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.

Analytical support to strategic defense and security (D&S) planning remains a uniquely challenging area for most of our D&S organizations. I have always been amazed at the enormous discrepancy between the effort nations (and international organizations) put in analyzing the lower level and the effort they put in supporting the higher-level choices analytically. There seems to be an unwritten assumption that the higher-level stuff is 'just politics' and is therefore either 'hands off' or 'impregnable'. It is obvious that in democracies, legitimately elected representatives of the people should have the final call. But it seems equally obvious to me that these calls should be informed by careful, rigourous, pre-political analysis. And yet there is preciously little of that on defense and security. Both in the public realm and in the classified realm. And to be honest, I don't know which of these two is more damaging or troublesome to our defense effort.

Ben Taylor has been at the forefront at pioneering such work first in the United Kingdom, where he used to work at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and then in Canada after he moved there and joined Defence Research and Development Canada. He was (and remains) one of the main driving forces behind two previous pieces of work on capabilities-based planning that really drew my attention to this line of work. I have called this approach to capabilities based planning the 'TTCP school'. The Technical Cooperation Panel is essentially the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the NATO Science and Technology Organization (previously called Research and Technology Organization) where defense scientists and representatives of the defense organizations of the participating countries convene in a number of different substantive panels to do collaborative research on various defense-related issues. Since the TTCP is a smaller group of (reasonably) like-minded countries than NATO, they often are able to produce fascinating work with fewer transaction costs than the often very cumbersome NATO analogues. 

In 2004, TTCP published a Guide to Capability Based Planning (CBP) followed up by more work along those lines in a number of US Military Operations Research Society (MORS) workshops on Capabilities-Based Planning in 2004 and 2006. I had the pleasure of having been invited to and of participating in a 2011 follow-up workshop in Ottawa, Canada in which a small group of specialists took stock of where we stood. I think it is fair to say that our mood was fairly somber then. Ben's paper picks up many of the challenges we highlighted in our discussions. He rightly points out that "If the approach to defence planning discussed in this paper were easy to conceive and execute then it would have been turned into a shrink-wrapped process many years ago. In fact there are many challenges, many of which are discussed in this paper. Those seeking to deliver analytical support to strategic planning through the capability based planning paradigm need to be aware of the challenges and seek to minimize their impact."

I think Ben is correct in pointing out that we have made SOME progress in moving beyond just platforms or systems to the various underlying functions that these embed. But I think he is too generous in his overall assessment. My (erroneous) assumption was that the growing fiscal constraints that have characterized the past half decade for all of us would have pushed our defense organizations (and especially their military AND political leaders) towards more transparent balance-of-investment tools at least in the whole-of-defense realm, and maybe even in the whole-of-security realms. I have seen nothing of the sort. I have seen even more bitter food fights between the various stovepipes. I still do not even see a 'big picture' lobby, let alone one that could provide at least some real counterweight to the various concentrated particularistic lobbies that are so plentiful and powerful in the defense world. Politicians still do not 'see' the trade-offs of the choices they are asked to make when confronted with the acquisition decisions they have to make. We still have defense materiel organizations, and not defense-capability organizations. Some of our defense organizations have at least started training defense acquisition specialists, none of us have even contemplated training defense capability planning specialists. 

My own thinking has evolved since the 2011 workshop - just like that of all the countries (and defense analytical organizations) that are described in this report. The following slide represents my own take on what I call 'strategic orientation and navigation guidance' (STRONG - for a very early version of this idea, see chapters 1 and 4 of this HCSS report; and one of these days I still hope to find the time to write a longer piece on this). The elements of this viz represent the pieces of analysis that I think our community should (and can!) provide to our strategic decisionmakers. The color represents my own idiosyncratic (and from my point of view still very generous) assessment of how well we are doing on them - and as you will see, there is mostly red in there. To me, what I now call 'strategic portfolio design' (of which CBP is a part), is a critical piece of strategic defense planning/management that becomes ever more important as volatility increases. Under deep uncertainty, actors have to think hard and deep about designing a portfolio of options in terms of capabilities ('what' do we have to be able to do and then translate that into 'real capability options'), ecosystem (with whom can we best do this and how to we keep our defense ecosystem healthy), and policies (how can we achieve our goals - what are the different policy options we have and what are their respective pros and cons).  On this last bit, I have formulated some thoughts in a piece we published earlier this year on 'designing stabilization efforts', and we are now running a larger 'strategic design' exercise to 'design' an options portfolio for how we can deal with a 'new' Russia.


I still deliberately put strategic capability options design in the first place within 'strategic portfolio design'. Policies can be changed virtually overnight; that's (a bit) harder with partners (just imagine a caliphate covering major parts of territory from Mali all the way to AfPak and what that would do to our relationship with Russia); but you cannot just make new capabilities appear overnight - that really requires a lot more forethought.

So yes, I feel there is a lot more work to be done in this area. And I applaud Ben Taylor and the TTCP JSA panel for tirelessly pushing the envelope. But I think we have to find better, smarter ("smart defense!") ways to bundle the efforts of people who are thinking and working along these lines within the Alliance also in more public ways, including our National Audit Chambers, our parliaments and our broader national and international ecosystems.