As defence budgets tighten and operational demands continue to grow, the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) faces a familiar but increasingly acute challenge: how to maintain decision-making excellence, operational readiness, and strategic agility in an era of constrained resources. A growing body of research suggests that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), if applied responsibly, could become a critical enabler in addressing this challenge.
Recent academic work on the impact of GenAI highlights how AI-enabled command and control (C2) systems can augment human judgment, enhance situational awareness, and support adaptive planning – capabilities that are particularly relevant to South Africa’s military context. Unlike technologically dominant forces with extensive operational exposure and frequent large-scale exercises, the SANDF must often operate with limited opportunities for sustained deployments, live training, and joint exercises. This reality risks creating an experience and exposure gap for current and future commanders.
Operational art, the bridge between strategy and tactics, has traditionally relied heavily on accumulated experience, intuition, and professional military education. However, modern operations, including counter-terrorism, border safeguarding, peace support, and maritime security, are characterised by complexity, information overload, and rapid change. GenAI-enabled C2 systems offer a way to partially offset these pressures by providing commanders with advanced decision-support tools that can analyse vast datasets, generate multiple courses of action, and simulate potential outcomes under varying conditions.
For the SANDF, this is less about pursuing technological novelty and more about pragmatic capability enhancement. GenAI systems can fuse intelligence from disparate sources – such as signals intelligence, open-source information, sensor data, and operational reports – to build a more coherent picture of the operating environment. This improves situational awareness for commanders who may not have the benefit of repeated operational exposure in similar contexts.
Perhaps more importantly, GenAI can support accelerated learning and decision-making. By generating realistic operational scenarios and simulating adversary behaviour, AI-enabled systems can be used to supplement training and exercises that are often constrained by funding and logistics. Commanders and staff officers can be exposed to a wider range of plausible operational challenges through synthetic environments, allowing them to rehearse decisions, explore consequences, and refine judgment without the cost of large-scale field deployments.
In counter-terrorism operations, a persistent concern in the region, GenAI-enabled C2 could assist by identifying emerging patterns, predicting likely adversary actions, and supporting the coordination of intelligence, surveillance, and response forces. Importantly, these systems are not intended to replace human decision-makers. Instead, they function as cognitive amplifiers, helping commanders make better-informed decisions while retaining responsibility, ethical judgment, and control.
From an engineering and defence planning perspective, this approach aligns well with South Africa’s need for resilient, adaptable, and cost-effective capabilities. GenAI-enabled C2 systems can be designed to operate in degraded environments, support joint and inter-agency operations, and integrate with existing platforms rather than requiring wholesale replacement of legacy systems. This makes them particularly suitable for a defence force that must do more with less.
There are, of course, risks and limitations. AI systems depend on data quality, are vulnerable to cyber threats, and can introduce new challenges around trust, transparency, and accountability. Any adoption within the SANDF would need to be guided by robust governance, clear rules for human oversight, and alignment with national values and legal frameworks. Education and training will also be critical, ensuring that commanders understand both the strengths and limitations of AI-supported decision-making.
Nevertheless, the strategic opportunity is clear. By leveraging GenAI as part of a broader human–machine teaming approach, the SANDF could strengthen its operational art despite constrained resources. AI-enabled C2 offers a way to preserve institutional knowledge, support less-experienced commanders, and maintain decision superiority in complex operations, without relying solely on costly deployments or extensive operational exposure.
In an era where technology increasingly shapes the character of conflict, the question for South Africa is not whether it can compete with major military powers on scale, but whether it can innovate intelligently. GenAI, applied with discipline and purpose, may offer a practical path to bridging the resource, experience, and exposure gap, ensuring that South African commanders remain effective decision-makers in an increasingly demanding security environment.
