Ethiopia’s Defence Technology Strategy – IFA

For Ethiopia, the question is no longer whether military modernization is necessary. It is whether modernization will strengthen sovereign capacity or merely replace one form of vulnerability with another. In defence, the danger does not end with the purchase price. It begins after delivery: in the spare parts chain, in software dependence, in maintenance regimes, in upgrade permissions, in munitions resupply, and in the quiet political leverage that foreign suppliers retain over the systems they sell. A country may formally own its platforms yet still lack full control over their combat availability. That is why the real strategic issue is not import versus local production in the abstract. It is whether procurement is structured to reproduce dependency or to create capability.[1][2]