Making the leap...

As I have received some 'sabbatical' time from HCSS to write a book about defense planning, I decided to finally make the leap and to start a blog. I have been in the field of 'strategic studies' for about a quarter of a century now (yikes) - mostly at places that enjoy excellent reputations in this field. For ten years I worked at the RAND Corporation - on both sides of the Atlantic - and I am still very much a RANDite at heart ("improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis"). I've also worked at a number of European think tanks - the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Germany (which was created after WWII to be the new Germany's 'RAND'); what is now the European Institute for Security Studies in Paris; and for the past 7 years in the TNO ecosystem - the least well known of these places, even though it is by far the largest, with 4000 scientists of which about a quarter work in the fields of defense and security. In 2007 TNO created the The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, where I now work to deal with the growing demand for strategic-level analytical support within the Dutch government and beyond.  [I certainly plan to return to my views on some of these institutes in future blog entries].




This blog will deal with a number of issues I feel passionate about: the sad state of strategic policy analysis; the gap between policy and theory; new tools and methods; scholarship about the post-Soviet space; etc. But its main focus will be the same as the book I'm writing: defense planning - what's wrong with it and how to fix it. The basic premise of that book is fairly simple: that the value proposition of our current 'Western' defense and security efforts is simply unacceptable and that we can and have to do better. In the past 20 years, the West (and by that shorthand I denote the liberal-democratic community of nations across the globe) has spent tens of trillions of dollars on defense. Yet when we look at the geographical regions where we have concentrated our efforts - from the Balkans over Iraq all the way to Afghanistan - can anybody really argue that the effects that we have obtained there are in any way commensurate with the expenditures? And how about the (many more) regions that we have essentially neglected and that remain locked in the suffocating grip of various security traps? Or potential new domains in which and through which conflict is starting to manifest itself  (such as cyber and space)?

I will argue in the book that defense planning may be on the eve of its largest shake-up since the so-called McNamara revolution in the 60s. These tremors may even break defense out of the physical and mental shackles of the industrial age - thereby breaking with not just 50 years, but with 200 years of defense planning. The book will analyze why some of the current ways in which we plan for defense lead to an unbalanced portfolio of defense capabilities and will propose ways to remedy this situation.

The ideas in the book are based on defense and security planning work that we have been doing at TNO/HCSS for the past few years. Much of that work was done for various parts of the Dutch defense organization, but also for other parts of the Dutch government - including the Ministry of Interior and the whole-of-government 'National Security Program' - and for international customers such as NATO, the EU and some other smaller and mid-sized countries. Although this may seem counterintuitive to many, to me personally the Netherlands - aka Holland - has proved a uniquely attractive country in which to do this type of work. [I can assure my readers that saying something nice about the Dutch is not really standard practice for a Belgian and does not always come easy]. After working in the US (and especially at RAND), coming back to Europe of course required some adjustments. Differences of scale. Of mentality. Of world views. A radically different 'political economy' of defense. But I can honestly say that of all the countries in which I've worked , not one even comes close to the Netherlands in terms of attractiveness for a strategic policy analyst in the field of defense and security.  The Netherlands is one of Europe's most respected (smallish) force providers, one of the very few ones widely acknowledged throughout the Alliance to be 'punching above it weight'. It is blessed with a civil service that is quite competent, pragmatic, and - above all - open to outside analytical inputs not only in theory, but also in practice. Analysis matters in the Netherlands, as also reflected in the fact that it maintains a unique research infrastructure in defense and security (TNO, but also Marin, NLR and other knowledge institutes) that it actually also uses - two things that are unfortunately not nearly as wide-spread as one might think.

So in the course of the past few years, I have been actively  involved in various 'strategic' research projects for 'real' customers. These include developing, rolling out, and supporting a new whole-of-government security planning method; a large benchmark study in which we looked at how different countries do defense planning; a fairly sizeable product line on security foresight for a range of public and private customers; broad work on how defense departments can become more strategically agile; analytical support of the country's first large (inter-departmental!) bottom-up defense review; and much more. In every one of these projects, our research teams were able to delve quite a bit more deeply into the subject matter than would be possible in most other countries (including in some cases even the US).

Because of the country's small size, strategic analysts in the Netherlands also have the opportunity to get a much better sense of the broader (applied)  'whole-of-government' security field than analysts in larger countries ever could. I am still amazed, for instance, at how difficult (well-nigh impossible) it is to do work on these broader issues in the US today. I still feel very fortunate that my work at RAND allowed me to get a far better 'big picture' view of world politics than I would ever have been able to get in a smaller European country; whereas my work in the Netherlands has given me a far deeper 'big picture' view of how security is (or rather - can be) handled across an entire government than I would ever have been able to get (as a foreigner) in a large country. I do, of course, hasten to add the usual health warning (in this case mostly my health) that the views that will be expressed here are entirely idiosyncratically mine and cannot be construed in any way to reflect the views of HCSS or of the Dutch government.

So it is from the vantage point of my own personal history that I embark upon this journey.  I am strongly convinced that even (I would even say especially) democratically elected governments CAN do much better in 'getting defense right'. There is a universal consensus across the political spectrum that governments bear a special responsibility in supplying the public goods of defense and security. It is equally uncontroversial that the demand for 'international security' remains fairly high, and that without special efforts it is inevitable that this precious good will be underprovided. My own take on this is actually that international security is in much better shape than the defense and security community wants us to believe (even though this is in my view more due to changes in the international political economy and to the remarkable improvements in governance over the past few decades than to any security-specific efforts). But I obviously also recognize that there are many unsolved security problems from the past as well as a number of emerging challenges that have to be addressed. The question is, looking forward, how we can best address these, especially also in light of the fiscal tsunami that is starting to hit us. This means that we have to find better, smarter ways to bundle all of our available force elements (and there are much more of them than we currently deliberately apply) to guarantee the proper level of international security and stability. And that in turn means rethinking the way in which our governments do defense planning

Most research on defense policy focuses on what I like to call the 'downstream' part of defense and security planning: the actual crises and what we (try to) do about it. Over the years, I have become convinced that if we ever want to get truly better at this - as we want to, and as I am sure we can - we have to tackle the issue at its very root, which is what I call the 'upstream' of defence planning. The way in which we develop our 'armed forces', the way in which we define and derive capability requirements, the way in which we procure them, etc. As the much (often unjustly) maligned Donald Rumsfeld famously and accurately said: 'you go to war with the army that you have, not the one you want or wish to have in the future'. Making optimal use of defense capabilities that are available at any given moment in time will always be a crucial part of defense planning. But there are plenty of direct stakeholders who never cease to push this agenda. The constituency pushing for better future capabilities is immeasurably smaller and weaker. And yet it is precisely here that we can generate better value for money, and can provide future policmakers and commanders with better options whenever crises develop or erupt.

We, the defense analytical community, also bear our fair share of responsibility for generating the armies we have now. In a positive sense (for let us not forget that defense planners HAVE achieved some quite amazing feats in the past few decades), but also in a negative one. It is true that there are many forces at play in defense planning, and that the analytical community is undoubtedly one of the weakest elements in this force field. It is also true that we as a community get (much) more money to deal with the parts of the problem than with the whole of the problem. To give but one example: the 'market' for modeling missile defense is incalculably larger than the market for modelling defense-wide balance of investment issues. And yet should not the latter precisely provide the broader framework within which the return on our security investment in one particular area like missile defense should be gauged against investments in a variety of other capabilities? I personally feel that as a community we have been remiss in our duty to tell our customers that they often ask the wrong questions.  And to start doing some work on those questions that they may not be asking, but that we feel they should. This is essentially what my book is about.

One of my favorite slides in my current deck is the following one.

We are currently on the left side of this picture. Our defense communities have now spent the past 20 years in a mixture of territorial defense mode (generally recognized as old-fashioned) and 'expeditionary' mode (thought to be more 'modern') - or maybe more accurately: one particular form of expeditionary mode whereby the bulk of the money goes to industrial-age type kinetic capabilities, to the detriment of other 'force' elements that may actually provide more value for money EVEN for the security objectives of which our defense and security communities are the custodians.  We have been improving our defense capabilities constantly (mostly at a glacial pace), but still very much within the same (industrial age) 'armed force' paradigm. It is my contention that there are alternative forms of 'armed force' that might prove to be more effective AND efficient. Those would be the right side of this picture. Yet the 'big frickin' wall' in the middle is preventing us from getting from where we can get with incremental improvements within the same paradigm to where we may want to be (even if it requires a different paradigm). The bricks in that wall are well known to everybody who works in the defense world. They are the current defense mindset, which is still very much influenced by the Cold War (which many younger up-and-coming officers and civilians are starting to jettison), but possibly even more powerfully by the industrial age (a constraint still too few acknowledge). They are the various stovepipes that bedevil us - within the armed forces; between the military and civilian parts of our defence organizations; between the defence organizations and the rest of government; between government and the myriad of non-governmental players that are increasingly (directly and indirectly) involved in the provision of security; between these non-governmental players (NGOs vs NGOs, companies vs companies, various internecine feuds between academic tribes), between nations (even within an alliance), between time horizons (those responsible for the short-term vs those responsible for the medium- or longer term), etc. An important part of the wall is also the current form of interaction between defense organizations and what is sometimes called - quite aptly - the military-industrial [emphasis added] complex and what I would call (more broadly) the current political economy of defence, with certain quite peculiar (and largely dysfunctional) incentive and interaction structures between the various actors involved in defense.

The 'big fricking wall' may well be crumbling before our very eyes. In Europe, it has been crumbling for a few decades since the end of the Cold War for a variety of both structural and more 'cultural' reasons which I will return to in this blog. But the current budgetary crisis presents another heavy blow on this wall - with the current FY11 defense budget already seen by some as a possible turning point even in the US. Once the bulk of the troops return from engagements in Iraq and Afganistan, we can also expect a much more open debate about value for money after 20 years of extremely costly 'kinetic' expeditionary operations.

My personal sense is that the larger defense community should welcome this debate. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Nobody can be happy with the current state of affairs. Least of all the indeed brave men and women we now send to far-flung places with powerful but often ineffective (or even counterproductive) kinetic technologies and with only the most rudimentary 'technologies' (in the broader sense of that word) to stimulate local security resilience (both through better trained local coercive capabilities AND maybe even more importantly - and difficultly - through growing societal security resilience), to fight corruption and establish effective governance, to reboot and connect local economies etc. Like traditional kinetic combat, these security tasks require capabilities. The capability to eradicate corruption from indigenous security providers may take as long to 'develop' and may cost (us) as much as a strike fighter, a new frigate, or a special ops soldier. But the return on our security investment in such capabilities may be at the same level, if not higher. And yet these capabilities, in sharp contrast to the aforementioned kinetic capabilities, somehow do not typically flow from our current capability development methods. I will argue in this book that they should and can - even without having to abandon the basic tenets of our current basic approach (capability-based planning).

What I set out to do in this blog (and in the book) is to provide some thoughts and some concrete pointers on how we can arrive at a more balanced portfolio of defense and security capabilities that may prove more effective AND efficient than our current portfolio.  I will tackle some of the main aspects of our current defense planning processes and methods: the way in which we look at the future, the way we define and derive capabilities, the way in which we acquire these capabilities, ways in which we can make them more strategically agile and the way in which we can improve strategic defense management. Wherever possible, I will refer to concrete existing examples of countries that may already be trying out some of these things. Where not possible, I will suggest a number of ways in which they could be made to work. In all cases, I hope that readers of this blog will provide me with feedback that I can then still work into the book.

May I therefore invite you to take this leap with me?