Reports and Publications

• Hunn Review:
  Annexes
  • Contents
  • Annex A
  • Annex B
  • Annex C
  • Annex D
  • Annex E
  • Annex F
  • Annex G
  • Annex H
  • Annex I
  • Annex J
  • Annex K
  • Annex L
  • Annex M

Within this section

• Assumptions
• Geo-Political Trends

Hunn Review: Annexes (30 September 2002)

Contents | Previous | Next

Annex E

The Future Strategic Environment Implications for Higher Defence Structures

1. Even if a Defence Organisation was ideally structured, resourced, and staffed to cope with today's strategic environment, and to respond to today's stakeholders, suppliers and customers, it may not necessarily be fitted to cope with the environment and requirements of the future. Moreover, if it is not coping well with today's operating demands and requirements, today's structures and accountabilities could be even less effective in the future. Consequently, it is important that the structural arrangements of the Defence Organisation be designed to cope with future as well as current performance requirements. Furthermore, as noted earlier, the Minister has asked that this review be forward-looking rather than focused on past failings.
2. To achieve these objectives, I considered it important to situate my examination of the higher organisation of New Zealand defence within an understanding of the demands and challenges of the strategic environment within which it must function effectively in the future. To this end, I commissioned an analysis of the future strategic environment for Defence. This following analysis is a summary paper of contemporary expert and considered views drawn from publicly available sources. It takes a ten-year forward look, identifying and outlining trends with implications for the future shape and capabilities of a effective Defence Organisation. While I do not offer the paper as the final word on the matters, its main purpose is to suggest the complexity of the setting in which New Zealand's defence machinery will have to operate.

Assumptions

3. The strategic environment in which the Defence Organisation functions is far from static, and in many areas increasingly fluid. At the same time, some aspects are relatively constant. In broad terms, these features can be expected to continue to shape New Zealand's future defence environment:
   • New Zealand as a democratic state, with national governance based on a modified Westminster system (legislature, Government executive, national public service and separate judiciary), with a constitutional head of state, with Armed Forces under civil political control;
   • the outcomes of a physically secure New Zealand and protected New Zealanders and New Zealand resources;
   • the requirement for a strategic level headquarters/office within the overall organisation of the Defence function to meet compliance, governance, and policy formulation functions;
   • the division of organisation, command, and management of military forces into strategic, operational, and tactical level activities; and
   • significant limitations on the proportion of national resources that Governments will be prepared to devote to maintaining national defence, unless there is a significant and proximate deterioration in New Zealand's security environment.

Geo-Political Trends

4. A less stable, predictable security order has replaced that of the Cold War. Pre-Cold War threats have re-emerged. Moreover, nationalist, tribal, religious and ethnic conflicts held in check by the Cold War superpower confrontation, have been released allowing protagonists to use savage violence to settle historical grievances. Disintegrative forces of micro- nationalism have been unleashed with the break-up of empires and alliances, leading to state fragmentation.
5. Particularly in some parts of the world, national governments have continued failing to achieve sufficient economic growth and wealth redistribution to assure peace in their territories. Without the aid and incentives from competing Cold War blocs, such governments have not been even less able to cope with systemic corruption, cycles of drought and famine, population expansion, debilitating international debt, and the AIDS/HIV pandemic. Consequently, they have been unable to defuse clan, tribal or provincial inequities and aspirations that have generated violent conflict, cross-border refugee crises and community disintegration.
6. The late 20th and early 21 8t century globalisation wave has also created the conditions for reviving or empowering many destabilising non-state groups. Some such transnational groups have grown in financial power and the strategies of violence to challenge or undermine the authority and infrastructures of national governments. Drug cartels, mafia criminal gangs and the Al Qaeda network are examples of such groups.
7. Following the end of the Cold War, and encouraged by the international co-operation generated in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the United Nations sought out an expanded management role in dealing with international security crises. However, having been only tested in limited and controlled peacekeeping situations, the UN found itself unprepared to handle challenging interventionist roles to stop on-going violent conflicts and the humanitarian crises surrounding them. Plagued by uncertainties over funding sufficiency, ineffectual military structures, optimistic and in many cases unrealistic mandates and expectations, the UN experienced a number of significant failures (Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina for example) have challenged the authority and confidence of the organisation.
8. Despite continual efforts, improvements in the UN's military capability have been very incremental. Progressively more international responses to security crises have involved ad hoc multinational military forces, drawn from like-minded countries, rather than UN organised military forces. In some cases, such multinational forces are operating on directly behalf of the UN; in others, action and forces are loosely endorsed by UN Security Council resolutions. In providing international humanitarian assistance, the UN is also joined by an increasing range of private, independent national and transnational volunteer organisations.
9. At the same time, the structure of alliances and treaties, which characterised the Cold War period, is under transformation. The Warsaw Treaty Organisation has ceased to exist formally. The other main Cold War alliance - NATO - has been reinventing itself, both with an expanded membership, and with networking programs, such as the Partnership for Peace to improve the ability of military forces surrounding NATO to work successfully with each other and NATO. The example of the Gulf War coalition demonstrated that former opponents could work together even if only on a temporary basis. These circumstances have potentially redefined the prime alliances from that of collective self-defence to that of being a vehicle through which countries develop interoperable military forces that can be formed and reformed into different multinational combinations appropriate for a range of security crises as they emerge.
10. The post Cold War international security management system is also characterised by more multifaceted loose coalitions for responding to security challenges. Such collective security responses are likely to involve military forces, police forces, administrative and governance advisers, infrastructure experts, etc., with regional actors others than the US taking leadership roles, such as Australia/New Zealand in East Timor, and the British with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.
11. Although non-state groups are growing in influence, for the foreseeable future, the international system is likely to be characterised by a hierarchy of states defined by their relative political, economic and social advantages and disadvantages. Even so, governments are likely to be less in control of their choices for action than they have been in the past. Because of the spread of access to instant television and increasingly internet broadcasts, public opinion is apt to continue to pressure particularly democratic governments into humanitarian interventions. Where national self-interest is not also similarly engaged, if such interventions run into trouble, public opinion is just as likely to force governments' hands to hasty and damaging withdrawals.
12. There is little evidence to suggest that state governance failures and the humanitarian crises they generate, or transnational threats of drugs and people trafficking, resources poaching, money laundering etc., will subside. The UN is likely to continue to have significant difficulties responding effectively to violence associated with this spectrum of activity, and prioritising its responses. As a consequence, it credibility, as highest international legal authority, will go on being challenged both by states and transnational actors prepared to act outside international law. Its credibility will also be challenged by coalitions of states, private volunteer organisations that have the capacity and will to act against aggression when the UN cannot achieve sufficient consensus to underwrite its own involvement.
13. The international legal environment is likely to become more litigious and demanding. The accepted primary of state sovereignty is under increasing pressure from the ideal of universal human rights. It is likely that the UN will continue to struggle with balancing states rights vs individual rights. Other issues of international law will affect the operational environment for which the future Defence Organisation must prepare and plan military forces. These include for example, Law of the Sea conventions. Influential pressures groups will continue to work to restrict military weapons, and to create a more ethically challenging environment of laws that bind the actions of regular military forces but not irregular or illegal combatants that they may have to cope with.
14. Increasing environmental stresses and resource shortages are likely to aggravate social and political tensions in many of the world's regions. Consequently, offshore, under-developed and under-utilised resources are likely to become a growing source of international dispute and potential conflict. Environmental degradation, resulting from global warming, and pollution may also lead to disputes between governments, and destabilising economic costs. Environmental protection policies and preventative measures are likely to be more and more important in managing and shaping the strategic environment to prevent conflicts.
15. The pace of globalisation is accelerating through the effects of information-based technological innovation. Traditional concepts of territorial and cultural sovereignty are being challenged as boundaries of all types become more permeable. The benefits of globalisation are likely to continue to be unevenly distributed across the world's regions. This will exacerbate high levels of both economic and social aspirations and dissatisfaction. Integration of regional economies, supported by expanding free trade agreements, is likely to limit the use of force to resolve some issues between states. But it will not necessarily have the same effect on intra-state conflict, where disparities in wealth may be exacerbated by shifts in economic opportunities to other regions and countries.
16. National interfaces with globalisation will inevitably expose a country to adverse domestic and international impacts just as much to more positive effects. The volume of international trade is likely to increase, with governments finding it increasingly necessary to align their economic policies to meet international investor expectations. As more industries become globalised, fewer countries retain control over all the means of production. Just-in-time management practices are purposely designed to avoid holding inefficient margins of capacity. Therefore, national economies are increasingly dependent upon uninterrupted offshore supplies of critical resource and products. When one region becomes embroiled in conflict, countries far removed from that region can have their economies affected by their reliance on resources and products from that region. The flow of oil products is a case in point.
17. The September 11th terrorist attacks have focused most countries on previously unexplored international and domestic security vulnerabilities that have been increased by globalisation and technological change. These include proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, emerging bio-technologies and information sabotage threats. Here again, increasing economic and financial interdependencies between countries and regions, and globalised information and transportation networks increase the "spread effect" of potential threats to well beyond the area generating them. As a result, the stability, economic wealth and health, and trade of remote countries such as New Zealand can be more easily threatened than was previously achievable by physical means.
18. Some security challenges are likely to arise with little or no warning, while others can be expected to have a long but not necessarily clear gestation period. Regardless of warning time, particularly Western publics are likely to expect prompt responses, with minimal casualties on all sides and collateral damage. Such demanding standards call for particular military capabilities of precise, timely intelligence and precise uses of lethal and non-lethal force.
19. At the same time, military power (in all its forms) is more likely to be mandated as part of a wider, co-ordinated response to security crises, be they emergencies and threats within a state's territory (for example, smuggling in illegal goods, resource poaching, natural disasters, etc) or crises that challenge regional neighbours or international norms of behaviour. This means that many of the non-offensive and supporting capabilities of military forces that have been commercialised at home base, are again required as part of deployed military forces.

Implications for New Zealand Defence

20. There is a high degree of uncertainty over the track that international security may take in the future. A number of scenarios, ranging from a benign, strategically stable environment to a malignant world of great instability and rivalry can be extrapolated from contemporary geo-strategic trends. The level of uncertainty in New Zealand's geo-strategic environment is a disincentive for a long-term focus on Defence matters. Yet, most defence capabilities have anything up to a forty-year life in the NZDF. Consequently, the future Defence Organisation will need structural arrangements and business processes that will allow it to identify, procure and maintain defence capabilities with the organic adaptive capacity to allow future Governments to respond to a diversity of security threats and opportunities, many of which cannot be clearly articulated or envisioned in the short term.
21. Anything but the most benign of future security situations where present and likely future vulnerabilities are not tested is likely to stretch the capabilities of the New Zealand Defence Force. In all other scenarios, it is likely that maintaining and demonstrating a credible off-shore presence, detection, and intervention posture will be increasingly important to contain or deter potential security challenges before they can escalate to a level beyond New Zealand's response capabilities.
22. Collaborative, regional security arrangements are likely to be increasingly needed. Traditional approaches where a country seeks to look after all its security needs independently is likely to be less and less feasible. More multi-national approaches allow countries to specialise their defence capabilities, while relying on others to contribute the balance of required capabilities to a common pool that can be accessed by all. By developing complementary force structures that are highly interoperable, each can offset capability gaps that they carry by relying on others to fill them. While moderating the cost of defence, such multinational approaches are dependent upon sufficient similarity in the strategic policies and objectives amongst partners to assure all that each is committed to meet their individual obligations. In many respects, this has been the logic behind New Zealand and Australia's Closer Defence Relations policy.
23. These geo-strategic trends, and the conditions they are likely to create, increase the need for New Zealand higher defence structures that facilitate a broader appreciation of national security, rather than defence, requirements both at the political and officials levels. Such structures are required to integrate and co-ordinate a whole-of-Government approach to formulating over-arching national security policy and strategies. These are needed to pro actively shape New Zealand's security environment to reduce the potential for conflict and other security threats. Such strategies are also needed because they guide inter-locking policies and strategies of relevant Government departments and agencies, including the Defence Organisation. Co-ordinated national security structures are also needed to harmonize responses to events if they arise, by identifying the best responses, and assigning responsibilities and resources to departments and agency to ensure that resources are not duplicated or applied at cross-purposes.
24. Current New Zealand higher defence structures at the whole-of-Government national security level are limited to ad hoc crisis response and consequence management. In the light of trends in New Zealand's geo-strategic environment, such structures are likely to be progressively more taxed by multi-faceted security threats and responses. Moreover, such structures cannot guarantee to be active when opportunities arise for pre-emptively shaping New Zealand's security environment, so that conflicts do not emerge, or are defused before they can flare up.

Jointness Trends

25. Analysis of warfighting and defence management trends and the behaviours of New Zealand's strategic partners confirms a consistent and concerted trend towards increasing jointness in both preparing for and conducting security operations, and in maintaining defence forces. The joint structures and command and control arrangements that are needed by the NZDF flow from the likely future operating environment at the strategic national and national operational levels.
26. Unlike business, in many aspects of war, duplication and diversity is a proven advantage. It complicates the challenge for an opponent who has to be prepared to cope with military forces with diverse ways of causing defeat. However, it has been increasingly recognised that duplication and diversity also contain inherent inefficiencies. "Stove-pipes" of duplicated capability create problems of co-ordination, delimit opportunities for synergy, and are wasteful of resources, when common approaches can work just as effectively. As a consequence, almost all professional military forces, regardless of their size, are reviewing their force structures and command and management practices to develop joint ways of carrying out military operations and preparing military forces.
27. These joint efforts include joint doctrine for organising and employing military forces, joint education to train and prepare future leaders and followers, joint structures and processes for command, management, and support, and joint communications architectures. As more armed forces adopt joint approaches, those that do not, will find it increasingly difficult to be effective in multinational operations. Joint approaches are progressively the professional standard necessary for effective strategic and operational level working relationships with strategic partners.
28. Joint approaches are concerned with more than simply joining similar units together into composite forces. Jointness involves standardised ways of describing and organising for activity. By having common activity descriptions, rather than have Service, or land, maritime or air activity descriptors, there are opportunities for looking at different ways of carrying out activities that are not circumscribed by Service or environment. By standardising organisational structures, greater organisational alignment can be achieved in the processes of the overall Defence organisation, rather than the vertical alignments of separate Military Services and Departments.
29. Over the last decades, jointness has become synonymous with the effectiveness, efficiency and synergies achievable through seamlessly combining the resources and capabilities of land, maritime and air forces. However, the trend for the future of jointness, is its expansion to encompass integrated broader inter-agency/departmental planning processes and operations. The catalyst for this is the changing nature of security crises and the changing response strategies and roles of military forces and other contributors in managing such crises.
30. Assessments of international security trends lead to the conclusion that at least for the first decades of the 21st century, inter-state conflicts, characterised by force-on-force military engagements between regularly constituted military forces with political goals of invading and occupying territory, are likely to be rare. The new "conventional" operations will be responding to outbreaks of violent devastation and human suffering resulting from civil and ethnic disputes, government collapse and cross-border spill-overs that engage the attention of the international community in whole or significant part, as well as providing humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.
31. Rather than keeping military forces reserved for use only in destructive confrontations, national security and regional security strategies are increasingly stressing the use of military forces in presence and conflict mitigation and prevention roles. As military forces develop more controllable force applications (such as precision weapons that can be launched safely from outside the range of an attacker or low-lethality weapons where casualties can be avoided) they can serve as part of broader diplomatic, economic and political strategies to de-escalate crises, or prevent escalation.
32. It is likely that increasing attention will be paid to the management of conflict, notably efforts to prevent it occurring in the first place, to reduce the risk of conflict escalation and to develop post-intervention strategies to resolve underlying causes. Such conflict management strategies depend upon maintaining a comprehensive range of civilian governance/administration and military assets and capabilities, and developing tested and trusted working practices and processes between all actors, both domestically, and on the international stage.
33. These types of strategies and operations are complex. Effective responses must integrate and co-ordinate political/diplomatic, humanitarian, intelligence, economic development and security mechanisms. Complex contingency operations are characterised by the often short-notice with which they are launched. While it may be relatively easy to detect the signs of crisis, political and diplomatic processes and initiatives will often introduce uncertainty over when an operation is actually launched, what its goals will be, and who will be involved, and what exit strategy is to be employed. Effective operations depend upon all participants sharing common understandings of processes and capabilities ahead of time. The time to become "joint" is not when an operation is declared.
34. In response to a new generation of complex emergencies, Inter-agency planning processes and operations at the national level (and increasingly at the coalition level) must be designed in a way to achieve more than just internal co-ordination. They must also be the nodes and connections for a broader range of actors with a stake in complex contingency operations -United Nations agencies, private volunteer organisations, scientific teams, host nations, and local, regional governments in conflict zones. Today and into the future "joint" does not just mean "purple military"; it means "inter-agency" and "international".
35. Expansion of the strategic joint concept to incorporate an inter-agency approach to reflect a 'whole of government' and an international approach to national security issues is a natural evolution. Defence is but one part of a complex matrix of international, governmental, national, non-governmental and local agencies and organisations that have the potential to address security issues. In New Zealand's strategic partners, increasing efforts are being directed towards delineating and synchronising the different roles, missions and responsibilities of organisations, departments and agencies through integrated processes and co-ordinating structures and arrangements.
36. Under traditional security thinking, national efforts to provide for New Zealand's security have been "stove-piped". Multiple "hand-off' points have existed between Government agencies and departments. This has resulted in demarcations between different contributors that can impede concerted and effective action. Co-ordination between agencies have been managed "on the fly" once a security challenge has presented itself. The approach means that opportunities to manage New Zealand's security, so that the country has fewer security challenges to respond to, can be missed.

Implications for New Zealand Defence

37. Higher defence structures will be needed that contribute to networking the security roles and contributions of relevant departments and agencies. A future Defence Organisation will need to contain structures, arrangements and pro-cesses that allow it to interconnect with other departments and agencies (and other external organisations and groups) in a broader national security network.
38. A future Defence Organisation will need joint management structures and arrangements particularly at the national strategic level and at the operational level that commands and directs the operations of deployed forces. At sea, in the air, and on the ground, forces operating at the tactical level need organisations, structures and processes that are particular to their working environment. Even at this level, forces still need to be aware of the broader joint environment in which they are operating that will support and protect them.
39. To move to adopt the professional standard of jointness at the national strategic, the operational and the tactical levels of military operations, a future Defence Organisation will be needed that supports and evolves a robust, confident joint culture, built on the knowledge, experience, and competencies contributed from both joint and environment-specific operations.

Top | Previous | Next