This exercise additionally noticed a full troop with two gun sections of 14.5 mm AA Guns, One Jakkals Vehicle with a Mamba double barreled 12.7 mm AA Gun being deployed in an air drop. The brigade's operational focus again shifted back to rural COINOPS in 1986 and members of the brigade have been deployed along the borders of Zimbabwe and Botswana in an Operation generally known as Operation Pebble. In April 1989, 14 Parachute Battalion Group was deployed to the Northwestern parts of Namibia where they carried out heli-borne operations from a base at Ehomba as part of Operation Merlyn, in what became identified because the Nine Day War. This occasion is remembered in Namibia as the Cassinga massacre, the topic of much continued controversy covered partly during the reality and reconciliation commission in South Africa. 1987 also was the 12 months when the final operational parachute drop was executed in Angola as part of Operation Pineapple, the place two companies from 1 Parachute Battalion performed a cordon and sweep maneuvers. McGill Alexander writes that corporations from 1,2, and 3 Parachute Battalions operated in opposition to Zimbabwean guerrillas inside Rhodesia in September 1979-FEbruary 1980, the last years of the Rhodesian Bush War.

Army males to see motion after World War II when, in 1966, they participated, with the South African Police, in opposition to insurgents in S.W.A. Angolan border with South West Africa (SWA)