Without Denel the SANDF will, amongst others, not be able to maintain the Rooivalk helicopter, the armoured vehicles that it uses and the assault rifles issued to every soldier. There will be no small arms ammunition for the SANDF and they will have to throw away the world famous G5 and G6 artillery because only Denel can manufacture the specialised base-bleed shells that it uses.
If Denel closes down it will cost billions of dollars to replace the hundreds of military systems manufactured and maintained by them.
That boat has already sunk: it is already far too late to save Denel.
We need the jobs, the innovation, the research and the technologies that flow out of defence research.
It is not about arms manufacturing in itself. It is about the knock multiplier effects that we all benefit from.
The SJW idiots will never understand that.
Denel forced all the engineers to leave for jobs elsewhere that actually pay, you need experienced engineers for R&D, Denel will never be able to regain that experience.
There is no point in funding Denel under the guise of recreating the R&D capabilities that Denel had, it would take at least a decade before any graduates can design anything meaningful, and that would involve learning from endless mistakes that would have been caught by experienced engineers (which Denel no longer has).
Local defence R&D can happen outside of Denel and without being hamstrung by government (corruption, BEE, cadre deployment and other examples of nepotism, indecision, bad decisions, basically everything for which the ANC is infamous).
Fund maintenance activities that Denel performs for the SANDF and SAPS, don't fund R&D which would be pearls cast before swine.
SA needs Denzel as well as my skills. Denzel has all the technology the world needs. They can build anything but they are restricted by government incompetence and internal ANC factional battles. Private ownership should be 52%. There are too many unnecessary things that are imported that could be manufactured locally and be exported. South Africa stands a good chance to control African continent trade before China takes over.
And what are your skills Mr Washington?
Yes, but we don't need this Denel we need a private Denel which may have a cooperative agreement with the state. There is no/yes answer here, the less state intervention the better.
I could not agree more
That's what state looters count on, being the only ones who can provide that service. And if you are not the only ones who do it, you enforce it aka SAPO.
As things stand now, I think it is safe to say that Denel is currently incapable of providing anything that even the SANDF needs, case in point being Hoefyster.
