Capability-Based Planning: The Fight Continues...

Dr. Ben Taylor, Team Leader of Strategic Planning Operations Research at Canada's DRDC has authored an interesting new piece that outlines some of the main tenets of what I have called the TTCP school of capability-based planning. It builds on a 2011 TTCP meeting in Ottawa I had the pleasure to attend. The paper is called 'Analysis Support to Strategic Planning' and has now been approved for unlimited release. Since I have not been able to find a copy on the internet (yet), I am taking the liberty of making it available on my blog and of adding a few personal thoughts.

I spent a few days last week in the presence of about 10 academics working in the field of Russian Foreign Policy. As I told them at the end of our meeting, I was struck by three main characteristics of this field: 1) the often astoundingly non-systematic empirical basis of much Russian foreign policy analysis; 2) the stovepiped nature of much of the work; and 3) the lack of any serious attemtp at cumulative knowledge building on this country that is once again become a major policy preoccupation of Western defense and security planners. My main rallying cry was that if we, as a community of experts, want to make a useful contribution to the West's attempt at dealing with a 'new' Russia, we will have to find ways to overcome these three hurdles.