Questioning the “Sanctity” of long-term defense planning as practiced in Central and Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT

It is an article of faith amongst many defense officials that long-term defense planning constitutes the gold standard in the development and management of modern armed forces. That such a method has become central to the U.S. and other countries’ defense planning systems it is surprising that there is so little questioning of its contemporary relevance, let alone an understanding of its provenance, original intent, and its highly nuanced nature. Rather, what one finds on closer examination of long-term defense planning methods is that they have contributed to producing sub-optimal defense plans. In order to provide greater clarity and understanding of the utility of long-term defense plans, this essay argues that as a key element of PPBS, this planning method has been a failure when measured against the ability of defense institutions in Central and Eastern Europe to produce viable defense plans. To produce cost-informed and implementable defense plans, these defense institutions need to return to the original intend of this planning tool: to inform officials of long-term financial obligations and to enable informed decision-making to fund the current force.

KEYWORDS:

• Central/Eastern Europe
• post-communism
• defense planning
• long-term defense planning
• Planning
• Programming
• Budgeting
• Execution system (PPBE)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. U.S. legislation requires the FYDP covers the fiscal year with respect to which the budget is submitted and at least the four succeeding fiscal years. For each fiscal year of the period in question, it must also include estimated expenditures and the proposed appropriations, as well as for procurement of equipment, military construction for the reserve components of the armed forces. U.S. Code 10 § 10,543 (2004).

2. Another weakness in the development of PPBS was the blind and uncritical acceptance by Hitch of the Joint Staff’s annual Joint Strategic Objectives Plan (JSOP) which was used to initiate the programming process. Hitch writes of his acceptance of the valid initiation starting point by the JSOP as the it initiates PPBS; whereas with the benefit of additional years of experience of implementing PPBS, Einhoven and Smith excoriate the document. They write that it was solely a wish-list of the military departments, way over budgetary projections, and the Joint Staff consistently failed to force the Military Departments to find efficiencies and produce great jointness. Cf., (Hitch 1967), p. 31 and (Enthoven and Smith 2005), pp. 94–5.

3. See then-Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter’s letter critical of navy priorities to then-Secretary of the Navy Ray Maybus, 14 December 2015 (Maucione 2015).

4. In this respect, it is instructive to compare the two Croatian long-term defense plans, 2006 and 2013 where the latter actually advocated the need for defense cuts if the defense institution were to be able to meet policy objectives: honesty in policy planning that is almost unheard of in defense planning documents found in the region. (Cf., Croatia 2006), with (Croatia 2013).

5. This point would underscore the argument made by the influential Henry Mintzberg who writes that the development and adoption of PPBS constitutes one of the greatest efforts and failures of all time in public finance (1994, p. 19).

6. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates complained that the Department of Defense was reluctant to meet a current battlefield requirement with purchasing MRAPs as it was seen as being at the expense of long-term procurement programs. In the end, the vehicles were purchased outside of the normal services’ budgets averting a bureaucratic “blood bath”, which should be seen as constituting a salient lesson for defense institutions in Central and Eastern Europe (Gates 2014, p. 121).

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Thomas-Durell Young

Thomas-Durell Young Academic Associate for comparative defense planning curriculum, Department of National Security Affairs, and Program Manager Europe, Center for Civil-Military Relations, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA.