The media release from the recently formed Defence Review Committee, set up by Defence and Military Veterans Affairs Minister Lindiwe Sisulu some weeks ago, which was issued on Tuesday, made no meaningful mention of the country’s defence industry, technology or research and development (R&D) sectors.

In the just over 1 000 word document, the local defence industry is explicitly mentioned just once, in a list of “key stakeholders” that the committee has “been engaging with in the last number of weeks and will continue to do so in the next weeks”.

The list contains 13 entities (they include Armscor, the National Planning Commission, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, the Presidential Commission on State Owned Enterprises, the South African Police Service (SAPS), the South African Revenue Service (SARS) and the Department of State Security); the list is not in alphabetical order and strikingly the local defence industry appears on it in eleventh position (Armscor is positioned ninth).

SARS is listed (in sixth position) because of its role in “Customs, Border Management, Arms Transfers, NCACC (National Conventional Arms Control Committee) interface”. The SAPS is listed fifth.

In a subsequent section, there is also the mention of “Corporate Business” and “Unions” as organisations with which the committee “may” engage in “extensive consultations”. But this is in the context of these being part of civil society, implying that these references are to business and unions in general and not the defence industry and the unions representing their workers in particular.

Other possible partners in these consultations are political parties and organisations, “Provincial level Imbizo [forums]”, youth organisations, religious bodies, academics, researchers and nongovernmental organisations, defence attachés (presumably foreign attachés serving in South Africa) and international organisations.

Regarding defence R&D and defence technology, there are only implicit references in the form of the mentioning of Armscor and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in the abovementioned stakeholders list, on which the CSIR is positioned tenth.

Oddly, the reference there, is to “CSIR (DefenceTek)”. But the defence R&D component of the CSIR was renamed years ago and is now called CSIR Defence, Peace, Safety and Security, or CSIR DPSS, for short.