Indefensible New Zealand National Security Podcast S2E5 Optimum National Power

Indefensible New Zealand

This episode was produced in the run-up to the new government’s first budget later in May. There is an expectation of increased spending on Defence. That remains to be seen but if there is, what should it be on?

A lot of discussion takes place around what sort of hardware and how many people the New Zealand Defence Force needs to have in order to achieve its mission.

Considerably less discussion focuses on what the Government and people of New Zealand need to do to allow the NZDF to achieve that same mission.

I talk about some of the elements of that in this episode – what is National Power and how do we optimize it?
Tactical effectiveness is essentially the capacity to bring together training, equipment, leadership, and other military endeavours to win battles and keep winning them in a changing battlefield environment. That is the primary job of the NZDF.

That can’t be done without several other elements being in place including good policy and strategy at the political level.

This has been poorly done for years with successive governments adopting a satisficing approach best summarised as ‘how little can we get away with?’ A strategy doesn’t cost any money. Execution of it does. Last year’s announcement that claimed to be a Defence Policy and Strategy was little more than a meta-policy sitting above many other existing policies. And now we wait for the next Defence Capability Framework.

Success for New Zealand requires the effective wielding of all elements of national power – people, ideas, industry, information, alliances, etc.

I am not suggesting we put our economy on a war footing. But we should know how to and we need to move closer to it now if we truly believe the deteriorating international security situation reports. That means trying to generate optimum rather than maximum national power.

Traditional views of generating national power have focused on population size, wealth and abundance of natural resources, industrial base and productivity. But these measures fall short when you consider the massive military effectiveness generated by relatively small countries such as those of the Baltic states, Israel and the countries of Scandinavia.

What is different is that these countries have cultures, social structures, and political institutions that emphasise and strengthen national power. All these countries have some form of national service.
This episode traverses goverenment policy, voluntary national service, defence industry, business continuity planning and individual preparedness for disruption.