Tag Archive for: reform

Too slow and too picky: Defence recruiting isn’t fit for purpose

Australian Defence Force recruiting systems need to be overhauled if the ADF is to sustain and increase its size in the coming years. The ADF also needs to make changes to entry standards so it can take maximum advantage of the pool of applicants.

In early 2024, the ADF was around 4300 people below its authorised strength of 62,700 permanent members. This makes the 2040 target of 80,000 permanent personnel look increasingly difficult to achieve.

While the challenges of recruiting are usually framed in the context of competition with other industries—with the low unemployment rate cited as evidence of labour market tightness—other factors are at play. It is commonly argued that pay and conditions for ADF members need to rise to attract and retain personnel. However, they are already relatively generous: Australia’s median full-time pay is about $88,500 a year. The starting pay of a sergeant or fully qualified officer is higher. A private reaching pay grade 5 will also earn more than the national median. Further increases to pay grades are likely to have diminishing returns.

In 2024, 64,000 people applied to join the ADF. The average time it took to complete a recruitment process was 300 days. These are both surprising figures, in different ways. On one hand, taking just a fraction more of those applicants in a year would bring the ADF up to its authorised strength. On the other hand, the recruitment period shows just how cumbersome and inefficient the recruitment process currently is.

While spending 300 days to decide whether to recruit someone might not have mattered as much in the relatively peaceful era straight after the Cold War, it is unacceptable when geopolitical tensions are increasing and we need expand the ADF quickly. Also, according to both human resources theory and plentiful anecdotal evidence, many of the ADF’s best applicants probably have other job opportunities. The longer the ADF takes to finish the recruitment process, the more likely a high-performing candidate will be frustrated by the bureaucratic delays and go elsewhere.

For those keeping score, some of those 64,000 applicants were successfully recruited and some withdrew their applications partway through. The rest would have been deemed unsuitable and had their application rejected. But could none of those applicants have been able to safely and competently do any of the 4,300 positions that remain unfilled in the ADF? Almost certainly not.

This is where the ADF needs to change its attitude towards recruitment standards: it needs to become less choosy. It is perhaps an uncomfortable truth that many Australian servicepeople who fought and died in World War I and World War II would have been rejected by today’s ADF. At the height of World War II, around one in eight Australians was deemed suitable to serve.

Defence needs to take a less risk-averse attitude towards health issues. There are many stories of potential ADF recruits being rejected for minor or historical physical and mental health reasons. ADF attitudes towards mental health are particularly outdated. Mental health issues are now better recognised and understood by health professionals and the public, increasing diagnosis rates. Despite improvements in the treatment and management of mental conditions, the ADF’s overly conservative attitude towards mental illness is excluding an increasingly large demographic from the recruiting pool. Recruiting from that pool will require improved mental health support both during service and after discharge.

The ADF will have to make changes to improve its recruitment process, starting with greater resource allocation to increase recruiting capacity. Identifying and prioritising high-performing applicants early would further optimise the recruitment process and increase Defence’s chances of securing these candidates. The ADF should also streamline bureaucracy where possible, particularly around document provision and follow-up medical examinations. Managing the contract with Defence’s recruiting service provider, Adecco, will further improve performance.

Defence would benefit from updated recruiting standards around minor or historical health issues. It should adopt a less risk-averse approach centred on an applicant’s ability to do their job at the time of recruitment. In the longer term, Defence should conduct a review into its recruitment processes with the aim of designing a recruiting system that can deliver the personnel needed for the ADF’s future.

Despite perceptions, there is a large pool of applicants who want to join the ADF. With appropriate changes to recruiting systems and standards, that pool should be able to fill the ADF’s expanding requirements. This will help the ADF meet its target of 80,000 permanent personnel by 2040.

‘A Stronger Europe?’: more a yearning than a strategy

Image courtesy of Flickr user Mark Skipper.

The authors of the European Union’s (EU) ambitious Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe – Global Strategy for European Foreign and Security Policy (GSEFSP) must have been aware it was unrealisable. They can’t have been ignorant of the almost insurmountable obstacles it faces. In the current economic and fiscal climate, it’s improbable that EU countries will make the required investment in defence capability. The EU project is under enormous strain, so the document’s best read as a contribution to the debate over the EU’s future.

The only explanation for this seemingly naively optimistic document is that it’s primarily intended for internal European consumption. It’s an attempt to rejuvenate and galvanise waning support for the founding vision of the EU. The GSEFSP opens with the recognition that, ’Our Union is under threat. Our European project, which has brought unprecedented peace, prosperity and democracy, is being questioned’. It repeatedly pleads for European unity: the strategy is introduced by declaring ‘The people of Europe need unity of purpose among our Member States, and unity in action across our policies’.

But the assertion that, ‘There is no clash between national and European interests’ can only be seen as dissembling. More pessimistic observers believe ‘some aspects of EU integration could be stopped or reversed’ as a result of growing Euroscepticism. Presently ‘Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK are among those EU countries with increasingly successful populist, and to at least some extent, Eurosceptic parties’.

Basing a policy on increased unity is odd at a time when disenchantment with the EU drive for ever greater enlargement is increasing and the political and cultural diversity of the Union is engendering policy conflicts; when immigration and refugee flows are feeding xenophobic populism, nationalism and anti-EU sentiments; and when Brussels’ support for projects like the TTIP is perceived by many as further evidence that it’s distant and uncomprehending of the problems confronting many Europeans. The call for European unity comes as analysts assert that ‘narrow national agendas are increasingly taking priority over European-wide solutions’. The commitment of some ‘European leaders and publics to the EU project in light of demographic and generational changes’ is being seriously questioned.

For the GSEFSP’s strategic objectives to be achievable, ‘investment in security and defence is a matter of urgency’. But between 2008 and 2014, national European defence policies collectively resulted in military capability being degraded by over 20%. In the Atlantic Council’s view, Europeans have ‘allowed their military capacity to atrophy’. In 2006 ‘NATO members agreed, on a voluntary basis, to spend a minimum of 2% of their GDP on defence yet few Europeans are genuinely attempting to meet this target. While Europe’s economy remains flat and unemployment is in double digits, fiscal austerity measures will ensure investment in defence continues to decline. ESPAS believes that, at best, defence budgets in Europe are likely to stagnate.

Extracting optimal benefit from current defence spending is hampered by the lack of coordination among EU members. This has left Europe with an urgent need for better defence cooperation—especially in planning cycles, capability development, procurement and interoperability. The GSEFSP identifies greater coordination as essential for achieving ’strategic autonomy’ and for providing Europe with the ability to meet its objectives and build the hard power to underpin its soft power ambitions. But the systemic challenges will remain substantial.

Perhaps the strongest indication that the GSEFSP is a contribution to the internal debate over the future of the EU from the perspective of Brussels is that the liberal internationalist values it advocates mirror the liberal manifesto originally at the heart of the EU. A recent Chatham House paper argued that the challenges to the rules based international order ‘are coming from rising or revanchist states; from unhappy and distrustful electorates; from rapid and widespread technological change; and indeed from the economic and fiscal turmoil generated by the liberal international economic order itself’. All these apply to the EU. Ironically, as the EU is in essence a collection of sovereign nations held together by a ‘rules based international order’, the recent Brexit can be understood as a rejection of the EU rules. The rules that hold the remaining EU members together are now still under threat from multiple sources.

While few are predicting the unravelling of the EU, and though the common market and freedom of movement still provide great benefits, many are predicting that the current pressures for greater policy autonomy for the member states and a greater capacity to exercise sovereignty will result in some significant reforms. A looser political union among EU members would result in even greater difficulty in coordinating foreign, security and immigration policies. The EU is headed for a prolonged period of introspection and reform, and the GSEFSP is designed to engender political support for a tighter, more centralised Union. The EU faces serious security threats on its periphery, but the security of Europe will continue to rely on NATO and not the EU—that is, on the US.