It is stated that armed forces can win battles, but it is nations who win wars. The current Ukrainian battlefield is showing this to be true. It is not enough to have boots on the ground at the frontline. In Ukraine, small teams of soldiers, with the right technology, are holding numbers of kilometres of frontline, whereas a few years ago that would have taken thousands of soldiers. Providing the battlefield with cheap, accessible, lethal and available precision systems is starting to change the fight.
This must be of interest to the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) as there are calls to right-size the force. Discussion could move from focussing on size to making a smarter force that is more lethal. At a tactical level the battlefield is going to be reshaped by lethality. We need to deploy a force that is set up for the most unfair of fights. Technology enables the smarter force – through access to information – the ability to strike what is seen within a matter of minutes.
A nation that wants to win wars needs to have the ability to regenerate/change, outproduce and outlast from the back to the front. Lessons learnt from the battles in Bangui and Goma/Sake show that this thinking is also applicable to peace keeping/enforcement missions.
The SANDF needs the support of local research, development and production capabilities. Local industry should be exploiting the rapidly advancing, maturing technology sector, that is being fuelled by artificial intelligence. South Africa should be stimulating and leveraging the defence and related technology sector. The SA defence industry is currently very hardware focused, while it needs to be increasingly software defined, but not hardware confined.
The SANDF needs to assist the South African defence industry (SAADI) in the prioritisation of those technology sectors that need to be developed at pace, and identify the industrial base where latent productive capacity lies for scaling. Then, there needs to be a discussion with an SANDF that knows where its most likely to deploy and fight, where its support elements will most likely have to protect, as well as know where its subsequent support is going to come from.
Prior to these discussions, it would be necessary to have the operational design used to drive the force design that guides the future concept of operations. The SADI is currently geared for supplying special operations force/rapid reaction force solutions for African conditions. The prioritisation would align industry solutions that match the mission and the priorities.
This would require a re-think on the technology development and equipment procurement approach. The SANDF and SADI need to determine how to rapidly scale the next generation of battlefield product solutions, while bringing in the next generation workforce. This could be captured in a Defence Investment Plan, which is a bit different from the current Strategic Capital Acquisition Master Plan (SCAMP) approach. The SCAMP is a strategic management tool which the DoD uses to assess and organise its capital acquisition requirements. The Defence Investment Plan would merge technology development and capital acquisition into a five-year rolling plan that is prioritised every two years, or after a major engagement like the Southern African Development Community Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (SAMIDRC) operation. The Defence Investment Plan must be aligned with a Procure to Export approach to get maximum returns for industry and the SANDF combined.
Way Forward for Unlocking Defence Sector Innovation
Funding remains the biggest challenge for the R&D and eventual product development roll-out environment. The SADI is engaged in development activities. The problem is that most SADI development projects are generally based on projects that are secured from international entities. The solutions are then inevitably owned by international partners.
The defence industry solution for unlocking innovation does not need to re-invent the wheel. A suggestion would be to tailor the current Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) approach for defence sector application. The technology readiness level (TRL) approach could be used in guiding development evaluation and funding schemes for critical capability gaps based on an operational use case. The goal must be to connect the SANDF user corps with industry innovators, reduce barriers of access for new entrants, and provide risk funding for innovators to progress ideas towards market entry and commercialization.
The TRL 1-3 is currently the domain of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the higher education institutions. These entities are generally covered. The recent articles on DefenceWeb related to the CSIR are evidence of this.
TRL 8 & 9 is generally covered by the acquisition element locally. A fund can be established for facilitating the Procure to Export element of international roll-out.
The major gap is the TRL 4-7 technology development cycle. I would like to suggest an approach to expand the current development route. This could be a rapid development cycle. The SANDF or a SADI member can identify a critical capability gap coupled to an operational use case. They can then submit to Minimum Viable Product grant fund to execute a project: three months for Minimum Viable Concept based on rapidly advancing, maturing technology; nine months to initial rapid prototype; 12 months to user tested prototype with enhancement inputs; and maximum 24 months to field tested solutions with user tactical insights and product refinement.
The project overhead cost is reduced if a grant approach is used. The aim is to maximise the number of products being developed, as well as open the sector to new entrants. There is a fail-fast approach coupled to the spiral development benefit of early user inputs, but on a limited, fixed budget. A secondary aim is to expose a wider SANDF user group to the defence industry.
It is proposed that projects be considered up to a maximum R25 million grant funding. Most project solutions should be below R5 million. There would be scope for getting at least 50 products per year if the SANDF had an R&D budget of R500 million per year. A small production batch can then be introduced into the SANDF for proof of concept and spiral technology enhancement in the deployed forces. A royalty mechanism can be proposed for products that are successfully rolled out. The royalty then goes into the grant funding mechanism. This is an approach based on a funding constrained SANDF. The SANDF can then use this approach to quickly and cheaply support its transition to new ways of operating.
Written by James Kerr, Orion Consulting CC, which provides Market Entry Strategy and Bid & Proposal services to the Aerospace & Defence related industry and assists international SME mission system product suppliers to gain traction in South Africa.
