Beyond guns or butter : towards a multi-level analysis of South Africa's strategic defence procurement

Includes bibliography.By 1998, after a full decade of declining defense budgets spanning both the late apartheid regime and the new democratic order, South Africa had fully halved military expenditure, in real terms, from its 1989 level. Through the process of negotiated transition to democracy in the early J 990s, it appeared as though advocates of demilitarization had taken the upper hand in setting the African National Congress (ANC) government's defense policy agenda. However, the government changed course drastically in 1998, initiating a massive arms acquisition program comprising submarines, frigate-class ""corvette"" patrol vessels, fighter jets and trainers, and helicopters, at a projected cost of nearly ZAR30 billion. This decision, consequently, has plagued the government with continued controversy since its implementation. What brought about this apparent defense policy reversal? Citing the lack of any significant external military threat to South Africa, dovish elements of civil society frame this controversial arms acquisition policy, entitled the Strategic Defence Procurement (SOP) program, as a classic ""guns or butter"" issue. The government, on the other hand, defends its decision by maintaining that the military procurements are vital to both the national security imperatives and economic growth of South Africa. In this vein, defense industrialists argue that weapons procurement deals containing counter-trade provisions help to stimulate the local economy-particularly the arms industry, transferring valuable technology and resources to one of South Africa's strategically-vital export industries which had suffered under the defense cutbacks in recent years-as well as foreign investment and job growth in civilian industrial sectors. This study addresses the complexities of the SOP-the ""arms deal"", in common parlance-through a systematic analysis that utilizes two distinct theoretical approaches to investigate the policy action from multiple perspectives, in order to illuminate issues that might otherwise remain buried in a single-level, single-approach analysis. The fundamental assumptions and concepts of the two theoretical approaches, the rational actor approach and the bureaucratic politics approach, focus on various issues embedded in the arms deal at discrete levels of analysis-the international systemic level. the state (organizational or bureaucratic) level, and the individual level-to generate a rough-cut account of the arms deal at each. The characteristic assumptions of both theoretical paradigms are applied to the South African case in order to generate an account of the arms deal at each level of analysis. This is done using empirical evidence gathered from primary sources such as government publications, policy reviews and other public documents, as well as from printed news media sources. The study's two fundamental objectives are to facilitate a better understanding of South Africa's arms acquisition decision and how it came about, and to provide a structured analytical framework for subsequent, comprehensive investigation of these issues by other students and analysts of South African politics and security. The scope of this study is necessarily limited to a primary focus on developing a structured framework and two-theory approach for multi-level analysis of the SDP, rather than on generating the exhaustive explanation that the framework potentially makes possible