Defence planning as strategic fact: introduction

ABSTRACT

With this special issue of Defence Studies, we situate defence planning as a constitutive element of defence and strategic studies. Indeed, in addition to the usual “downstream” focus on the use or non-use of force, on policy decision-making in foreign relations, military operations and global external engagement, we argue for the utility of an increased “upstream” focus on what is a major part of everyday defence and security policy practice for military, civilian administrative and political leadership: the forward-looking preparations for the armed forces and other capabilities of tomorrow. In particular, the special issue contributions explore two general dimensions of defence planning: the long-term, historical relationship between defence planning and the state including national variations in civil-military relations, and a concurrent tension between defence planning as an administrative, analytically neutral activity and the politics of its organisation and outcomes. In both of these, defence planning appears as a particular case of general planning, as a lens that enables particular foci on the external world to come about on behalf of the state while also sometimes creating institutionalised biases along the way. In this manner, paraphrasing Émile Durkheim, defence planning emerges as a “strategic fact” with dynamics of its own.

KEYWORDS:

• Defence planning
• defence policy
• strategic fact
• defence organization

This special issue of Defence Studies identifies defence planning as a particular object of interest for defence and strategic studies as well as for security studies and the wider International Relations discipline. In doing so, the different contributions draw attention to a little analysed but functionally central part of defence and national security policy, namely the more or less formalised planning efforts that are part and parcel of how major policy and organizational reform, investment and acquisition decisions are made in modern defence policy. By opening the black box of the state in terms of identifying, parsing and discussing the effects of various administrative, organisational and political dynamics associated with defence planning, this special issue also offers the potential for a more general focus shift in defence and strategic studies. It does so by taking a cue from Stephan de Spiegeleire (2012) in suggesting that – in addition to the usual “downstream” focus on the use or non-use of force, on policy decision-making in foreign relations, military operations and global external engagement – it is useful to also move “upstream” towards phenomena well-known to most military as well as civilian defence practitioners, namely activities that bear on how states and their constitutive administrative and political authorities conceive of, plan for, and decide upon future defence capabilities rather than the immediate use of the current ones.

In sociology, Émile Durkheim famously proposed that social science could and should be established around its own objects of study: that there are such things as “social facts” that are different from the objects of natural science (Durkheim 1982). By giving social science its own dimension, Durkheim paved the way for its modern incarnation. We use Durkheim’s example metaphorically here and propose that among the “strategic facts” – constituting together the raison d’être for defence and strategic studies – we ought to include also those phenomena that are incorporated under the term defence planning. We propose, in other words, that the study of defence planning should be considered a relevant and integral part of the overall sub-disciplinary landscape in defence and strategic studies as a pertinent strategic fact. This special issue is intended to open up avenues for such an agenda and to inspire others to go down those or parallel roads to produce new and useful strategic knowledge.

Process behind the special issue

This special issue originated with a September 2016 conference on “Long-Term Defence Planning in the NORDEFCO countries” organized by the Centre for Military Studies at the University of Copenhagen. This conference initiated a multi-national research agenda by bringing together the expertise of scholars, officers, and civil servants from seven different countries and was followed by a February 2017 author’s workshop at the same venue. Taking these questions to a broader audience, the authors of this special issue then convened a roundtable in October 2017 at the ISSS-ISAC Annual Conference hosted by American University in Washington, D.C. The roundtable again saw a mix of scholars, practitioners and officers weighing in on the papers presented as part of an emerging academic field of defence planning. This special issue has itself been subject to the intricacies of planning for the future and the guest editors would like to thank everyone involved in this process for their valuable contributions. This goes especially to the editors of Defence Studies for their strategic acumen in seeing the perspectives in this special issue and for professionally and patiently tending to the editorial process. The numerous anonymous reviewers also deserve praise. Finally, accolade belongs to the contributing authors who willingly ventured into little visited academic territory, providing maps and ideas to further explore for those who will follow.

Defence planning as an object of study

The erratic nature of security threats faced by the modern state demands planning for war and peace under the pressure of deep uncertainty. This condition essentially makes defence planning a persistent quest to tame Machiavelli’s Fortuna, the wild river of unforeseen political events and involves the highest of stakes as state survival is ultimately conditioned upon successful defence planning: si vis pacem, para bellum. The practical activities, dynamics, conditions, effects, pitfalls and general characteristics associated with actual defence planning, however, have hitherto mostly been a technical issue for practical problem-solvers, making it an understudied subject for International Relations and related sub-disciplines. A case in point is delivered by Colin Gray’s intent to provide a “proto-theory” for defence planning (Gray 2014, p. 10). While this effort serves as a motivating factor, it is also a testament to the unexplored state of research. One early example of the link between practitioners and knowledge production on the subject is U.S. Defense Planning: A Critique (Collins 1982), a monograph written by a researcher with the Congressional Research Service. A recent and central contribution, Stephan Frühling’s Defence Planning and Uncertainty: Preparing for the Next Asia-Pacific War, fruitfully explores how uncertainty is addressed in different ideal-typical genres of defence planning as a question of fit between analysis of particular kinds of strategic risk and subsequent codification of requirements (Frühling 2014). Even if this special issue testifies to a growing academic interest in defence planning, practitioners’ perspectives are likely to be sought after and a dialogue upheld. The historical under-appreciation of defence planning in academia is called attention to as decision makers and defence planning practitioners are hard pressed to find expert academic counterparts while confronted with an intensified NATO burden sharing debate in addition to threat proliferation by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, Islamist terrorism and spread of advanced weapons technology that has motivated a number of countries to increase defence spending. The practical reactions to these threats is to a high degree contained in the activity of defence planning such as investing in new and more capable fighter jets, participating in new forms of international defence cooperation, developing new doctrines or more radically reforming the armed forces. The sheer scale of the monies involved and the security interests at stake critically warrant a renewed impetus in the academic debate on the substantial and variegated activities formally or informally related to defence planning.

Rather than assuming that adaption to the new security environment happens automatically – like a chemical reaction – practitioners will instead testify to extensive organizational and analytical efforts prior to and clearly shaping the eventual outcomes of political decision-making. Inside the black box of the state, such processes pass over and link the interfaces of not only (in this case) civilian and military realms, but also across the political and the administrative divide (in practice terms: from analysis to policy), all of which have effects on strategic outcomes, and which therefore have strategic relevance. Little research systematically tackles the extensive chronological dimension of long-term planning on top of the complex political, bureaucratic, and operational dimensions, chains of command, policy formulation and implementation. For a research subject of defence planning to emerge it will likely be productive to acknowledge, engage, and assess also these interface dynamics of its analytical, military, political, administrative and organisational dimensions. In the end, we argue, and following the logical sequence of events, studying the preparation of the armed forces of tomorrow is arguably as important as studying the employment of the existing armed forces of today.

Defence planning has been established and executed as a practice throughout the totality of human history and has at its most fundamental level aimed to limit the condition of uncertainty to ensure survival of the group, community, nation or state. Indeed, as 19^th century historian Otto Hintze argued, “ [a]ll state organization was originally military organization, organization for war” (Hintze 1975, 181). Within the contemporary modern nation state, this practice has taken on great complexity through a variety of formal national and international processes (Håkenstad and Larsen 2012), which challenge and renegotiate the civil-military relationship as well as the bureaucratic organization of the state as security threats evolve and proliferate. In this way, what matters in particular to a tentative gesture of opening up for new research such as the present one, is to work from the outside in with regard to delimiting the subject. This special issue therefore takes an explicitly big tent approach to the definition of what defence planning is and how it can be studied – with one particular reservation. In the broadest possible sense, defence planning is all planning related phenomena in the world of defence. Following Merriam-Webster's definition of planning, that would be all activity related to the “establishment of goals, policies, and procedures” at the higher echelons of the world of defence. In theory, this could mean studying all kinds of preparatory and prioritisation oriented processes as defence planning. One example could here include all the various organizational terminology that include planning, such as for example “threat-based”, “capability-based”, “assumption-based” and “effects-based” planning. But while we acknowledge that efforts to control the employment of armed forces crucially also involve organisational planning – for example, the logistics prepared through the (US) Joint Assistant for Development and Execution’s instruments such as the Time-Phased Force and Deployment List clearly pertain to planning in a literal way – the planning phenomena we draw new attention to here address not the question of optimal use of the current armed forces, but rather analytical discussions of future alternatives. In this way, “threat-based”, “capability-based” and “assumption-based” planning will count as defence planning, while “effects-based” planning, which is concerned with the optimal use of force, does not. As indicated above, we distinguish “downstream” or force-employment related activities (including such things as effects-based planning and the Time-Phased Force and Deployment List), from our main concern, namely “upstream” activities that are about planning for the future force.

Placing defence planning hierarchically within the political-military nexus, Stephan Frühling states that “strategy and the pattern of strategic risk [that is] to be reduced form the strategic guidance that defence planning has to translate into actual programmes, forces and activities” (Frühling 2014, p. 32). Defence planning’s activities, output, and outcome function within this composite nexus institutionalized through Weberian bureaucracy and the practice itself is so vital to any state that it stands as an often-undisputed object. The content ascribed to it and what it is an effect of, however, is more opaque. The contribution in this special issue by Paul Davis defines defence planning – along the lines of our distinction above – as the “deliberate process of planning a nation’s future forces, force postures, and force capabilities (as distinct from operations planning on how to employ the forces in war). The planning must consider the near-term, mid-term, and long-term” (Davis, 2018). This definition is helpful in distinguishing between force provisioning and force employment – where the latter is not part of defence planning – but as Davis points out, the assumptions, content, scope, and purpose of defence planning has taken on several different expressions over time in the American practitioner context, in which he himself has played an important part. This continuous debate between defence planning practitioners, located inside or organically related to central policy organizations, on what the activity constitutes is the fertile ground from which this special issue wishes to establish defence planning as a strategic fact.

Establishing defence planning as a strategic fact means, beyond the symbolic gesture, to facilitate the renewal of academic debates on theoretical approaches, methodologies, and empirical experiences and in doing so also contributing to the definition of defence planning as a particular object of academic research. In this pursuit, academic research on defence planning has much to gain from interacting with the expert knowledge of practitioners with long empirical experience in connecting platforms, doctrines, and transformation processes with strategy on multiple levels of state bureaucracy and not least a rapidly developing security environment. While these issues have received individual academic attention and even constitute research fields of their own, the contributions in this special issue illustrate how gaps between them can be bridged. Based on these contributions, the special issue aims to open a discussion that allows for a renewed and promising engagement with a rich empirical reality and a variety of academic approaches.

It is therefore worth highlighting the mix of contributions in this special issue. In a welcome addition to the articles penned (as has become the common standard) from the vantage point of a theoretical framework, the issue contains also two commentaries, authored by prominent scholar-practitioners, both with long experience in the US defence planning orbit including central think tanks and professional military education institutions. Paul K. Davis has for several decades produced influential analytical and programmatic writing about defence planning notably at RAND. Along with colleagues, Davis has played a prominent role in shaping the evolution of American defence planning paradigms. Thomas-Durrell Young likewise has a distinguished career at leading institutions including the Naval Postgraduate School, RAND and the U.S. Army War College. He too has made a mark in US defence planning knowledge production with a particular focus on the adaptation and transformation of American defence planning in Central and Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War. The contributions by Davis and Young contain in their own right a number of valuable and interesting observations and propositions. In this way, they are also a concrete example of the practitioner proximity preached by this introduction.

The state, planning and the politics of planning

While the contributions in this special issue do differ in the particular ways they exemplify the utility of analysing the domain of defence planning, they all share a concern for understanding and bringing to light how defence planning is more than a mere receptacle of a changing threat horizon, more than an automatic transposition of such contextual, external changes into political priorities and, ultimately, decisions. Defence planning, in other words, in these articles appear, as a strategic fact with dynamics of its own that is not reducible to neither automatic reactions to external change, nor to the purely political decision-making surrounding its processes. In particular, the contributions enable a deepened understanding of two general dimensions of defence planning as a strategic fact, namely the long-term, historical relationship between defence planning and the state including national variations in civil-military relations, and a concurrent perspective on the tension between defence planning as an administrative, analytically neutral activity and the politics of its organisation and outcomes. In both of these dimensions we see examples of how defence planning appears as a particular case of general planning; as a lens that enables particular foci on the external world to come about on behalf of the state while also sometimes creating institutionalised biases or path-dependencies along the way to warrant specific attention to the planning phenomenon as a relevant independent or intermediate variable in the greater field of defence and strategic studies.

In the long term, the relationship between the state and defence planning is, as indicated with the reference above to Hintze, deep and constitutive. Approaching defence planning within the overall context of the state’s foreign, defence and national security decision-making offers a macro-perspective, which points to its functionalist genesis between the state and war. In the bellocentric historical sociology of state formation, this is most famously captured by Charles Tilly’s dictum that “war made the state and the state made war” whereby external competition and risk of war encouraged the emergence of modern internal state institutions, including permanent, dedicated defence administration organisations (Tilly 1975, 42). In the long term, particular, national trajectories of specific organizations of defence planning affected and affect the forms of planning that arise. Long-term divisions of labour at the civil-military level and related institutionalisations of responsibilities for defence planning appear as a central motif in Jan Angstrom’s contribution (Angstrom, 2018). Analysing the role and character of United States military long-term defence planning, Angstrom proposes that there is a link between defence planning practices and deep-seated preferences for a particularly military technique focused approach to military operations where the biased preference for kinetic military activity over political solutions is echoed in both defence planning outcomes regarding military platforms as well as the planning stage of the future visions of war. The deep relationship between the state and defence planning is also echoed in Magnus Christiansson’s contribution, which offers an analysis of the United States third offset defence planning strategy (Christiansson, 2018). The article identifies the historical origins of the planning as integral to the evolution of the modern state, locates these in a more contemporary context with the evolution of a rational planning paradigm inside the United States defence structure and discusses how the third offset strategy in important ways represent a new form of “metagovernance” that at the same time demonstrates and purports to be an answer to the limits of the modernist rational planning paradigm. Thomas-Durell Young’s contribution combines Angstrom and Christiansson’s findings by showing how national path dependencies of military and civilian organization set limits to importing and implementing Long Term Defence Planning (LTDP) from the United States to Central and Eastern European (CEE) states (Young, 2018). A legacy of Communist five-year plans lingers in the bureaucracy of CEE states and shape their perception of defence planning as determining for future action even if the original LTDP intention was the direct opposite, namely to facilitate future flexibility by enabling the production of costed priorities as policy priorities and financial execution. Bridging these two positions is thus a key point for Young.

The origins of rational planning, as Magnus Christiansson observes in his contribution, coincide with the advent of Western modernity around the 18^th century. This point in time marks the emergence of the Prussian general staff with its adoption and development of Enlightenment rationality into superior force provision and force employment – and it becomes the (defence) planning organization of reference. During the 19^th century, evolution of planning practices and theories interact between the civilian and military domains while these become increasingly demarcated throughout the political-military revolutions as civilian political power hierarchically comes to dominate the military as the wielder of state violence while the military itself establishes a professional information and knowledge production monopoly on defence planning and organized violence. However, from the closing decade of the 20^th century onwards, the planning practices and theories of the civilian domain can be observed to penetrate the military domain, through organisational practices such as New Public Management (Norheim-Martinsen 2016).

In more contemporary terms, defence planning has a dynamic of its own with political effects that is not reducible to politics or evolving threat horizons. Even so, or because of this, defence planning is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather an administrative tool with political repercussions. Jordan Tama’s contribution shows, like Young, how the way defence planning processes are organized impact the effects of the processes and that there are trade-offs associated with these choices. By incorporating many actors and emphasizing transparency, some defence planning processes can help create broader support and buy-in for subsequent political decisions, whereas others, by keeping the organizational design inclusivity limited are more likely to produce more incisive analytical results (Tama, 2018). Benjamin Jensen’s contribution, on the other hand, emphasizes how “programmatic actors” can mobilise the power of ideas to shape agendas inside the defence planning systems with subsequent political effects. Drawing on a related public policy theoretical framework, Jensen shows how the study of defence planning can gain from employing insights from other research stemming from other policy domains. Jensen, like Norheim-Martinsen above, in this way in effect deflates at least part of the particular aura surrounding national security studies by subjecting it to approaches found useful elsewhere, thus challenges the uniqueness of Huntingtonian civil-military relations (Jensen, 2018). In Paul Davis’ contribution, we also find a reflection on how the evolution of formalised US defence policy and planning systems since the 1960’s have fared in the light of major changes in the international environment. The periods of major change, that Davis constructs based on his long experience with the RAND Corporation, shows how the U.S. defence planning structure with the Department of Defence organizationally at the head has been struggling to adequately predict future conflict situations due to limited planning scenarios and failures of imagination, accentuated under a threat-based defence planning paradigm. His analysis indicates how organizational inertia of the planning system calls for civilian and military strategic leadership and the necessity of reaching outside of established planning processes to access non-standardized analyses. In this way, the analysis also illustrates how United States defence planning has evolved between political change agents and administrative procedures (Davis, 2018). This dynamic of defence planning during major changes is elevated past the state level in Alexander Mattelaer’s analysis of the evolving organizing principles of NATO defence planning. Mattelaer’s contribution shows how the foundational logic of NATO’s geography-based division of labour was abandoned after the end of the Cold War and replaced by capability-based defence planning as a consequence of NATO assuming a global mission. However, as Mattelaer posits, the pendulum is swinging back as geography again took centre stage after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Underscoring that defence planning is more than only a receptacle of volatile international politics, Mattelaer connects the domestic politics driven debate on NATO burden sharing with his recommendation of acknowledging geography through a regional division of labour (Mattelaer, 2018).

The evolution of defence planning

Whether one emphasizes the deep historical conceptual contingencies or the contemporary organizational interplay between administration and politics, between process and advocacy of ideas, the forms and roles of defence planning emerge as important and relevant aspects of overall national security and defence policy, not least with regard to its incremental evolution. This should be of no surprise in a common sense way, since the organisations tasked with planning are in fact given responsibility for identifying and proposing change with regard to the future armed forces of a given nation. But from a defence and strategic studies perspective, it matters because the effects of defence planning point to its existence as more than a mere analytical relay station between changes in the character of war and the subsequent political reorientations of the state. As Davis’ evolution of defence planning indicates, governments have had a hard time incorporating change into their defence planning systems, and to accommodate the condition of deep uncertainty. Similarly, Young’s account of the challenges posed by (legacy) state-society relations in implementing defence planning systems highlights the immanent national security aspects of bureaucratic organization for the upstream. If Jensen’s programmatic actors are able to capture a larger slice of top-level political attention and even budgets, they may also in some instances be able to circumvent blind spots – but they could in the process lose their edge by trading inclusion over analytical focus, as argued by Tama. If defence planning continues to be a military dominated activity, such blind spots as identified by Angstrom could be sustained with negative consequences – or it may be that defence planning itself, as proposed by Christiansson, is breaking into mutually incongruous phenomena, serving both the status quo and the need for future technologies. Accommodating these developments will be of critical concern to not only states but also to international defence planning such as in NATO. As Mattelaer points out, the post-Cold War history of alliance defence planning has created unintended dynamics that must now be renegotiated, aligning national and alliance demands and resources.

If defence planning can in these ways be said to be a strategic fact, this special issue will then have served an important purpose not only through the contributions of the articles but also through the example that they set together with regard to the general utility of studying defence planning as a discrete activity in the larger field of defence, strategic and security studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Carlsbergfondet; Gerda Henkel Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Henrik Breitenbauch

Henrik Breitenbauch heads the Centre for Military Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen.

André Ken Jakobsson

André Ken Jakobsson is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Military Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen.