MILITARY CAPABILITIES AND THE STRATEGIC PLANNING CONUNDRUM (original) (raw)

Expanded Capability Portfolios to Steer Force Development under Strategic Uncertainty

Specialist Meeting on Capability Based Long Term Planning, 2008

The paper reflects a methodology for long-term defence planning, developed by one of the authors at the request of the Bulgarian Ministry of Defence in the period July-November 2007. The methodology builds on good practices in long-term defence planning and capabilities-based planning in an attempt to make the force development process more sensitive and adaptive to significant changes in the environment (security, political, socioeconomic , technological, etc.) while preserving the transparency of resource allocation decisions. The underlying approach combines two recent developments. The first one calls for the use of two levels of scenarios-'mission scenarios,' or 'planning situations' in NATO parlance, and 'context scenarios,' known also as 'alternative futures'-as a means to represent strategic uncertainty in the force development environment. The second one is based on an expanded definition of 'capability.' We distinguish three types of capabilities: A. Capabilities to perform operational and management tasks, the operational capabilities being in the focus of long-term planning so far; B. Capabilities to shape the security environment, e.g. regional security cooperation, assistance to other countries, etc., and C. Capabilities for strategic adaptiveness, including analysis of trends and forecasting changes in the force development environment, technology monitoring, R&D, concept development and experimentation, maintenance of mobilization capacity, etc. Since the decisions in the long-term planning process are made under constraints (although constraints may be more or less loose), all types of capabilities are thus placed on equal footing in the competition for resources, while the use of context scenarios allows to rationalize the balancing between type A capabilities and the investment in shaping and strategic adaptiveness.

Defence planning as strategic fact: introduction

Defence Studies, 2018

With this special issue of Defence Studies, we situate defence planning as a constitutive element of defence and strategic studies. Indeed, in addition to the usual "downstream" focus on the use or non-use of force, on policy decision-making in foreign relations, military operations and global external engagement, we argue for the utility of an increased "upstream" focus on what is a major part of everyday defence and security policy practice for military, civilian administrative and political leadership: the forward-looking preparations for the armed forces and other capabilities of tomorrow. In particular, the special issue contributions explore two general dimensions of defence planning: the long-term, historical relationship between defence planning and the state including national variations in civil-military relations, and a concurrent tension between defence planning as an administrative, analytically neutral activity and the politics of its organisation and outcomes. In both of these, defence planning appears as a particular case of general planning, as a lens that enables particular foci on the external world to come about on behalf of the state while also sometimes creating institutionalised biases along the way. In this manner, paraphrasing Émile Durkheim, defence planning emerges as a "strategic fact" with dynamics of its own.

Enhancing the Effectiveness of Defence Planning Through the Implementation of Capability-Based Budgeting and Civilian Control

Access to Justice in Eastern Europe

Background: The effectiveness of defence planning within Ukraine’s defence and security sector is heavily contingent upon the meticulous formulation and execution of future defence budgets, as delineated in Ukraine’s National Security Strategy. Furthermore, it is imperative to com- prehensively examine international experiences in defence planning, specifically in developing and sustaining vital resources and capabilities for fulfilling defence missions under budgetary constraints. Consequently, there exists an inherent necessity for extensive dialogues among scholars and officials tasked with military-strategic decision-making. Results and Conclusions: This research explores the paramount significance of defence plan- ning for bolstering Ukraine’s security and defence capabilities. The intrinsic link between the identified issue and pivotal scientific and practical objectives becomes evident when considering the prioritisation of robust financial planning and judicious resource all...

Strategic Management of Defense Capabilities

2013

Strategic management of military organizations can be defined as an initiative to perceive changes in international security environments that are difficult to predict, to adapt to the changes, and to reform one’s assignment and role, capabilities and institution in a dynamic way. There is a wide range of preceding studies in business management about such institutional reform through recognition, adaptation and innovation. Here I would like to review strategic management from the defense studies point of view while consulting the results from the business management research.

Making Use of Uncertainty: A Different Approach to Australian Defence Force Capability Development (note: 2005)

Australian Defence Force Journal, 2005

Contemporary defence planners use the traditional strategic planning approach that is based on the fundamental assumption that the future of a business can be predicted accurately enough to choose a clear strategic direction for it. This conventional strategic planning methodology performs adequately when extrapolating from the present, or when dealing with incremental change within the existing strategic perspective, but the methodology deals less well with dynamic systems in which unexpected events occur.

Conducting Comparative Research into Defence Capability Formation

Applied Economics and Finance, 2017

The world appears to be searching for a new, multipolar model of global security. In this context, the provision of impartial data on military capability formation to be used in disarmament proposals and balance of power negotiations will be critical to effective security management in the prevailing uncertain international environment. In their recent research paper on the relationship between military expenditure (milex), government spending and economic growth in the Indo-Pacific Asia region the authors argued that milex" high level of aggregation often masked important changes in national military capabilities and proposed limited disaggregation of military expenditure data to highlight national spending on military force structure and preparedness so as to facilitate better understanding of military capability formation. In this paper the authors develop this perspective a step further by reviewing alternative approaches to the production of data on military capability formation. It is suggested that the milex data are disaggregated one level down to differentiate between investments in the future force and expenditure on the readiness and sustainment of the force in being.

Strategic Planning in the Military

Long Range Planning, 2000

This is an account of the US Naval Security Group Command's (NSG) search for strategic management during a time of unprecedented change. In response to dramatic shifts resulting from the end of the Cold War, Congressional pressures for cross-service cooperation , and the emergence of new technologies, the NSG engaged in a six-year strategic planning process. The process helped the group refocus and develop strategies better suited to new demands for military preparedness. The process was incremental and eclectic; early leadership came from middle managers, rather than top of®cials. The process began with a`quick and dirty' planning session initiated by department heads to deal with an immediate crisis and gained momentum and top-level involvement as the ®rst session and subsequent strategic planning efforts showed results. The process was guided by a strategic planning framework speci®cally designed for public and non-pro®t organisations and relied on a variety of strategic planning tools and techniques, including stakeholder analyses, SWOT analyses and capturing the insights gained from scenario planning using the newer cognitive methods such as cognitive and oval mapping. This article provides a chronology of events over a sixyear period, explores some of the strategic planning tools and techniques used, details results achieved and discusses some of the major lessons learned.