The practice of strategy: South African defence in stasis

Abel Esterhuyse and Gerhard Louw

Defense & Security Analysis, 2018, vol. 34, issue 1, 53-72

Abstract: The article concerns the strategy development processes of the South African Department of Defence in South Africa. It intends to identify the probable causes of the observed failure of the South African National Defence Force to develop appropriate departmental policy and military strategy. Military strategy comprises force development, force employment, force deployment and the coordination of these elements in pursuit of national, grand-strategic objectives. (See Dennis M. Drew and Donald M. Snow, Making Twenty-first Century Strategy: An Introduction to Modern National Security Processes and Problems Montgomery, AL: Air University Press, Maxwell Air Force Base, November 2006, 103). Of these four constructs, the article concerns itself only with the first two. The article analyses two complementary approaches to strategy formation: a resource-driven, inside-out model and an interests-driven, outside-in method. The article concludes that the Department is preoccupied with the inside-out method to the lasting detriment of the declared strategic intent of the defence policy.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/14751798.2018.1421403 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cdanxx:v:34:y:2018:i:1:p:53-72

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CDAN20

DOI: 10.1080/14751798.2018.1421403

Access Statistics for this article

Defense & Security Analysis is currently edited by Martin Edmonds

More articles in Defense & Security Analysis from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().