ABSTRACT
South Africa’s defense establishment faced great challenges in the 1990s, as the nation’s security situation changed radically and international sanctions against the previous apartheid regime were lifted.The defense budget decreased dramatically, stabilized and then began rising again in the late 1990s. Many defense firms, reacting to the falling defense budget, exited the market. Others downsized, restructured, and diversified both production and markets in the lean years. However, the absence of a coherent government policy on conversion and the recent increase in the defense procurement budget have meant that South Africa failed for the most part to move people and resources released from the defense industrial sector into other spheres of development.
