Retired Deputy Chief of the South African Army, Major General Les Rudman, believes the Department of Defence should get back to basics and focus on the training of soldiers rather than being side-tracked by technology.
Speaking during a question and answer session at the recent Africa Aerospace and Defence (AAD) 2024 conference, organised by defenceWeb, Rudman, today a military and security analyst, said that the ongoing degradation of the South African National Defence Force’s (SANDF’s) capacity over the last 20 years – leaving it under-funded and under-equipped – has been scandalous.
He said it was vital to reinvest in the skills and capabilities of the defence force’s members by focusing on the needs of the private soldier. Technology, he said, was a very important factor in restoring those capabilities but could not be seen as an answer in itself.
He added that the SANDF was paying a lot of attention to soldiering under the auspices of international conventions at the expense of understanding that most of the enemy combatants that the SANDF has found itself deployed against paid little heed to – and did not consider themselves bound by.
“We want to look at how nice we are but if we are in a conflict we are in a battle for survival and we need to do everything to survive (that conflict).”
