HELMOED RÖMER HEITMAN: The stakes are high when the military makes mistakes

It has been a bad few weeks for the SA National Defence Force (SANDF): three sailors lost overboard during an exercise, four soldiers killed in a truck accident, and six soldiers killed, others injured and vehicles destroyed by a bush fire.

I am not here to judge anyone as I was not there, and in the case of the submarine accident do not even begin to have the knowledge to do so. But some will immediately jump to the conclusion that all is rotten in the SANDF and that “this would not have happened in my day”, so perhaps there is a need for a dispassionate look at things.

Let us first dispel that latter nonsense: the old SA Defence Force flew three HS-125 VIP jets into Devils Peak in 1971; it lost the frigate SAS President Kruger in a collision with its tanker, SAS Tafelberg, in 1982; it lost soldiers in training, aircraft and vehicle accidents though the 1970s and ’80s; and it lost vehicles to a bush fire at Lohatlha, where soldiers risked their lives to drive vehicles out of the danger area, fortunately none paying the ultimate price.

In March 2021 we lost two highly experienced former SA Air Force pilots, one also an experienced test pilot and both personal friends, in a crash at Pretoria because of a malfunction in the aircraft they were flying. Things do sometimes go wrong.

And lest we think our military is uniquely inept or accident prone, the reality is that the same happens to other armed forces. Consider the Royal Navy driving a destroyer, HMS Nottingham, onto a charted rock at Lord Howe Island in 2002, and this year losing an F-35 fighter because someone forgot to remove a blanking cover from the jet’s air intake.

Or consider the US Navy losing one of its large landing ships, the $1bn USS Bonhomme Richard, to an accidental fire in 2020, with 63 injured, while alongside in a major naval base, and driving one of its nuclear attack submarines, the USS Connecticut, into a seamount in 2021. Or the French Navy having one of its nuclear submarines, SNA Perle, badly damaged by fire in 2020. Or the German strike craft that collided with its consort off Lebanon in 2020, and the German army’s loss of a Tiger attack helicopter and its two crew in Mali in 2017 as a result of incorrect autopilot settings.

Or the Australian army helicopter crash earlier in 2023 that cost the lives of four crew. Or the Argentine submarine ARA San Juan, lost with all hands in 2017, the Indonesian submarine KRI Nanggala 402 lost with all hands in 2021, and the Chinese Submarine 361, the crew of which died in 2007 when the diesel engine did not shut down as she dived and used up all the oxygen in the boat. Not to mention the series of accidents that have befallen the Russian Navy’s only aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, since 2018.

None of the people involved were incompetent idiots, but those accidents happened and some of them cost lives. It may sound callous, but there is a saying in the military that covers this sort of thing — “shit happens”. It does so in all walks of life, but when it happens in the military it can have serious, costly and sometimes fatal results.

The bottom line is that soldiering in all its forms is by definition a dangerous business. Soldiers, sailors and airmen deal with ammunition and explosives and complex equipment that can kill if something goes wrong. And they must learn, and then practise, how to work with that stuff under difficult conditions — be it rough terrain, poor weather or at night using night vision goggles or just what moonlight there might be, or all three at the same time — when they are exhausted and distracted.

They must do that because that is how it will be in war and even in “operations other than war”, such as peace enforcement missions and anti-piracy patrols. And there is nothing quite as potentially dangerous as overworked and overtired staff officers — a small mistake at that level can be lethal to those in the field or at sea.

The potential for something to go wrong and even dramatically wrong is always present. Also, and perhaps more than in any other line of business, the military relies on people at all levels making judgment calls, and judgment can be good but will not always be perfect. And no matter how well trained and experienced a soldier of whatever rank may be, sometimes his or her best judgment will be overrun by capricious weather, equipment failure, some other person making a poor judgment call or making a mistake, or by plain old bad luck.

It is a simple fact of life that sometimes the best trained and most experienced people get it wrong and make mistakes. Then, if you are really unlucky, it all comes together and people get hurt or die. None of this means such incidents should not be investigated. Proper investigation to develop an understanding of what happened is essential to reducing the risk of similar incidents. Perhaps someone made a mistake or a poor judgment call; then it is essential to establish why, not to blame or shed responsibility but to ensure we do better in the future.

Perhaps procedures or drills were not adequate for the situation; then they need to be reviewed and the training curriculum and standing orders adapted to avoid similar incidents or mitigate the outcome when they cannot be avoided. Or perhaps one or the other incident was simply bad luck and no-one could have done anything to avoid it. Then the best that can be done is to consider how the results might have been mitigated and adapt training, doctrine, procedures and drills accordingly.

Beyond that, all that is left is to mourn comrades lost and carry on. The one thing we must not do is rush to judgment and make assumptions based on nothing but a knee-jerk reaction to what happened. That would be grossly unfair to all involved.

• Heitman is an independent security and defence analyst.