If the past is any guide then some middle-ranking official or officer is going to take the fall for the cock-up at sea last week when an Iranian corvette took part in exercises off False Bay with the South African, Chinese and Russian navies after President Cyril Ramaphosa, late in the day, issued instructions (exactly what he said and whether or not he wrote it down we still don’t know) that they should not take part. There was probably no need for the Iranian vessel to follow the others out to sea, veteran military analyst Helmut Roemer Heitman tells Peter Bruce in this edition ofPodcasts from the Edge, if it was merely going to observe. You can observe from the bridge of a participating ship.
The result of the mess thus created, he says, is that “It will be a demoralising impact on an already demoralised defence force because they’ll be given the blame. And that’s bad because the morale is already not good for obvious reasons. “So you’ll have more people leave who we’d rather keep and you’ll have fewer people join who we’d like to join”.
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