{"id":19458,"date":"2015-04-01T13:10:13","date_gmt":"2015-04-01T02:10:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=19458"},"modified":"2015-04-01T16:13:10","modified_gmt":"2015-04-01T05:13:10","slug":"first-principles-review-ideas-at-ten-paces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/first-principles-review-ideas-at-ten-paces\/","title":{"rendered":"First Principles Review: ideas at ten paces"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Force<\/a>There\u2019s a lot in the First Principles Review<\/a> (FPR) of Defence that was released today. We\u2019ll have more to say about it over the next week or two, but here\u2019s a first look. While there\u2019s a lot of meat in terms of organisational reforms in the headquarters, my focus naturally fell to the capability development and project management aspects of the review. There are some big changes there\u2014some with a \u2018back to the future\u2019 feel, but also some new ideas.<\/p>\n

In particular, I was especially interested in what the Review had to say about contestability, a subject dear to my heart. As I wrote a few years ago<\/a>, I don\u2019t think the Services are well equipped to produce capability proposals that take into account constrained resources, industry capacity and technological maturity. That\u2019s why we ended up with a Defence Capability Plan that bore little resemblance to fiscal reality<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say that the Services have no role to play in capability development\u2014they\u2019re remarkably good at their core business of providing military capability and because of that they need to be involved in the capability development process. But their institutional drivers are such that they\u2019ll tend to shoot high where requirements are concerned, sometimes to the detriment of deliverability and often with high opportunity cost to other ADF capabilities. That\u2019s at the core of my previous arguments that Capability Development Group shouldn\u2019t be in military hands<\/a>, and that the contestability mechanisms should be organisationally separate.<\/p>\n

The FPR team were evidently convinced of that as well. The Review has recommended the abolition of the Capability Development Group (CDG), with its functions to be transferred to other areas of the Department. Critically, the Services will be responsible for identifying capability requirements, but not for the costing or contestability functions. While CDG had a military head and an internal costing division, those roles will now fall to the civilian Deputy Secretary for Policy and Intelligence and the Chief Financial Officer respectively.<\/p>\n

To those of you who came in late this probably looks like a bold new development. For anyone who\u2019s been around a few years, this looks more than a little like the old Force Development and Analysis (FDA) division, which answered to the former Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence.<\/p>\n

Dusting off that approach isn\u2019t a bad thing, though there\u2019ll be no shortage of people lining up to say that it is. There\u2019s no doubt that there was a lot of tension between the military and civilian capability developers in the past. The relationship between FDA and the Services was pretty dire in its final days in the second half of the 90s, and FDA was unofficially dubbed the Forces of Darkness and Anarchy (or Annihilation or Acrimony, depending who you spoke to).<\/p>\n

There were good reasons and bad reasons for the acrimony. Tension in the system was good in the sense of it signifying that FDA was doing its job in contesting the often dearly-held views of the Services\u2014exactly what it was set up to do. FDA was the product of the Tange reforms that produced the Department of Defence as we know and love it today. Tange deliberately designed what he dubbed \u2018creative tension\u2019 into the capability development process. When strongly held views that reflect a robust Service culture are second guessed by an \u2018outgroup\u2019, hard feelings are inevitably the result.<\/p>\n

But some of the ill-will between the groups was unnecessary and avoidable. Contestability sometimes seemed to be more for its own sake than because it was really adding value to capability deliberations. And FDA didn\u2019t always give professional military opinions enough weight. Then we have to add to that the inevitable communication problems in large organisations and the bureaucratic overheads imposed on both sides by the process-heavy framework they had to operate in. The result was often two sides getting to the committee table without sufficient respect for each other\u2019s position. In fact, one of the problems was that FDA sometimes seemed determined to take a position, which I don\u2019t think was necessary or helpful in most cases.<\/p>\n

Next week I\u2019ll follow up this first look with some thoughts on how these problems might be minimised in future. But we shouldn\u2019t expect everything to be rainbows and unicorns under the new old process. If the contestability mechanism is working, someone will be unhappy. But if it\u2019s done right, the outcomes should be an improvement on recent history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a lot in the First Principles Review (FPR) of Defence that was released today. We\u2019ll have more to say about it over the next week or two, but here\u2019s a first look. While there\u2019s …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":19462,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[762,33,1208,1129],"class_list":["post-19458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-arthur-tange","tag-capability","tag-capability-development-group","tag-first-principles-review"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFirst Principles Review: ideas at ten paces | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/first-principles-review-ideas-at-ten-paces\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"First Principles Review: ideas at ten paces | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"There\u2019s a lot in the First Principles Review (FPR) of Defence that was released today. 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