Angola and Mozambique may be some of the few African militaries, which South Africa couldn't just walk over, but which they would have work up a metaphorical sweat.
WI a coalition of African nations invaded Apartheid South Africa?
- Thread starter Malone
- Start date
Angola and Mozambique may be some of the few African militaries, which South Africa couldn't just walk over, but which they would have work up a metaphorical sweat.
Personally, I think everyone has made a huge mistake here assuming any invasion would be conventional. We only have to tweak OP’s suggestion to the much more dangerous and likely case of providing arms, funds, ‘volunteers’ and cross-border bases, for the militant-wing of the ANC, and any other revolutionary organisations.
It is exactly this scenario that kept the South African establishment up at night, and was the fear around which they based their foreign policy during the 70s and 80s.
South African policy demanded that a buffer of supportive countries exist between them and the African Nationalists. Until the late 70s this meant supporting white rule in Portuguese Africa and Rhodesia, after both of these collapsed it meant intervening to support UNITA in Angola, carrying out covert operations in Mozambique, and fighting a guerrilla war in South African occupied Namibia.
Luckily for the South African government, they were able to convince Botswana, Zimbabwe and to a lesser extent Mozambique that the risks of supporting anti-apartheid revolutionaries directly was too great. But that still meant they had to fight a serious and draining conflict in Angola.
It is exactly this scenario that kept the South African establishment up at night, and was the fear around which they based their foreign policy during the 70s and 80s.
South African policy demanded that a buffer of supportive countries exist between them and the African Nationalists. Until the late 70s this meant supporting white rule in Portuguese Africa and Rhodesia, after both of these collapsed it meant intervening to support UNITA in Angola, carrying out covert operations in Mozambique, and fighting a guerrilla war in South African occupied Namibia.
Luckily for the South African government, they were able to convince Botswana, Zimbabwe and to a lesser extent Mozambique that the risks of supporting anti-apartheid revolutionaries directly was too great. But that still meant they had to fight a serious and draining conflict in Angola.
Aye. If it could have happened, it would have. The frontline states had enough trouble fending off the SA backed quislings like Renamo.
Which is not to say that there aren't cases where African armies have shown the capacity to fight hard and win on conventional battlefields - Eritrea-Ethiopia twenty years ago, for example. But that wasn't on the menu in Southern Africa in the bad old days.
Thanks. So Alien Space Bats.... like "Zontar, the Creature from Venus"? (An alien space bat-like creature that controlled humans to do its bidding by biting the back of their necks and leaving behind a small transistor.)
Well the Angolan air force flying ~100 MiGs = the Angolan air force having ~100 Cuban and East German MiG pilots and ground crews on loan. It wasn't exactly a home-grown force, and its a far smaller air force today. Angola, though, did have a large ground army and one equiped with modern tanks, APCs, artillery, etc.
I agree but it was still a great force for subsaharan africa , qualitatively outclassing the SAAF in many respects
Simply having good aircraft is only one part of the equation. How good was their pilot training and maintenance?
ASB are closer to Divine Intervention or, if you are a Star Trek fan, the "Q". Capable of doing literal magic, up to and including creation of alternate Earths or multi-verses.
Small "g" gods.
As I noted above, it was superb, they outsourced everything to the finest East German crews Soviet money could buy.
Understood, thanks. And my low-budget sci-fi movie reference should have been "Zontar, the Thing from Venus."
Qualitatively as long as their pilots trained as much as the SAAF (or any other reasonably front line air forces), were supported by technical expertise, and had a robust parts inventory.
Saying that they have the airframes is barely the beginning of what is necessary, especially if the pilots are selected by how favorably they are viewed by the government (See: Bekka Valley 1982, 1991 Iraq) and if most of the ground personnel are conscripts with little or no serious training (takes at LEAST a year to get a tech up to speed, that was one reason you would see Soviet Air Force officers engaged in direct maintenance supervision or even "hands on" repair work).
In the case of Angola when it was simply a Soviet drone, with Cuban and WP personnel effectively BEING the air force, and also having "advisors" who were in full out command of Angolan forces the scenario jumps into an entirely different, vast more dangerous game. In this case the chances of a U.S./UK (possibly with France) intervention, skyrockets since it has now gone from a local dogfight to a obvious Soviet invasion to acquire the cornucopia of SA mineral assets and natural resources. Even if it was restricted to three CBG the Angolan Air Force, regardless of who was in the cockpit, will survive for exactly as long as it stays on the ground (assuming the intervention doesn't include air strikes on air bases and C3I).
Larry Bond actually wrote a fairly interesting book, Vortex, back in the early 1990s surrounding a variant of this scenario. It hasn't aged well, which is true of most of the techno-thrillers of the era, since they depend on political realities that no longer exist, but the combat scenes are still solid, as one would expect from the man who wrote the combat scenes for Red Storm Rising and created the computer simulation Harpoon (both the civilian version and the classified version used for years at Annapolis and the Naval War College).
Several Questions:
1) What sort of support does Cuba provide these African Nations? Air support? Cuban Special Forces? Logistics?
2) Do these nations have access to SAM tech/imports from the USSR?
3) Do these nations employ their forces in a conventional manner, as Soviet advisors would have trained them to do, or do they fight in a irregular fashion?
4) How do South African and Namibian blacks react in this situation? Do they revolt, riot, or keep their hands down?
5) What role does Rhodesia play in this scenario? Are they neutral or are they actively allied?
6) Does Botswana have the political will to fight against South Africa? Aren't their economies heavily tied together during the Apartheid era?
1) What sort of support does Cuba provide these African Nations? Air support? Cuban Special Forces? Logistics?
2) Do these nations have access to SAM tech/imports from the USSR?
3) Do these nations employ their forces in a conventional manner, as Soviet advisors would have trained them to do, or do they fight in a irregular fashion?
4) How do South African and Namibian blacks react in this situation? Do they revolt, riot, or keep their hands down?
5) What role does Rhodesia play in this scenario? Are they neutral or are they actively allied?
6) Does Botswana have the political will to fight against South Africa? Aren't their economies heavily tied together during the Apartheid era?
I wouldn't really say this is true. While fighting in Angola during the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, Angola's SAM system did wonders in limiting the SAAF.
The point is that SAMs only need to be placed in strategic areas, not along whole fronts.
In the 1970s and 1980s where would you rank the South African military globally?
Top 20?
Conventionally? Probably not top 10, after which it is more a matter of comparing folks regionally. They lacked both an adequate naval fleet and were weak logistically for any sort of offensive operation. While naval forces are not always critical (as demonstrated by the DPRK) if a country has a long shoreline to defend, being unable to defend it is a rather huge gap.
They did, however, have a nuclear capability "rumored" at the time, acknowledged later with six +/- special weapons by 1982. They also had an active BCW program. That put them into a whole different league at the time (in order of joining the club: U.S., USSR/Russia, UK, France, Israel, PRC, India, South Africa, Pakistan, DPRK). South Africa is also the ONLY member of a related, and in a way much more remarkable, club. They are the first and only nation-state to voluntarily disarm a domestically run program (Ukraine gave up the inventory they inherited from the old USSR, but it wasn't their program).
They couldn't really do anything about it. The launch mechanisms for Ukraine's nuclear weapons were located in Russia. Plus, I doubt Russia would very much tolerate one of their former republics having nuclear weapons so close to it's borders.