Capabilities-Based Defense Planning: Techniques Applicable to NATO and Partnership for Peace Countries

Abstract

Defense planning, even at its best, is an inexact science. Objective data that demon-strate how well (or poorly) existing and future capabilities will perform on operations as envisaged in the planning process are difficult to come by. And, despite the fact that countries are willing to spend inordinate sums on defense capabilities, the academic and professional literature that addresses defense planning qua planning is modest, in stark contrast with the literature on business planning. 1 Perhaps unjustified concerns by ministries of defense over the security of information, or simply a lack of general inter-est by students in the field of strategic studies, have—singularly or combined—pro-duced a rather anemic body of literature dealing with defense planning methodologies. This lack of an objective and normative body of literature on this subject should not, however, be allowed to dissuade defense officials and planners from examining extant approaches to defense planning. To be sure, the range of methodologies from which 1 The discipline of strategic studies, albeit a relatively new specialty in the field of interna-tional relations, is surely an oddity. While exceedingly rich in most areas, the literature of strategic studies has all but ignored addressing, in any generic and systematic sense, the basic issue of how nations should best conduct defense planning. The extant literature on " defense planning, " which is indeed prodigious, typically addresses a single country's experience while ignoring any cross-national analysis of methods, let alone attempting to offer generic methodologies that can be adopted by governments, either in their entirety or piecemeal. Surprisingly, there is not a single work in the extant literature that provides a theoretical ap-proach to defense planning, management, and execution, either for didactic purposes, or for application by a government. Instead, particularly in the context of U.S. professional military education, curricula are often developed from source materials that are neither intellectually nor academically rigorous, given their bureaucratic genesis. Moreover, as countries under-take defense reform efforts—a rather prevalent practice, given that the end of the Cold War spawned a large number of young and fragile democracies—there is simply a dearth of work that contains a comprehensive presentation of all of the key contingent elements of defense planning that could serve as an appropriate guide or even template for emulation. This lack of a generic planning approach has a number of debilitating characteristics, not the least of which is that, without such a template, it is exceedingly difficult to demonstrate the benefits of integration, a sine qua non for an efficient and effective planning and execution system. Given that almost all countries have ministries of defense and defense forces, which regularly undergo restructuring and reform, the lack of any rigorous treatment of how nations can im-prove their planning, management, and execution of the mission of national defense is a sig-nificant lacuna in the professional and academic literature.