Tag Archive for: Force Structure

No need for a Need

Being an editor of this blog, I try to avoid jumping into a stoush with our much valued contributors because it looks a bit uneven. But Jim Molan is big enough and tough enough for me to make an exception. I won’t dwell on the Reserves aspect of his response to Nic Stuart’s piece—Kath Zeising is taking that flank. And, as it happens, my thoughts on making better use of the Reserve are already on the record.

Instead, I’m going to take Jim to task on the notion of Australia’s strategic ‘Need’. The way it’s presented, it sounds like there’s some kind of Platonic Ideal strategy out there in the ether waiting to be summoned, if only we can think hard enough about it for long enough—of course with government, bureaucrats, think tanks and commentators keeping quiet for long enough. Once we have the ‘one true strategy’, then government either has to fund it, or explain to the Australian people why it is going to eschew such a noble pursuit.

Of course, the world doesn’t work that way. Even if there was some kind of Ideal Strategy from which we could deduce our Need, the resulting investment required to implement it necessarily comes with an opportunity cost. Ignoring that cost makes no sense in a planning framework. Like every other area of public policy and budgeting, the funding of defence is an exercise in balancing costs and benefits.

What we really need to accept is that there is no one true path to security. For a given level of expenditure we can provide ourselves with certain options. If we spend more then, generally speaking, we’ll be able to do more and be more flexible in our responses. If we spend less, then we’ll be able to do less. No level of spending will be ideal—ask our American friends if their $700 billion a year has bought them the perfect force structure for all of their problems. The world is such an unpredictable place that there is no level of spending that will cover every contingency. So there’s an inherent degree of arbitrariness in where you decide to draw the line. One planner’s Need could be a woefully inadequate capability in the eyes of someone less sanguine about the future. Read more

Force Structure 102: getting the balance right?

Balancing the force?

The next White Paper’s conclusions on the overall force balance will be closely studied. While whether current or future wars receive priority and the numbers of wars to be fought concurrently might be big strategic decisions, it’s the force structure decisions that will identify the big financial winners from the White Paper.

There is a wonderful myth in Australian defence planning that the correct force structure is some ideal ‘balanced’ force. It’s myth mainly because everybody has their own unique idea of the ‘right’ balance. Rather than being permanent, the balance sensibly changes overtime as people consider the emerging circumstances and decide what to focus on. Each White Paper in ways large or small rebalances the ADF. The last White Paper’s decision to build 12 submarines was one such rebalancing.

In simple terms, military forces can do many things, but there are really only three broad types of wars they can be organised for: civil wars (including counterinsurgency), conventional interstate wars and nuclear wars. The weighting of the force between the various types of war is one of the balancing criteria. Read more

Force Structure 101

More tooth than tail?

Behind every book, article and blog post about contemporary defence issues, there lurks the author’s view of what is the ADF’s ‘correct’ force structure. This is never more evident than when there’s a White Paper in the wings. White papers usually represent the outcomes of numerous clashes between competing force structure options. Accordingly, advocates of various alternatives are out in force, both in public and behind closed doors, to try to influence the final result in their favour, This is especially so today when money and resources are scarce.

At the Cabinet level, force structure represents how the Defence budget is allocated—the ‘balance of investment’ in budgeting terms. When funds are limited, the first decision is which gets priority: the current force or the future force? We’ve faced this dilemma before. In the 1990s governments decided to fund the future force at the expense of the current one. This philosophy underpinned both the Keating Government’s 1991 Force Structure Review and the Howard Government’s later 1997 Defence Reform Program. At the time it seemed reasonable enough—there was no war and none threatening so the budget was skewed towards the future, when there might be. Personnel and operating costs were cut to free up funding for new equipment.

Smaller operating budgets meant less flying hours, less steaming days and less track miles. Reduced personnel costs meant a smaller Defence workforce. There was also considerable outsourcing of the ‘tail’, cutting of logistic stocks and transfer of functions to the part-time Reserve. Not surprisingly, when an actual operation like Timor-Leste turned up, where the current force rather than a future abstraction actually had to show up, the Army had worries over both manning the deployment over the longer term as its personnel rotation base had been cut, and in the sustained support of the deployed forces. With Navy the impact was subtler; as the Rizzo Review found, outsourcing to gain efficiencies cut Navy’s and DMO’s professional skills, contributed to the poor preparedness of Navy ships a decade later. Read more