- Messages
- 4,784
- Reactions
- Nation of residence
-
- Nation of origin
-
An examination of the South African military’s haphazard digital transformation.
The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) is one of the most technologically advanced militaries in Africa, operating modern equipment supplied in part by a world-class local defence industry. However, its digital transformation is taking place in fits and starts, with a declining defence budget threatening much of the military’s modernisation.
Defence expert and director at African Defence Review Darren Olivier notes that when it comes to digital transformation, “the SANDF had some really good visionary steps in the 1990s and early 2000s regarding moving to a digital force”.
For example, it created the Link-ZA digital communication network protocol, which was developed in South Africa by Thales Advanced Engineering (as it then was). Link-ZA, developed as an alternative to the popular NATO Link-16 system, allows all SANDF communications equipment to easily and seamlessly exchange information, from handheld devices to Hawk and Gripen jets. Through Link-ZA, a Gripen fighter jet can share its radar data with the radar-less Hawk jet trainer, for example.
(Guy Martin)Link-ZA forms part of the Combat Net Interoperability Standard (CNIS), which dictates every new system to be acquired should be able to operate seamlessly in the same digital combat net.
Another innovation cited by Olivier is the SANDF’s Air Picture Display System (APDS), which views radar feeds from radars situated all over the country. This was developed locally by Saab and forms part of a sophisticated command and control system that includes the Ground Command and Control System (GCCS) used to task and monitor aircraft schedules and Current Intelligence System (CURIS), used to disseminate intelligence.
For logistics, the SA Army uses its Computer Aided Logistics Management Information System (CALMIS) and the Air Force and Navy use the Operational Support Information System (OSIS). These digital systems have resulted in large gains in efficiency and asset availability over the years as they track asset use, spare parts and other logistics and maintenance requirements. However, only a tiny part of these systems’ power and functionality is being used and much logistics management is still (unnecessarily) paper-based.
“In the past decade, the South African Air Force has actually regressed in technological terms when it comes to its handling of logistics and reporting, reverting from a highly functional integrated system to an inefficient and error-prone system of paper records, manual data entry, and spreadsheet-based collation,” Oliver says in regard to OSIS.
Similarly, the SANDF’s human resources (PERSOL) and FMS (Financial Management Systems) have potential in that they have ensured the SANDF is remarkably free of personnel- and finance-related fraud and the SANDF has never had ghost soldiers, Olivier points out, but these systems are more than a quarter of a century old and starting to show their age.
“CNIS desperately needs an update to account for modern technology, but it seems nobody is in charge of that role. And nobody in senior leadership gets digital transformation,” he adds.
The SANDF’s Command and Management Information Systems (CMIS) division, in charge of information technology and related responsibilities, “isn’t fulfilling its promise,” Olivier says. “The SANDF needs a chief data officer or similar.”
Lack of a dedicated ICT and cyber division within the SANDF is affecting its cyber defence capabilities. The Department of Defence has warned that old and obsolete information and communications technology facilities are leaving the SANDF vulnerable to cyber threats.
The military has developed a cyber warfare strategy, but this is only in the approval process, and the full establishment of a Cyber Command Centre hasn’t been realised due to financial constraints. The Department of Defence has acknowledged that cyber threats against South Africa are a reality, but there is little ability to respond to these threats in the absence of a fully funded cyber defence capability.
Defence equipment acquisition agency Armscor has meanwhile established an inhouse cyber security unit that plans to develop a globally competitive cyber warfare capability that will be ‘a strategic reserve for the SA National Defence Force’. The unit, according to Armscor, is responsible for ensuring current security measures are enhanced by the establishment of an integrated security operation centre.
Armscor has warned that there are three main cyber threats to the defence industry and SANDF, including data breaches, malware and artificial intelligence used for hacking. Armscor was itself hacked several years ago and stolen data was posted on the dark web.
Apart from growing cyber risks, other threat areas the SANDF needs to be aware of due to 4IR technologies include small commercial unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, that are fitted with weapons and being used to attack targets (as used by Islamic State in Iraq); remotely controlled car bombs (as seen in Syria); increasingly sophisticated improvised explosive devices (IEDs); and drone boats (such as those used in Yemen to attack Saudi Arabian vessels), according to defence analyst Helmoed Romer Heitman.
The social threat
The current members of the SANDF themselves also pose potential risks to their organisation as the use of digital communications spreads. Major Gert de Jager, responsible for the SANDF’s Tactical and Mobile Electronic Warfare Acquisition programme, has warned that the uncontrolled use of social media networks and general information-sharing poses security risks to the SANDF, as opposing forces can easily tap into this information – in Iraq and Syria, for example, the United States has successfully carried out strikes against militants after they posted geo-tagged photos of themselves on social media sites. Social media is also open to eavesdropping, social engineering and espionage.
Although it lags in some areas, the SANDF is strong in others, particularly communications and electronic warfare (EW). South Africa led the world in bringing frequency-hopping radios into service – these change frequency at high rates while transmitting, making it very difficult to eavesdrop. Today, Reutech Communications is supplying a whole range of new generation radios to the SANDF under Project Radiate and these feature frequency-hopping, built-in datalink, embedded electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM), GPS, SMS capability and USB, Ethernet and Bluetooth interfaces. The new software-defined radios are backwards compatible with old analogue sets and are a huge leap forward over the older models. They have been deployed by the SANDF to the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of the United Nations peacekeeping mission there. The company says these are the first tactical communications system in the world providing complete interoperability between all elements of the battlefield (air force, army, navy) without using gateways or protocol converters.
Areas of competence
Since the 1960s, South Africa has been a leader in the field of electronic warfare, with a big focus on warning and self-protection systems for aircraft. Saab Grintek Defence, for example, has supplied aircraft self-protection systems to the SA Air Force (and export nations) while Sysdel has been active in radar and radar countermeasures research since 1978. It has supplied electronic countermeasures to the SA Navy to distract, jam or spoof the enemy’s electronic systems and guided weapons.
A Lynx lands on an SA Navy frigate in Cybicom Atlas Defence’s Helicopter Flight Deck Trainer (CAD)
Another area of competence is drones; the SANDF was an early adopter, using some of the first such aircraft in the 1980s for artillery spotting and reconnaissance, in Angola. The Defence Intelligence division has acquired Seeker 400 UAVs from Denel Dynamics, while the South African Army is using small handlaunched Indiza UAVs developed locally by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. These have been deployed for border security missions and to the Democratic Republic of Congo to support the United Nations peacekeeping mission there. The Indiza can be fitted with day or night cameras.
Unusually for an African military, the SANDF makes extensive use of simulator-based training, recognising its ability to develop and maintain key skills without incurring the otherwise prohibitive costs of regular live-fire training. The Air Force uses various simulators for its aircraft while the Army uses vehicle simulators provided by local company Thorough- Tec Simulation – these simulate everything from tanks to fire trucks and cranes.
4IR technologies
There is a lot of discussion around the need for digital transformation and the use of 4IR within the SANDF, but the military is lagging behind in this regard. However, affiliated entities such as Armscor have made some progress, with aspects such as 3D printing, computer simulation and modelling and computer-aided design.
Flamengro, an Armscor subsidiary specialising in computational mechanics modelling, has for example developed cheap and robust test and evaluation software using digital image processing and machine learning for displacement and acceleration measurement. According to junior engineer Kyle Winnaar, this is used in measuring the properties of armour, materials and weapons. It has been tested in analysing weapon feed chute dynamics, the fragmentation of a prototype warhead and projectile tracking to determine muzzle velocities.
Denel Dynamics is supplying the Seeker 400 drone to the SANDF
According to Flamengro principal engineer Adriaan Steenkamp, 4IR technologies (including 3D printing, a digital twin and smart sensors) have been used to assist with the development and qualification of a 30mm projectile for air defence. The idea was to take an off-the-shelf round and improve its air defence capabilities, with the projectile designed to destroy incoming mortars, rockets, artillery, helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles. Tests were successfully conducted against incoming 120mm mortar and 155mm artillery rounds.
Inadequate funding
Many other companies, such as state-owned Denel, support the SANDF’s digital transformation but arguably the biggest millstone is inadequate funding. The SANDF has little money to upgrade and modernise its equipment and spend on research and development. Defence minister Nosiviwe Mapisa- Nqakula this year warned that severe budget cuts are making it difficult for the SANDF to fulfil its constitutional mandate and ‘we are now in a situation where our budget has been cut beyond the bone’ as the SANDF has only been provided with 63% of the funding needed to meet its requirements.
SA Army soldiers with laserbased firearms training kit during an exercise
Olivier warns that as “the SANDF budget remains stagnant, obsolescent equipment is not being replaced, capabilities are not being preserved or restored after being lost.” Lossmaking Denel is also a cause for concern as “it’s home to strategic technologies and capabilities and of huge importance to the SANDF. I would argue government should be actively subsidising key technology areas, whether through direct funding or a constant stream of guaranteed orders. The CSIR’s defence research and development side and Armscor are also in bad shape and may not continue for much longer, thanks again to sharp cuts in defence spending.”
The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) is one of the most technologically advanced militaries in Africa, operating modern equipment supplied in part by a world-class local defence industry. However, its digital transformation is taking place in fits and starts, with a declining defence budget threatening much of the military’s modernisation.
Defence expert and director at African Defence Review Darren Olivier notes that when it comes to digital transformation, “the SANDF had some really good visionary steps in the 1990s and early 2000s regarding moving to a digital force”.
For example, it created the Link-ZA digital communication network protocol, which was developed in South Africa by Thales Advanced Engineering (as it then was). Link-ZA, developed as an alternative to the popular NATO Link-16 system, allows all SANDF communications equipment to easily and seamlessly exchange information, from handheld devices to Hawk and Gripen jets. Through Link-ZA, a Gripen fighter jet can share its radar data with the radar-less Hawk jet trainer, for example.
(Guy Martin)Link-ZA forms part of the Combat Net Interoperability Standard (CNIS), which dictates every new system to be acquired should be able to operate seamlessly in the same digital combat net.
Another innovation cited by Olivier is the SANDF’s Air Picture Display System (APDS), which views radar feeds from radars situated all over the country. This was developed locally by Saab and forms part of a sophisticated command and control system that includes the Ground Command and Control System (GCCS) used to task and monitor aircraft schedules and Current Intelligence System (CURIS), used to disseminate intelligence.
For logistics, the SA Army uses its Computer Aided Logistics Management Information System (CALMIS) and the Air Force and Navy use the Operational Support Information System (OSIS). These digital systems have resulted in large gains in efficiency and asset availability over the years as they track asset use, spare parts and other logistics and maintenance requirements. However, only a tiny part of these systems’ power and functionality is being used and much logistics management is still (unnecessarily) paper-based.
“In the past decade, the South African Air Force has actually regressed in technological terms when it comes to its handling of logistics and reporting, reverting from a highly functional integrated system to an inefficient and error-prone system of paper records, manual data entry, and spreadsheet-based collation,” Oliver says in regard to OSIS.
Similarly, the SANDF’s human resources (PERSOL) and FMS (Financial Management Systems) have potential in that they have ensured the SANDF is remarkably free of personnel- and finance-related fraud and the SANDF has never had ghost soldiers, Olivier points out, but these systems are more than a quarter of a century old and starting to show their age.
“CNIS desperately needs an update to account for modern technology, but it seems nobody is in charge of that role. And nobody in senior leadership gets digital transformation,” he adds.
The SANDF’s Command and Management Information Systems (CMIS) division, in charge of information technology and related responsibilities, “isn’t fulfilling its promise,” Olivier says. “The SANDF needs a chief data officer or similar.”
Lack of a dedicated ICT and cyber division within the SANDF is affecting its cyber defence capabilities. The Department of Defence has warned that old and obsolete information and communications technology facilities are leaving the SANDF vulnerable to cyber threats.
The military has developed a cyber warfare strategy, but this is only in the approval process, and the full establishment of a Cyber Command Centre hasn’t been realised due to financial constraints. The Department of Defence has acknowledged that cyber threats against South Africa are a reality, but there is little ability to respond to these threats in the absence of a fully funded cyber defence capability.
Defence equipment acquisition agency Armscor has meanwhile established an inhouse cyber security unit that plans to develop a globally competitive cyber warfare capability that will be ‘a strategic reserve for the SA National Defence Force’. The unit, according to Armscor, is responsible for ensuring current security measures are enhanced by the establishment of an integrated security operation centre.
Armscor has warned that there are three main cyber threats to the defence industry and SANDF, including data breaches, malware and artificial intelligence used for hacking. Armscor was itself hacked several years ago and stolen data was posted on the dark web.
Apart from growing cyber risks, other threat areas the SANDF needs to be aware of due to 4IR technologies include small commercial unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, that are fitted with weapons and being used to attack targets (as used by Islamic State in Iraq); remotely controlled car bombs (as seen in Syria); increasingly sophisticated improvised explosive devices (IEDs); and drone boats (such as those used in Yemen to attack Saudi Arabian vessels), according to defence analyst Helmoed Romer Heitman.
The social threat
The current members of the SANDF themselves also pose potential risks to their organisation as the use of digital communications spreads. Major Gert de Jager, responsible for the SANDF’s Tactical and Mobile Electronic Warfare Acquisition programme, has warned that the uncontrolled use of social media networks and general information-sharing poses security risks to the SANDF, as opposing forces can easily tap into this information – in Iraq and Syria, for example, the United States has successfully carried out strikes against militants after they posted geo-tagged photos of themselves on social media sites. Social media is also open to eavesdropping, social engineering and espionage.
Although it lags in some areas, the SANDF is strong in others, particularly communications and electronic warfare (EW). South Africa led the world in bringing frequency-hopping radios into service – these change frequency at high rates while transmitting, making it very difficult to eavesdrop. Today, Reutech Communications is supplying a whole range of new generation radios to the SANDF under Project Radiate and these feature frequency-hopping, built-in datalink, embedded electronic counter-countermeasures (ECCM), GPS, SMS capability and USB, Ethernet and Bluetooth interfaces. The new software-defined radios are backwards compatible with old analogue sets and are a huge leap forward over the older models. They have been deployed by the SANDF to the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of the United Nations peacekeeping mission there. The company says these are the first tactical communications system in the world providing complete interoperability between all elements of the battlefield (air force, army, navy) without using gateways or protocol converters.
Areas of competence
Since the 1960s, South Africa has been a leader in the field of electronic warfare, with a big focus on warning and self-protection systems for aircraft. Saab Grintek Defence, for example, has supplied aircraft self-protection systems to the SA Air Force (and export nations) while Sysdel has been active in radar and radar countermeasures research since 1978. It has supplied electronic countermeasures to the SA Navy to distract, jam or spoof the enemy’s electronic systems and guided weapons.
A Lynx lands on an SA Navy frigate in Cybicom Atlas Defence’s Helicopter Flight Deck Trainer (CAD)
Another area of competence is drones; the SANDF was an early adopter, using some of the first such aircraft in the 1980s for artillery spotting and reconnaissance, in Angola. The Defence Intelligence division has acquired Seeker 400 UAVs from Denel Dynamics, while the South African Army is using small handlaunched Indiza UAVs developed locally by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. These have been deployed for border security missions and to the Democratic Republic of Congo to support the United Nations peacekeeping mission there. The Indiza can be fitted with day or night cameras.
Unusually for an African military, the SANDF makes extensive use of simulator-based training, recognising its ability to develop and maintain key skills without incurring the otherwise prohibitive costs of regular live-fire training. The Air Force uses various simulators for its aircraft while the Army uses vehicle simulators provided by local company Thorough- Tec Simulation – these simulate everything from tanks to fire trucks and cranes.
4IR technologies
There is a lot of discussion around the need for digital transformation and the use of 4IR within the SANDF, but the military is lagging behind in this regard. However, affiliated entities such as Armscor have made some progress, with aspects such as 3D printing, computer simulation and modelling and computer-aided design.
Flamengro, an Armscor subsidiary specialising in computational mechanics modelling, has for example developed cheap and robust test and evaluation software using digital image processing and machine learning for displacement and acceleration measurement. According to junior engineer Kyle Winnaar, this is used in measuring the properties of armour, materials and weapons. It has been tested in analysing weapon feed chute dynamics, the fragmentation of a prototype warhead and projectile tracking to determine muzzle velocities.
Denel Dynamics is supplying the Seeker 400 drone to the SANDF
According to Flamengro principal engineer Adriaan Steenkamp, 4IR technologies (including 3D printing, a digital twin and smart sensors) have been used to assist with the development and qualification of a 30mm projectile for air defence. The idea was to take an off-the-shelf round and improve its air defence capabilities, with the projectile designed to destroy incoming mortars, rockets, artillery, helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles. Tests were successfully conducted against incoming 120mm mortar and 155mm artillery rounds.
Inadequate funding
Many other companies, such as state-owned Denel, support the SANDF’s digital transformation but arguably the biggest millstone is inadequate funding. The SANDF has little money to upgrade and modernise its equipment and spend on research and development. Defence minister Nosiviwe Mapisa- Nqakula this year warned that severe budget cuts are making it difficult for the SANDF to fulfil its constitutional mandate and ‘we are now in a situation where our budget has been cut beyond the bone’ as the SANDF has only been provided with 63% of the funding needed to meet its requirements.
SA Army soldiers with laserbased firearms training kit during an exercise
Olivier warns that as “the SANDF budget remains stagnant, obsolescent equipment is not being replaced, capabilities are not being preserved or restored after being lost.” Lossmaking Denel is also a cause for concern as “it’s home to strategic technologies and capabilities and of huge importance to the SANDF. I would argue government should be actively subsidising key technology areas, whether through direct funding or a constant stream of guaranteed orders. The CSIR’s defence research and development side and Armscor are also in bad shape and may not continue for much longer, thanks again to sharp cuts in defence spending.”
