Capabilities

Capabilities are at the heart of any defense effort. Getting them ‘right’ has been, is, and will remain a fiendishly difficult task. For better or worse, defense organizations go into any crisis with the capabilities they have – not the ones they need or would like to have. We have come a long way in certain areas of capability development, as illustrated by recent experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. But these very same experiences also show that most of us still are far from getting it ‘right’.

Over the past decade Capability-Based Planning (CBP) has become somewhat of a ‘gold standard’ in defense planning throughout the NATO Alliance. The basic idea behind Capabilities-based Planning (CBP) is still best formulated in the original wording of Paul Davis from RAND: “Capabilities-based planning is planning, under uncertainty, to provide capabilities suitable for a wide range of modern-day challenges and circumstances while working within an economic framework that necessitates choice”.  CBP represented a revolution in defense planning. Prior to its introduction defense planning consisted of a glorified form of operational planning for (at best) a small number of contingencies. Just like Copernicus replaced the earth with the sun as the central element in our view of the universe, so too did CBP replace threats with capability packages as the core element in a more systemic defense planning approach.  These capabilities were still to be tested against a (broader and more dynamic) scenario space, but they were no longer merely derived ‘one on one’ from a few, overly precise – and therefore rarely reliable – point scenarios. This often led to soldiers being sent into battle with decidedly suboptimal capabilities. The key intuition behind CBP was to start with what needs to be done and then to derive an affordable force that can do that – all within a transparent and traceable analytical framework and in the hope of increasing the chance that the right capabilities would be available when they would be needed.

While the basic tenets of CBP are now widely accepted (at least at the rhetoric level), there remain many important differences in the ways in which various countries have implemented them.  Broadly speaking, CBP today comes in three major strands. The Anglo-Saxon approach, as best exemplified in the work of the Technical Cooperation Programme (TTCP), still gives scenarios a central role within the CBP-process. It uses a combination of expert judgment and various operational analysis tools to derive capabilities in a number of sequential stages. The French approach is unmistakably ‘capability-based’, but its ‘PP30’-exercise merges a number of different perspectives – a geopolitical one, a (strong) technological one and an operational one – in a carefully orchestrated pas-de-deux between an ‘operational coherence officer’ from the joint defense staff and a ‘force systems architect’ from the powerful procurement agency, supported by analytical work done for each ‘force system’ (e.g. projection, ‘deep strike’).  A third strand can be found back in some of the smaller countries who profess to be practicing some form of CBP but do not have the tool suites to support this analytically in the level of detail that the larger countries do.  These smaller countries to some extent rely on the NATO defense planning process to help them in this.

If the CBP was (and remains) revolutionary in its conception, its actual impact on force structures has been underwhelming.  The potential analytical power of CBP has so far not proved a match for the much more potent constituencies (political, bureaucratic, industrial, etc.) that drive capability planning.  Any objective observer of defense choices cannot but be surprised by some of the capability decisions that still come out of our current supposedly more ‘rational’ CBP-processes. This applies both to a number of questionable (often big-ticket) choices that still manage to ‘make it’ through the new CBP-mechanisms; and to some seemingly obvious new choices that still do not make the cut.

A number of factors are now likely to push CBP in new directions. These include the budgetary tsunami that is about to hit most NATO defense organizations, accelerated learning through ongoing operations (at an extremely high cost in blood and bullion), a possible backlash against the disappointing value for money obtained in military efforts from the Balkans to the Af-Pak region, and a number of analytical breakthroughs. I have described some of the most striking and promising new trends in a presentation I have been giving (drawing upon a larger international benchmarking study of defense planning methods commissioned by the Dutch MoD from The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies). Here is an earlier version of this presentation

10 Trends in Capability Planning for Defence and Security

View more presentations from Stephan Spiegeleire.

I am writing out this presentation for a National Defense University publication that should come out later this year.  But in this entry I just want to stand still on what I think is one of the most important trends, which is the broadening of the definition of defense capabilities (very much in line with the entries I posted here on the deeper meanings of 'armed force' and of  'military technology'). I sometimes use the following slide to illustrate this.

Until recently, defense capabilities were mostly identified, acquired and used by the individual military services, who thought of them primarily in terms of materiel (M) and – to a smaller extent – personnel (P). The past decade has witnessed a clear trend towards more ‘joint’ (_j) M(&P) capabilities, even if real progress on this score remains patchy. Most countries are now also taking a step further by recognizing that true defense capabilities consist of more than just M(&P)-solutions. They have broadened the definition to include important capability elements such as doctrine, training, leadership, etc. – leading to new acronyms such as DOTMLPF in the US, TEPID OIL in the UK, PRICIE in Canada, etc. This trend is most visible in concrete new capability areas such as counter-IED. When confronted with this new threat, the first instinct of a number of national defense organizations (NDOs) was still to instinctively jump to materiel solutions (à la MRAP). But with time, most graduated to a ‘broader’ analysis of this capability requirement which spawned somewhat different solutions – e.g. increased emphasis on training or tactics, techniques and procedures might provide higher value for money than the instinctive ‘M’-only solution.

These first two extensions of the term ‘defense capability’ occurred purely within national defense organizations, and yet already they proved/are proving extremely difficult to implement. But more and more countries now also accept that actual defense capabilities go beyond the purely military ones (“the solution is not military”) and should include all instruments of statecraft that governments have at their disposal. As I have already indicated, we tried in the NATO RTO's Joint Operations 2030 study to identify some of these. The first natural trend here is towards ‘3D’ approaches, combining the capabilities of government departments or agencies responsible for Defense, Diplomacy and Development Aid. Cooperation between these departments is finally picking up in-theater, and in many countries also in the capitals – but typically mainly to deal with problems in the operations themselves. The next step will be to start deriving and developing defense capabilities in a more ‘comprehensive’ way.

As they start moving in the ‘3D’ direction governments quickly come to the conclusion that many – if not all – other government departments have capabilities that can be and should be harnessed to obtain the desired security effects. Homeland security concerns have greatly helped this trend towards more whole-of-government (WoG) approaches to defense and security planning. But the difficulties surrounding the civilian surge in Afghanistan throughout the NATO Alliance illustrates we still have a long way to go. The new Dutch national security strategy, however, shows that it is possible for governments to perform genuine capability-based planning on a whole-of-government basis. Sharon Caudle and I have argued that we are starting to see a new generation of national security strategies that is moving in that direction. 

A final (very embryonic) trend is that governments are starting to think about not only their own capabilities, but also about ‘ecosystems’ of defense capabilities around them – both at home (in the private sector, the NGO sector, etc.); and even beyond their national borders (by strengthening forward security resilience in other countries). Many countries are starting to pay lipservice to this trend (for examples, please check the US QDR’s and the UK Green Paper’s emphasis on partner capabilities), a few are putting real resources into this, but none have amended their capability development models and methods to fully take this onboard.