ABSTRACT

Defence planning in South Africa has gradually declined to the point of collapse; for reasons that are both complex and largely unexplained. While South Africa is not alone in this situation, the paucity of universal theories to explain the ineffectiveness of defence planning currently limits the theoretical validity of analyses that seek to address the phenomenon. Generating a substantive hypothesis that explains not only the causes of South Africa's current defence predicament, but also those of other countries in similar circumstances, became the paper's primary purpose. By abstracting from theories in management sciences and security studies, the paper concludes that top management's approaches to defence planning are the primary mechanisms that bring about success or failure in defence decision-making. The authors subsequently integrate relevant critical, contextual, and functional approaches to defence planning in a theoretical framework, using empirical evidence from the South African defence environment to substantiate their arguments throughout.

摘要

南非的国防计划逐渐衰落到崩溃的地步；原因既复杂又很大程度上无法解释。虽然南非并不是唯一处于这种情况的国家，但目前缺乏解释国防计划无效性的普遍理论限制了旨在解决这一现象的分析的理论有效性。提出一个实质性假设，不仅可以解释南非当前国防困境的原因，还可以解释处于类似情况的其他国家的原因，成为该论文的主要目的。通过从管理科学和安全研究的理论中抽象出来，本文得出结论，最高管理层的国防计划方法是导致国防决策成败的主要机制。