Table of Contents
Strategy is the marshalling of means to achieve ends. In the arena of national defence, the allocation of means to ends occurs at a variety of levels. At the most abstract, a country allocates its limited store of flexibility by forging alliances, committing to treaties and conforming to international norms that it perceives to be in its interest.
More tangible, and of relevance to this chapter, is the matching of means to ends in maintaining and developing an armed force. While some of what follows is generally applicable, the focus will naturally be on the ADF.
The remainder of this chapter is divided into three parts. To begin with, I will argue that—even in principle—maintaining and developing an armed force consistent with identified strategic imperatives is a very complex and difficult task. Then—in keeping with the historical theme of ‘History as Policy’—I will survey the last 40 years of Australian defence history and offer some observations about the maintenance and development of the ADF over that period and the influence, or otherwise, of strategic guidance on the shape of the force.[1] Finally, I will turn to the present, and examine how well the Australian Government and its Defence bureaucracy are matching matériel means with strategic ends today, and suggest how greater coherence might be brought to the process of doing so.
Designing, maintaining and developing the ADF requires three things to be brought together: strategic guidance, military capability, and the budget.
Strategic guidance sets out the approach that Australia will employ to defend itself and protect its interests. Since the 1970s, this package of decisions has been contained in a series of Defence White Papers. These include a series of interrelated decisions about:
how Australia’s alliances, relationships and commitments to international norms will be used to enhance the nation’s security;
the ways in which Australia hopes to influence international affairs to its strategic advantage;
the military strategy for Australia’s defence, including the tasks that the ADF might be called upon to perform and a clear statement of under what circumstances and to what extent Australia will employ armed force and other tools of national power in order to achieve its goals; and
the broad shape, size and preparedness of the ADF to enable it to achieve that military strategy.
Military capability is the combination of force structure and preparedness that provides the government with options to use military force. It is important to remember that military capability includes preparedness—that is, the readiness and sustainability to undertake military operations. Capability also includes a time dimension. Current capability is the force-in-being, while future capability is that which is being planned or under development. In Australia, future capability is set out in a Defence Capability Plan that details a decade-long program of equipment acquisition.
The final element, the budget, is the amount of taxpayer’s dollars that the government is willing to direct towards defence and security.
Having laid out these three aspects—guidance, capability and budget—it is tempting to view the problem in linear terms. First you formulate a strategy, then you submit it to the generals and admirals who advise you what military capabilities are needed to enable that strategy. Finally you send the bill to the Treasurer, who writes a cheque for the amount in full. If only it were that simple.
Despite apparent recent evidence to the contrary, such a linear approach is not likely in practice, nor is it even desirable. Every dollar of defence spending must be balanced against the potential alternative uses for that money; be it health, education or tax-cuts. In practice, this leads to a process where options for strategic guidance, and especially capability and budget, are iterated to produce an affordable package, taking into account the many competing calls on the public purse.
This point is worth dwelling on; various levels of funding can call for diverse strategies and correspondingly different sets of military capability. If the Defence budget where to halve tomorrow, the optimum response would not be to cut the size of every component of the ADF by 50 per cent. Instead, a new defence strategy would be required that made use of a different set of military capabilities that was affordable within the new budget. In this sense, defence planning is not ‘scalable’.
If only these factors complicated the planning of an armed force, it would be bad enough, but there are three further complications.
The first complication is that strategic guidance is usually ill-defined. The ambiguity has its roots in several factors. To start with, the tasks which a defence force must accomplish are rarely unique or specific, and are often neither. This is true irrespective of whether planning is conceived around ‘threats’ or based on meeting ‘capability’ benchmarks. Furthermore, potential adversaries will seek to complicate our planning in several ways: they will develop multiple military options to use against us; they will conceal the true details of their military capabilities; and they will adapt to the choices we make so as to avoid our strengths and exploit our weaknesses. We can be sure that this will be the case—because it is also the way we operate.
The second complication is that the link between strategic guidance and specific plans for current and future capability is ultimately a matter of judgement. There is no unique military solution to a given task. Back in the late 1990s the US military undertook concurrent studies to determine the best options for delivering ‘deep strike’—disruption of enemy command and control and supply lines 100 km behind the forward line of battle. Each Service managed to produce analyses that showed its particular equipment option to be the most effective. This demonstrates that there are indeed many ways to ‘skin a cat’, but also that operational analysis is to be used with great caution.
The third complication is that, invariably, it is difficult to accurately estimate the relative cost (let alone the relative cost-effectiveness) of alternative capability options ahead of time.
In summary, planning a defence force is difficult as we cannot be sure of the tasks our armed forces will be required to perform. Even if these were clear, we would be uncertain on the best way to proceed, and we are never sure how much things are likely to cost—nor, in fact, do we know with any certainty how much money Treasury may make available. This is a heavy load of uncertainty to feed into an iterative (a mathematician would say non-linear) optimisation process.