the burning of the capital city. This should prove a timely warning that not even the richest SADC state finds it easy to come to the military aid of a friend in need. The smouldering wars of equatorial Africa prove the point. The South African National Defence Force is founded on the premise that we should not be able to threaten our neighbours, and therefore should not have strategic reach. Well, and good, the money can be spent on social betterment instead. But what if we need to come to the assistance of our neighbours, in time of trouble, and as provided for under the United Nations and SADC laws? If we cannot threaten our neighbours we cannot help them either. And if perchance, as has happened in every continent of the earth, some real monster of depravity by deep cunning comes to misrule in some nameless SADC state, can we go to the aid of the now tortured population? Of course we cannot help them, our SANDF was designed without strategic reach. The place is huge, our forces are small, we are wrongly equipped to match the requirements of SADC laws, and we do not train to fight wars at strategic distances. We can get a Boeing full of infantry to Bujumbura, but if war erupts there they will die. We cannot give them air cover and we cannot extract them under fire. We lack strategic reach, as a matter of policy.

Except for the Navy. By its nature a submarine is stealthy, and ships can operate easily over great distances. The states of the SADC know this, and it is a regular occurrence for SA Navy officers to be asked by smaller more vulnerable States to the north of us to increase the size of the SA Navy, so as to be able to increase the umbrella it offers to our allies. Nor is their alliance to be taken for granted. A united Angola under adventurous leaders, an increasingly powerful oil state, might not inconceivably become an enemy. The SADC is not at peace, and it smoulders. We need a South African Navy for the SADC. This is true all the more so if Joint Operations are called for. Small numbers of troops and air cover can be airlifted into a trouble spot. If the railway happens to go that way, much larger volumes can be moved. But for many of the SADC states, especially those with coastal cities, sea born operations are ideal. The ship is the oldest and still the subtlest outflanking mechanism.

The military stability of the SADC depends upon its richest member playing a role that matches our financial size. Our own economic future may in part depend on perceptions of the security of the rest of the SADC. Foreign investment judges South Africa by the SADC, and in an age of globalisation we need more foreign investment than we are getting. It may be in our own economic interest that we beef up our strategic reach. But, short of throwing that policy overboard, we can help ourselves by strengthening our Navy, which is the most innocent force with which to conduct diplomacy. A show of force by tanks and aircraft leads to war as the night follows the day; a diplomatic visit by seemingly polite sailors in a ship dressed overall and with dance music playing, makes the point with less risk.

In short, one way to cope with the huge size of the SADC is to strengthen the SA Navy. No, this will not solve the problem in the Great Lakes district, but that problem will not be solved by South Africa militarily. A bigger SA Navy will lead to better coherence and trust in the SADC region, however.

In conclusion, we need a Navy. I have outlined why. It may be the case that we are not yet equipping it as well as we should. Any Navy depends on its people, not on its equipment. A good set of sailors can take twenty or thirty years to build from scratch, whereas even a big ship can be built in a year or three. But the two go together. A Navy without enough good ships and submarines cannot train well, loses morale and some of its best people. We are buying four patrol corvettes and three submarines. These are too few for the job, which the Navy will have to do. Our Navy effectively has to cope with the coasts and seas of the SADC region, a landmass bigger than China, situated in three oceans, each with vicious storms. The Southern Ocean is not the Baltic! Four ships and three submarines cannot cope with the defence of our ports, activities north of our borders up to the equator in two oceans, looking after the islands of the Southern ocean, as well as protecting sea bed mining and one of the richest fishing grounds in the world. The better decision would therefore be eight patrol corvettes and four submarines, also because maintenance takes any sea going vessel out of action for extended periods. We need to buy two helicopters for each of the ships, and enough spares to replace broken ones. We need Maritime Air reconnaissance. We need UAVs. We need more multipurpose sealift vessels, because it is probable that the SANDF is going to be required to take troops onto or off a very hot beach under fire, at some time in the twenty-year future. We need to spend two percent of GDP on Defence, not the present 1,7%. Most of the extra expenditure should be on air cover for the Navy, and on the Navy. We need a Navy, and I submit that we are not yet spending enough to get one.