Every time your phone reroutes you around traffic, you are using a Cold War weapons system.
By Dr Dithoto Modungwa, defence and security researcher at CSIR
GPS began as NAVSTAR, a US Department of Defence positioning network built for missile guidance in the 1970s and 1980s. Precision targeting became precision navigation, and precision navigation became Google Maps.
The internet has the same lineage: ARPANET, a military communications project designed to survive a nuclear strike, became the network your smart logistics platform runs on today.
Battlefield communications research underpins 5G networks that enable real-time freight data transfer. This is not a coincidence. It is a pattern, and South Africa has more history inside that pattern than most people realise.
Military origins of the self-driving car
Consider the self-driving car. Its breakthrough, simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM), was proven out in the DARPA Grand Challenge of 2004 and 2005, a US military-funded race for autonomous ground vehicles across the desert.
The teams and algorithms that emerged became the start of Waymo and Cruise. Electric propulsion followed a similar path: the US Army’s “Silent Watch” programme in the 1990s, aimed at running vehicle systems silently on battery power in the field, fed directly into the Allison EP-50 hybrid drivetrain and, from there, into the commercial EV revolution.
Even the composite materials protecting today’s EV battery enclosures descend from ballistic armour research, just as carbon fibre owes its maturity to the same lineage.
Defence safety Innovations ignored by transport sector
South Africa’s own contribution to this story is significant and underused.
The Casspir, developed here and built in more than 2 000 units, pioneered the V-hull design that deflects mine and IED blast energy away from occupants.
That design shaped the evolution of the MRAP standard now used across NATO forces. The underlying blast-deflection and occupant-survivability engineering is directly transferable to crash protection and vehicle safety more broadly, yet it has never been systematically carried into our civilian transport sector.
The Rooivalk’s avionics and electro-optical targeting systems, and the radar and electro-optics behind our long-range surveillance systems, both have direct civilian equivalents in air traffic management, transport monitoring and weather surveillance.
Our NyendaWeb and CMORE digital twin platforms, built for multi-domain military situational awareness, are architecturally the same tools now needed for real-time civilian fleet management and predictive infrastructure planning.
Why does this matter now?
South Africa loses more than 12 000 lives on our roads every year, and transport accounts for roughly 10% of our national greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, geopolitical volatility, climate disruption and great-power competition over critical technologies are reshaping global R&D priorities.
A country with South Africa’s defence-innovation heritage cannot afford to leave that heritage siloed inside the CSIR, Armscor and Denel, disconnected from the civilian transport systems that need it most.
At the 44th Southern African Transport Conference (SATC 2026), I used my plenary address to set out what I call the 4S1R framework: Sovereignty, Safety, Security, Sustainability and Resilience, five imperatives that should guide how we deliberately move dual-use technology across the defence-civilian boundary, on near-term (0–3 year) and longer-term (3–10 year) horizons.
SATC has run for over three decades as the primary forum where South Africa’s transport researchers, engineers and policymakers meet, and this year’s 44th edition landed deliberately on the 30-year mark of transport policy in the democratic era, a fitting moment to ask what government, industry and research institutions must do next.
I am currently contributing South African expertise to NATO Research Task Group AVT-408 on autonomous military systems, following our co-authored contribution to NATO’s 2026 flagship report on the assessment of autonomous ground vehicle mobility (TR-AVT-341). That international work confirms something worth saying plainly: our researchers are already operating at the frontier of this field. What is missing is not capability. It is the institutional bridge connecting that capability to the transport systems South Africans rely on every day.
The technologies reshaping global transport were not born in Silicon Valley. They were born in military research programmes, ours included.
The question for South Africa’s technology sector is not whether we can compete in this space. We already have. The question is whether we will finally build the bridge that lets our own innovation heritage do useful, civilian, life-saving work at home and whether policymakers will move dual-use technologies across that boundary with urgency.