Abstract: South Africa inherited distinct military and political traditions that were never fully synthesised into a coherent post-1994 strategic culture. Rebuilding effective military strategy and doctrine therefore requires neither restoration nor rejection, but a deliberate synthesis of professional, technological and operational strengths with the legitimate lessons of the liberation experience.
Dr Joan Swart
Keywords: Strategic culture | South African Defence Force | SANDF | Military strategy | Military doctrine | Defence transformation | Strategic synthesis
SOUTH AFRICA’S UNFINISHED STRATEGIC CULTURE
South Africa’s defence debate often becomes trapped between two histories. One looks back to the South African Defence Force (SADF) and sees a military and defence industry that, despite the political circumstances of the time, achieved an extraordinary degree of technological and operational sophistication. The other begins with 1994 and the creation of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), emphasising transformation, integration and the country’s new constitutional and democratic order.
Both histories contain important truths. The difficulty is that South Africa has never fully turned them into a coherent strategic culture.
This matters because strategic culture is not simply a country’s military history or a collection of attitudes towards defence. It influences how a state understands threats, national interests, the legitimate use of force, the role of the military and the kinds of capabilities it considers necessary. It therefore contributes directly to military strategy and doctrine.
South Africa’s problem may not be that it lacks a strategic culture. It may be that it has several, derived from different historical experiences, that have never been adequately synthesised.
An extraordinary inheritance
The former SADF and the defence-industrial system that supported it deserve to be assessed historically rather than politically.
The political circumstances in which they operated are deeply contested and cannot be separated from the country’s history. But that does not diminish the technical, organisational and military achievements of the institutions themselves.
Under international isolation, South Africa developed significant indigenous capabilities in areas including armoured vehicles, artillery, missiles, electronic warfare, communications and aerospace. The defence industry developed systems suited to the country’s particular operational and logistical circumstances, while the military accumulated considerable experience in conventional and unconventional warfare.
South Africa’s nuclear weapons programme represents the most extreme example of the country’s ability to develop sophisticated strategic technology under conditions of isolation. Whatever one’s assessment of the policy that produced it, the programme demonstrated an indigenous technological and scientific capability that few countries of comparable size had achieved.
There is a lesson here that should not be lost.
The point is not that South Africa should recreate the SADF. Nor is it to romanticise the political circumstances of the past. It is to recognise that a country can develop considerable military and technological competence when strategic purpose, institutional capacity, industrial capability and national resources are aligned.
Much of that capacity has subsequently been lost or severely weakened.
What changed after 1994?
The transformation of the defence establishment after 1994 was necessary. South Africa had undergone a fundamental political transition, and the armed forces had to reflect the constitutional order of the new state. The integration of former statutory and non-statutory forces was a formidable undertaking, and establishing democratic civilian control over the military was essential.
The problem is not that these changes occurred. The problem is that institutional integration is not the same thing as strategic-cultural integration.
The new SANDF inherited personnel with very different experiences of warfare, legitimacy, politics and national purpose. The former SADF brought a professional conventional military tradition, technical expertise, institutional memory and extensive operational experience. The liberation movements brought experience of political warfare, insurgency, intelligence, mobilisation and operating within a very different conception of legitimacy and conflict.
Both contained valuable knowledge. Neither, however, could simply provide the complete strategic foundation for the democratic South Africa.
A more deliberate post-1994 project would therefore have sought not merely to integrate personnel and institutions, but to construct a new strategic culture from the most useful elements of these different traditions.
That synthesis appears never to have been fully achieved.
A country of competing strategic instincts
Some of the tensions are visible well beyond the military.
South Africa combines strong traditions of individual initiative and self-reliance with equally strong traditions of communal responsibility. The familiar contrast between doen self and ons doen saam captures something of this tension, although neither value belongs exclusively to one community.
The country has a substantial European institutional and cultural inheritance while simultaneously asserting an African identity and a strong commitment to Pan-Africanism. It combines a market-based economy with a political tradition shaped in part by socialist and Marxist thought, particularly through the liberation movement’s historical relationship with organised labour and the SACP.
These should not necessarily be regarded as contradictions. A mature strategic culture could accommodate all of them.
A country can be African without rejecting useful elements of its European inheritance. It can value individual initiative while recognising communal responsibility. It can embrace markets while pursuing social solidarity. It can defend its own sovereignty while contributing to the security of the continent.
The problem arises when these competing traditions are not consciously reconciled and instead become competing sources of political and strategic direction.
That is when diversity becomes friction rather than adaptability.
Why this matters for the military
Military strategy cannot be separated entirely from the society and state that produce it.
A country’s strategic culture influences what it regards as a threat, how it defines security, when it considers military force legitimate, what missions it assigns to the armed forces and how much national effort it is prepared to devote to defence.
It also influences doctrine.
If a military inherits different and sometimes competing assumptions about the nature of conflict and the purpose of military power, those assumptions will eventually appear in force design, doctrine, procurement and operational priorities.
This may help explain some of the persistent ambiguity surrounding South Africa’s defence posture.
The country has struggled to articulate a sustained answer to basic strategic questions. What threats should the SANDF primarily prepare for? What level of military capability does South Africa require? What responsibilities should it accept beyond its borders? How should conventional capability be balanced against peace support, border protection, maritime security and other domestic or regional tasks?
These are not merely budgetary questions. They are questions of strategic culture.
Neither restoration nor rejection
The answer should not be a return to the past. Nor should it be a rejection of the past.
South Africa needs to recover what was valuable from its previous military and industrial experience while placing that knowledge within a contemporary constitutional and strategic framework.
That means recovering professional military competence, technical knowledge, institutional memory, operational experience and defence-industrial expertise. It also means retaining the lessons of the liberation struggle: political legitimacy, the importance of popular support, intelligence, irregular warfare, African political realities and the understanding that military power operates within a wider political contest.
Neither tradition is sufficient on its own. Together, however, they could provide much of the raw material for something more distinctly South African.
The objective should therefore be synthesis rather than restoration.
A future South African strategic culture could be simultaneously African and technologically sophisticated, sovereign but internationally engaged, professionally military but firmly under civilian constitutional control, and capable of both conventional deterrence and the irregular and political dimensions of contemporary conflict.
That would not require South Africa to choose which part of its history is legitimate.
It would require it to understand what can be learned from each.
Rebuilding the intellectual foundation
There is, however, an uncomfortable reality.
South Africa’s historical achievements demonstrate that it could build sophisticated military capabilities. The decline of those capabilities over the past two decades demonstrates that capability can also be lost.
Rebuilding therefore cannot simply mean buying new equipment or allocating more money to Defence. Additional resources are necessary, but resources without strategic direction will not restore military effectiveness.
The first requirement is intellectual: South Africa needs a clearer conception of its national interests, its strategic environment and the role its military is expected to play within them.
Only then can strategy provide a coherent basis for doctrine, force design, procurement and investment in the defence industry.
This is where strategic culture matters most.
A coherent strategic culture does not mean that everyone thinks alike. On the contrary, strategic adaptability benefits from different perspectives and experiences. What matters is whether institutions can bring those perspectives together into a sufficiently coherent understanding of national purpose.
South Africa has not necessarily failed because it possesses competing strategic traditions. It may have struggled because it has never fully developed the intellectual mechanism for turning those traditions into a common strategic culture.
That is something that can still be addressed. But it requires honesty about both the achievements of the past and the failures of the present.
South Africa does not need to recreate the SADF, nor does it need to perpetuate the strategic assumptions of the liberation struggle. It needs to build a defence establishment suited to the South Africa of today and the strategic environment of tomorrow.
That requires recovering the best of what the country already knows, learning from the different experiences that shaped it, and creating a strategic culture capable of turning those experiences into coherent strategy and doctrine.
The objective should not be to decide which historical tradition wins.
It should be to build a strategic culture in which South Africa’s different inheritances can contribute to a common national purpose.
That may be the most important element of defence transformation that South Africa never fully completed.
NONGQAI’S Strategic Security Analyst Dr Joan Swart is a forensic psychologist with an MBA and an MA in Military Studies. Her work focuses on African security, geopolitics, state fragility, substate dynamics, and the intersection between governance, legitimacy, and coercive power. She is the author of several books and regularly publishes long-form analysis and opinion pieces on security and governance issues. Her writing has appeared in outlets including DefenceWeb, Maroela Media, Netwerk24, RSG, Visegrad, and other policy and public-affairs platforms. She has a weekly slot on SAfm The Global Briefing to analyse world affairs. Her work bridges academic research, policy analysis, and applied strategic assessment, and she is currently completing a second PhD at the University of Stellenbosch Military Academy. Follow her on X/Twitter, Substack, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
