The Interaction of Defense Planning with Strategy

Throughout history, the defense of individuals' material assets such as property and life or moral assets such as freedom against internal and external threats has been the main objective of all political entities, especially states. In order to fulfill this task properly, states have carried out defense planning regarding elements such as forward-looking forces, weapons and facilities by making use of all kinds of national power elements. In this context, defense planning is a strategic decision-making process used to create military capabilities and flexible force structures in order for states to cope with unexpected threats in their environment by using military power, to perform different military missions outside of conflict, and to meet changing security needs (1). However, as stated in various previous articles, contrary to popular belief, defense planning is not only the domain of military personnel. It is imperative that all members of society, from members of political authority who are directly affected by its results, to community leaders and defense industry employees, are familiar with the elements of defense planning that use public resources. For example, it is of vital importance for the defense industry to learn defense planning in order to analyze the needs of its armed forces correctly and to export its products to friendly and allied countries (2).

On the other hand, many different methods have been tried throughout history for defense planning, and even social, science and engineering sciences have been used extensively. A full understanding of defense planning systems and approaches depends on an accurate knowledge of this historical process. This is because the approaches used in the historical process have not disappeared, but have either found a place in popular new ones or have become more effective and have been called by a different name. The greatest mutual contribution to defense planning, especially in the 20th century, came from the business strategy literature developed by universities and scientific consultancy companies, despite the differences between them (3). Today, when the development process in history is examined, it can be seen that defense planning has progressed on a much different semantic plane. In this context, when the development process is examined in detail, the future goals of defense planning can be easily determined.

The concept of "strategy", which is thought to be the way of a kind of judge or general called stratos in Latin, is defined in the TDK Dictionary as "the science and art of using political, economic, psychological and military forces together in order to give maximum support to the policies of a nation or a community of nations adopted in peace or war" (4). However, the concept of strategy is a systematic of thought known in military literature since the time of the famous philosopher Sun Tzu (500 BC) (5).

Although the concepts of strategy, which are essentially blended with the ancient war culture and Taoist tradition of the Far East, existed before, they gained their original meaning during the Warring Principalities period of China (480 BC - 221 BC).  Sun Tzu's principles on the structural decisions made by top officials on vital problems are considered to be the first theories of strategy in history. The thinker's systemic approach, based on the analysis of the physical reality of man and nature, social psychology and politics, has played an important role not only in political and military sciences, but also in today's business world and even in the existential development of mankind. Stating that the main thing is to "win without fighting", the philosopher outlined the main policies that should be implemented for this purpose, and in the second part of the study on the cost of war, he did not neglect to draw the basic framework of defense planning in today's sense.

On the other hand, the basic military policies applied in military sciences represent only a small part of the art of war. The innovations, deceptions, traps, deterrence, and psychological games to achieve a superior position compared to the opponents are in fact the main points on which these policies should be built. Harro Von Senger collected and published these ancient techniques under the Greek term "stratagem" (6).

However, the cadre-based defense planning activities carried out in the Western war tradition in the past centuries became unbearable for states after a while due to the excessive economic and demographic losses experienced with the industrial revolution.  It was precisely during this period that the American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (March 20, 1856 - March 21, 1915), who is also considered the founding father of industrial engineering, came to the rescue with his scientific management approach. Similar to Sun Tzu's military principles, the "Business Policy" course at Harvard in 1909 introduced the concept of strategy inextricably into the business literature.

During this period, Henry Ford's installation of the moving assembly line reduced automobile production time from 12 hours to one hour and 33 minutes. In the future, this would mean that all industrial products, including military equipment, could be easily produced and ready for operations. However, this process provoked competition, especially among car manufacturers, and led to new searches in business strategy. For example, Alfred Sloan, the head of General Motors, tended to see strategy in terms of competitors' strengths and weaknesses, just as Sun Tzu had envisioned.

However, the Great Depression, which began with the collapse of Wall Street in 1929 and peaked in 1933, led businesses to adopt a "financial planning" approach to strategy until 1950. This understanding also affected defense planning, and despite the impending global war, it brought the issue of controlling the cost of defense budgets and making use of scientific methods to the agenda.

In this framework, needs analysis approaches in defense planning made great strides, especially during and before World War II, with the development of quantitative analysis methods within the science of operational research. However, by the end of the war, the emergence of the Soviet Bloc as the dominant power with its high human-density military presence instead of the defeated Nazis, the fact that Europe, which was devastated and almost to the point of economic collapse, was able to allocate a trace amount of resources to defense, and the importance given to domestic social policies in the USA caused the resources allocated to defense planning to be scrutinized again.

Aware of the devastation caused by a total war, the US began to look for ways to stop the Soviet advance with the scarce resources at its disposal. Thus, it relied on the deterrence of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima (August 06, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 09, 1945) against conventional weapons.  However, just two years later, the USSR declared that it possessed nuclear weapons and conducted its first test in Kazakhstan (August 29, 1949). Thus, in the following years, it became clear that the USSR could not be fought with manpower or nuclear weapons. Consequently, in addition to advanced technology, additional approaches were sought in defense planning. 

At that time, the concept of strategy entered the process of "planning activities determined by policies" between 1950-1960 as a result of managers' focus on planning activities to ensure coordination, unity of purpose and operational efficiency between main departments/functions, which became difficult in growing enterprises.  These efforts enabled the concept of strategy, which did not find a place in universities and journals until the 1950s, to draw a new path for itself by separating itself from organizational policies, with which it was often confused since the 1960s (7). In addition, Kenneth Andrews' Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat (SWOT) analysis, which gained increasing popularity, was adopted as another formulation method in the following years (8). 

Defense planning studies were also influenced by these approaches, and in order to defeat the enemy, the focus was on the qualitative values of the forces as well as numerical criteria. Thus, in order to determine adequate defense expenditures for the defense of allies, some questions such as who or who is a threat, where they can threaten from, how big a force they are facing, what kind of impact they can have, and what the cost will be in case of improper planning were analyzed at the very beginning (9). This threat-oriented approach eventually led to more expensive and technology-intensive platforms such as intercontinental missiles, jet aircraft, tactical and strategic nuclear submarines, if necessary, against manpower (10). In addition, since the enemy's possible courses of action were anticipated, the Allies' organizational structures, troop deployments, equipment and training were redeveloped to stop them (11). For example, in order to destroy the enemy's forward observation post, the tactics and techniques of air platforms for joint targeting, naval and land artillery weapon systems, and conventional weapons were subjected to evaluation (12).

However, in the strategy literature, the concept of long-term strategic planning, based on economic forecasts and future forecasting, which is made to cover the whole enterprise instead of limited business plans, became popular between 1960 and 1975, due to the fact that the concept of business policies could not remedy the failure of growing enterprises to achieve their goals, especially due to environmental interaction.

In defense planning, it was observed that the classical, short-term, input and unit-oriented budgeting systems used until then did not allow for result-oriented resource planning. Therefore, the US Budget Office prepared a report in 1961 on the need to establish a performance budget-like structure. Thus, a new tool called the Planning Programming Budgeting System (PPBS), which was developed to improve the cooperation between the civilian and military bureaucracies and to increase the strategic planning power of the political authority regarding defense expenditures, was put into operation by the US Secretary of Defense Mc Namara in 1965. The new system provided the infrastructure for the analysis, synthesis and conceptualization of strategic planning processes and made the classical and scientific decision-making methods functional in defense planning, answering the questions of "why" and "how" as well as "what" (13). By 1970, PPBS had spread to other allied countries, and in addition to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden and France began to use it to ensure fiscal discipline in defense expenditures.

Macroeconomic problems due to the oil crises in 1973 further accelerated the issue of strategic planning in the business world (14). In fact, the studies carried out in European countries on this subject until that period had reached the final point. For example, in France, the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, with the support of the French Ministry of Defense and oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell and ELF, had begun studies called "La prospective" (15). Therefore, with the importation of strategic foresight into defense, "trend-based" planning came to the fore between 1960 and 1970 (16).

However, while the studies in the concept of strategy were mostly aimed at predicting the future and determining acceptable goals and objectives, from the 1970s onwards, the logic of "position" based on gaining advantageous positions over competitors began to rise due to the fact that business policies and planning could not create synergy at the desired level in business performance. In fact, "La prospective" studies in Europe failed to meet expectations and were incapable of predicting major crises (17). Macroeconomic shocks, especially due to the oil crises, led people to search for new approaches with the "school of learning" from 1975 onwards, and the concept of strategy was marked by "best practices" in the 1980s (18). In strategic defense planning, concept-based requirements system approaches, which assume the filling of uncertainties based on past positive experiences, gained prominence in this period. 

Interestingly, the concept of competition also gained prominence in the strategy literature during this period (19). The concept even shifted towards the competition of countries (20). Companies such as RAND Cop., the pioneer of defense planning, started to look at defense planning from a macro scale and concluded that it could not be carried out only with weapons and that the political environment should be shaped with mass policies (21).  

However, after Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, the political atmosphere in the world began to shift in a different direction. Only six years after his resignation, the USSR disintegrated with the secession of 14 different republics, and the US and its NATO allies, having lost their global rival, were uncertain about what kind of operations their armed forces should conduct (22). In response to the resulting uncertainties, a more flexible defense planning (DDP) approach based on short-term assumptions was brought to the agenda (23).

In 1991, Barney published a study on the resource-based side of SWOT analysis, which he divided into two parts: internal and external in strategy, and argued that for a sustainable competition, it is necessary to have valuable, rare, inimitable and back-up resources (24). This approach inspired many researchers in the following years. However, it was not long after that it became popular to use incremental learning to acquire capabilities in order to prevent the negative impact of changing environmental conditions (25). Even in 1995, as a next stage, flexible bureaucratic structures based on strategic capabilities and strategic culture came to the fore (26). In 1997, the concept of dynamic capability, defined as integrating, building and reconfiguring internal and external capabilities to address rapidly changing environments, reshaped the framework of strategy (27).

On the other hand, non-state actors feeding on the regional conflicts of newly established countries in the unipolar world order have caused terrorism to expand globally and deepen individually (28). In fact, terrorists have planned more lethal operations despite being less active. For this reason, various regional security organizations, especially the United Nations, have been involved in activities such as peacekeeping, coercion and arms collection in many regions. In the United States, for this reason, the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review included many possible crisis scenarios at the same time. For this reason, a capability-based planning approach has been adopted in defense planning in order to achieve these missions beyond the classical staffing and missions of the armed forces.  Unlike the normal material structure, capability includes not only the material structures such as personnel, vehicles and facilities required to accomplish a mission, but also intangible elements such as technical and tactical elements. 

In 2002, the US Department of Defense initiated a project called "Analytical Agenda", later renamed "Support for Strategic Analysis", to support such high-level decisions and to assess the capabilities to be procured through PPBS (29). Following this work, a handbook on the "Long Term Defense Planning" approach, in which the development of environmental trends is monitored, future predictions are made and scenarios are developed, was published by the NATO Research and Technology Office in 2003.

However, it was during this period that the United States was attacked at home on September 11, 2001, and immediately afterwards the US government declared a war on terrorism. Yet new threats to civil society life, such as unstable and uncertain political environments, have become increasingly salient during this period. Therefore, the question of "how can we fulfill our mission under the current circumstances", which would establish the link between strategy and tactics, began to occupy the minds (30). While these operations, which aim to create the expected effect on the target, are defined as impact, their preparations have been referred to as mission or objective-oriented defense planning over the years. However, in goal-oriented planning, economic, political and even social objectives, in addition to military impact, became the subject of these operations (31). In other words, the ideas of Clausewitz and RAND Cop. became popular again.

Considering the historical development curves of defense planning and business strategy listed above, it is understood that the two concepts, which are influenced by similar political and economic environmental conditions, feed on each other and progress in parallel, despite the occasional phase difference between them. For this reason, it would not be unreasonable to say that developments in business strategy will also find their counterparts in defense planning.  When we look at the recent period in this context, it is seen that the value approach in strategy is on the rise with Felix Oberholzer-Gee's benefit-oriented book "Better, Simpler Strategy: A Value-Based Guide to Exceptional Performance" at Harvard Business School. Accordingly, it is clear that over time, defense planning will move towards capabilities that will be more effective in carrying out the mission.

However, the most surprising development in strategy was the concept of "external enablers" introduced by Per Devidson and his colleagues (32). In short, this logic, which is based on the idea that environmental factors are the main determinant regardless of the business, means that the concept of strategy can be expanded with macro models in the coming years. Therefore, it is clear that the perception of threats to national rights and interests in the future will not only be military, but also economic, social, technological and demographic.  For example, epidemics, economic collapse, famine, illegal mass migration, social unrest, etc. can be considered in this context. In order to eliminate these threats, military power will need to work hand in hand with other elements of national power. The use of the armed forces in the US, especially during the new covid19 pandemic, is the clearest indication of this. On the other hand, the use of the driver stock of the armed forces should not be ignored in the energy crisis due to the decreasing number of tanker drivers in the United Kingdom after the Brexit process. 

In this context, perhaps the trained demographic structure of the armed forces will be used outside the culture of conflict more than ever before in its history. The use of armed forces in agriculture, construction and social services, as we have seen in the People's Republic of China and some European countries, may become more widespread.   This suggests that military and civilian cooperation will become the most popular area and the concept of defense planning will be shaped within this logic.  

References

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