Defence Business: Signs of strategy | ADM May 2010

Why?

Because ‘we're doing a value for money exercise.'

Nick Lee-Frampton | Wellington

Mapp denied it is a cost cutting exercise, saying it's a matter of shifting some NZ$50 million ‘from the back to the front.'

He singled out human resources and training as areas where costs could be reduced.

New Zealand's Defence Force reacted swiftly and set about creating Directorates.

On 16 March, [NZ] ARMY NEWS announced the Training & Education Directorate had already been opened and Colonel Dave Russell, the NZ Army's Chief HR officer, announced the forthcoming Directorate of Chaplaincy.

According to Russell, "chaplains will be better prepared and supported and able to assist with a wider variety of roles" (Author's emphasis).

Other changes include the creation of so-called Centres of Expertise ‘to develop the overarching HR management model' and ‘increased and standardised' job descriptions as something called Project R5 ‘cascades through all ranks' requiring troops and civilian personnel alike to justify their place on the payroll.

Such adjustments may, or may not, cause millions to ease their way forward, but ADM remained puzzled as to why a relatively small accounting exercise should delay the long awaited DWP, the first since 1997.

Mapp's office told ADM that although the DWP had been delayed "it's in progress and in fact making good progress".

"But it's a case of do it once and do it right.

"The Minister sees it as too important to be rushed to meet an arbitrary deadline set a year ago.

"We need to . . . close the funding gap."

ADM asked Dr Ron Smith, co-director of International Relations and Security Studies, Department of Political Science and Public Policy, at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, for his views on the delay.

"I was part of the [Defence] review process; "expert" academics like myself submitted papers and we had discussions [with Mapp] in Wellington.

"I argued strongly that the history of conflict tells you that you cannot accurately predict what [capabilities] you are going to need.

"Therefore, a policy that doesn't anticipate capability requirements in a broad way is a policy that is going to fail you.

"I was very much in a minority; most people took a bureaucratic view of defence policy.

"What has now happened suggests the meetings [between academics and Government] were not taken seriously ... that really the [objective] is about how much more money can be taken out of Defence.'

Expectations
ADM asked Smith what he expects from the DWP.

"Very little.

"I expect it to be driven by financial considerations, by what we want to spend rather than by an assessment of contingencies and what we might need.

"I think we ought to consider [the] possibility that we might want to deploy our armed forces to a conflict zone.

Frankly, apart from our Special Forces who are properly equipped and properly trained, I don't know that I would be confident in deploying any of our other forces to a war zone.

"I think we ought to be concerned about that; that we really don't have forces we can deploy.

"We used to have a capability for detecting and attacking submarines, we have allowed that to lapse.

"I hope we are considering re-establishing that capability.

"We build civilian ships and paint them grey.

"You couldn't send [the amphibious ship] Canterbury to a serious war zone."

How had such things come to pass?

"Because the [select committee's] Defence Beyond 2000 review answered the wrong question - ‘What do we need defence forces for?'

"They concluded that we needed them as an adjunct to diplomacy, to contribute to UN operations.

"The NZ Army was commonly used for such purposes and is cheaper than the Navy or the Air Force.

"Hence we focus on our Army, which makes no sense in relation to our strategic environment.

"So far as Defence is concerned, nothing that has happened since the new Government took over [in November 2008] has given me any encouragement at all.

"Although it was much de-emphasised under Labour, I am of the opinion that our most important defence partner for our ultimate security is still the US."

Dr Lance Beath, Senior Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington's Centre for Strategic Studies, echoed Dr Smith regarding reasons for the delay.

"I understand that an unusual degree of effort has been put into costing capabilities through their life cycle and found this inescapable gap between aspirations and money.

"To fill the gap the Minister is seeking savings in the Defence budget.

"It seems to me a credible, if disappointing, line.

"I would hope for an honest accounting of what it is we require our defence forces to do and how they need to be equipped and trained to do that.

"As distinct from - what is more likely to be the case - a survey of what we are currently doing, including anything we are currently doing that can be dropped for the sake of affording some new capability.

"This review should examine some of the policy tenets laid down by DB2000 that the incoming Labour Government more or less endorsed as their road map.

"There are aspects of that policy ... that are odd, not to use too strong a word for it.

"Particularly the assertion that New Zealand's policy emphasis ought to be first and foremost on equipping the Army, with Navy and the Air Force very much in a supporting role," Beath told ADM.

Maritime focus
"Maritime forces ought to be our primary focus.

"We do, of course, need well equipped, well trained, effective land forces but I can't see the strategic justification for putting them at the top of the pyramid.

"The Labour government and the select committee argued that it is the Army whose capabilities we draw upon for peace keeping and peace support operations therefore it is logical that we should focus on Army first and foremost.

"From a strategic perspective that is like driving looking only in the rear view mirror, forgetting that the future may not look like the past.

"Forgetting also that the past has been deeply coloured by the extent to which various players in the NZDF system have stuck their thumbs on the scales.

"The theory that it is the Army that is called on most often has been greatly buttressed by the East Timor intervention," Beath explains.

"There was no iron law that said the NZ Army should commit a battalion, it was, I believe, a choice manufactured by the then Chief of Army.

"The Australians were startled ... the most they expected was a company or company group.

"So the Herculean effort to maintain successive rotations at battalion level has, I think, distorted our view of the utility of land forces versus maritime forces in the current strategic environment.

"One likes to think policy leads to capability.

"The reality, in New Zealand's case, and I suspect of many other countries, is that capability drives policy, not the other way round.

"What flows from that?

"When we are looking to join coalitions we fall back on sending the poor old Army once again to a location where, hopefully, little harm will come to them.

"That line of thinking sows seeds of trouble for the future.

"The fact we have had a series of highly successful deployments in the ‘peace' area feeds the belief in Wellington that actually we're pretty good at this.

"We don't consider future situations where we may be required to achieve certain battlefield objectives for which we are poorly equipped, poorly trained and inexperienced.

"At that point the Government of the day is going to be very embarrassed [and] once again we may end up with casualties.

"So I would like more clarity around the issue of what capability we really need in the event of the balloon going up in some serious way," Beath said.

"The current Government has pretty well carried on the process laid down by the former Government, so it is a story of continuity, which is almost to be welcomed."

Does Defence Minister Mapp have room to manoeuvre?

"I think he must be very heavily constrained," Beath told ADM.

"It would be useful - and I hope to see this - if a distinction was drawn between how to manage our way over the next three to five years, presumably largely reliant on existing capability, as against the more radical requirements that one could sketch falling in the latter 10 to 15 years of the review.

"Restraint now, but a different story further out."

Future concerns
"My view of the future does not exclude the possibility that there could be major inter-state warfare in our region in the next 10 to 30 years.

"Australia says that while the prospects of inter-state warfare are not great they are not to be equated with zero and therefore we have to be prepared to fight a conventional war of a major kind.

"We tend to say the prospects for inter-state war appear to be pretty improbable, maybe vanishingly small, therefore ... let's focus on peace related operations.

"The problem with that line of argument is that ultimately it is the Defence forces that pick up the pieces when things do go pear shaped.

"I am in the school that believes the long period of peace we have enjoyed will sooner or later come to an end."

Minister of Defence under the previous administration and now Labour Party leader, Phil Goff told ADM that delaying the DWP has repercussions.

"Given the White Paper is at a strategic level, I don't think the explanation for its delay is adequate and the consequences of the deferral is an absence of policy and an absence, in any area, of moving forward with defence.

"I wouldn't expect a radical change in direction.

"It will probably be a re-iteration of the concentric rings of NZ Defence policy, the immediate area, the Asia-Pacific region and our global obligations.

"They may look more closely at the relationship between the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to avoid any duplication.

"I would certainly look at whether there were better and more effective ways of managing the procurement process.

"I don't think the Government is going to reverse some of the things that happened under us," Goff told ADM.

"I don't think they will bring back air combat when there are greater priorities that need to be carried through.

"Politically they can't afford to reverse the anti-nuclear stance and I don't think that they are going to expand defence spending that we had at roughly one per cent of GDP.

"You put off what is not vitally important for you in order to ensure what is critically necessary to the capabilities that you want to exercise.

"Upgrading the self-defence capability on the frigates would not have been my first priority.

"I think [the DWP] needs to emphasise the whole-of-Government approach, within the context of foreign policy directions and what NZ might be doing further in the areas of disaster relief.

"In terms of major changes, I think they were made over the previous decade when Labour reversed the previous run downs of capabilities that were so embarrassingly exposed in Bosnia.

"We could be looking for exit strategies in the Solomons and Timor Leste, but there are still risks of instability, particularly in Melanesia and concerns about Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Fiji; our broader defence and foreign policy needs to address that."

Nature of conflicts
"State on state conflict?

"I would say you cannot entirely disregard it; it is still possible," Goff said.

"The greater focus, though, will be on intra-state conflict and terrorism.

"I think we have been effective in Bamiyan.

"The benefits were outweighing the risk of what we were able to do there.

"I see the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated, with a huge level of uncertainty as to whether the US can achieve its objectives in the absence of a strong, local administration.

"You need it to be effective as no one from outside can do what the Afghan administration needs to do for itself.

"And if it fails to win hearts and minds, then it is hard to see how we will eventually succeed there.

"So I see continued problems in Afghanistan.

"Our Government needs to think more openly and transparently about those particular problems.

"Under Labour ... notwithstanding our desire to work closely with our friends, there was still an absolute commitment that New Zealand policy was to be determined in New Zealand in accordance with our values, our principles and our view of the world.

"I am worried that decision making will flow out of Wellington into other capital, because there won't be that strength of purpose or the same commitment to the importance of an independent, values based foreign and defence policy," Goff warned.

"I think China is far on the way to becoming a world superpower economically and with that it will expand its political and defence influence.

"Our response in the past to engage constructively with China and encourage it to be a responsible stakeholder in the region and globally is the appropriate policy to take.

"And probably it's the only policy to take.

"I don't think we need to get ourselves into the difficulties that Australia did over some of the implications within its own DWP."