My second post (after proposing a Royal Military College of NZ) regarding what I’d do if I were in Andrew Little’s shoes would be to look at the Service Chiefs, and the steady erosion of their functions and powers over the last few years. The extent of this erosion is that they are now almost toothless to address issues in the services which they are supposedly in charge of.
The old mantra of ‘raise, train and sustain’ described the role of Chief of Army / Navy and Air Force, along with their supporting General / Naval and Air staffs. They were not autonomous, answering to Chief of Defence Force, who ensured that they each stuck to budgets, staff number caps, tasks and equipment. But they could recruit, structure, order, train and direct their services so that they could then offer a wide range of capabilities to the government, through CDF.
They are now basically powerless to do pretty much any of that. Their functions are now fulfilled by centralised bureaucracies / boards / committees and civilians, and in my opinion, this is a key contributing reason why army attrition rates are over 17%.
The first erosion of service chiefs’ authority was the creation of Headquarters Joint Forces New Zealand (HQJFNZ) in the early 2000s. It was sensible and probably the best thing to do at the time. NZDF’s individual services were far too stove-piped, and too busy doing their own thing. Creating a single operational HQ to coordinate the outputs of the three services made sense. But it is timely today to look at whether transferring as many functions from each service as we did fits the situation today.
For example, below the Commander of JFNZ come the individual component commanders – Land (LCC), Maritime (MCC) and Air (ACC). It is the LCC who is the true commander of NZ Army’s troops – under him (or her) come the formations and training units of the entire army. Chief of Army is not technically in the chain of command over his own troops! The responsibility for the trained state of the army rests with LCC, who answers to COMJFNZ, with only an ‘influence’ relationship under Chief of Army.
HQJFNZ should be responsible for all operations involving NZ forces, but the generation of those forces needs to return to each service chief. I would therefore transfer LCC / MCC / ACC back to the services, and slim down the scope and command of JFNZ.
CPO. When Tim Keating was CDF, he probably embarked on the biggest reforms of the structure of the NZDF for many decades. His mantra was that ‘if we were a business, we would go broke.’ So he embraced many business structures and positions and recreated them for NZDF. (Though to be fair, at least he discontinued the disastrous ‘Chief Operating Officer’ position established by his predecessor and Dr Mapp.) One of the functions he created was the Chief People Officer ((CPO), on a par with the service chiefs. In retrospect, the flaw is obvious – we never had a lack of CPO. The NZDF had three very good CPOs – the service chiefs! Taking away their functions for people capability management, which included HR policy, career management, health, chaplaincy, and pay and conditions, and putting them in a single level of Defence HQ, staffed almost entirely by civilians has been a disaster. If CA wants to improve pay for any of his trades, he has to go cap in hand to CPO and justify why some of his people need to be remunerated more, and this will then be balanced against the other services. If the Navy run out of houses because they have been given to the local iwi as part of a treaty settlement in 2012 (thanks National!), then CPO will respond by rolling out a tri-service policy limiting families to only 6 years in housing, no matter the location. CA and CAF are powerless to say no.
Tim Keating had prior form in civilianising and centralising functions from the military – when he was Chief of Army, he made the decision to get rid of the uniformed administrators. Now when we deploy off shore, we either need to train someone up specifically to run this vital function, or else we need to reach back to NZ to do it. Where previously each army camp had its own administration cell (both civilian and military), now soldiers and officers were forced to conduct ‘self admin’ or else reach back to the clueless (and overworked) HR Service Centre in Wellington.
Other militaries do not have a standalone CPO. Because people are the greatest capability of each service, the chief of each service should in effect be the CPO. Centralisation and civilianisation of this function has been a disaster, and prevents the chiefs of each service from being able to treat their people as a capability to be nurtured and developed.
In the interests of brevity, I’m going to stop it there. There are other trends of centralisation and civilianisation in the NZDF, health and logistics and capability development are three key things which have suffered to varying degrees through this process as well. I’m not saying that each service needs to go back to the bad old days of competing against each other and doing their own thing, but the solution to that is not a bunch of civilian bureaucracies and committees doing what should be done by the service chief.
I think our centralisation of functions has been at the wrong point – rather than combining things at the top or in the back offices, we should combine things at the bottom and the coal face instead. We’ll get much better bang for buck if we do things like combine officer training (RMC- New Zealand) and then building on from commonality of training, some units can become much more tri-service (3 Squadron, RNZAF should be far more tied in to land warfighting than it currently is for example).
This sounds increasingly like the rest of government; Health, Education, and now with the 3/5/7 Waters BS.
One thing I would be interested in hearing is whether these are just your thoughts or whether you’ve been hearing similar things from other parts of the military and/or the Labour Government and/or the National and ACT Parties?
Yes, it’s a trend being replicated across a lot of other departments, with similarly poor results – the benefits are very much illusory only.
Interesting question – the Navy fought to keep their ‘writers’ as a uniformed trade, and they are reaping the benefits of this.
I know that Labour now have a new list MP who has come straight from the army – Dan Rosewarne. He’ll be more than aware of this frustration in particular, but as a low-ranked list MP probably doomed to not last beyond next election, I sadly don’t think he has much clout.
National and ACT are not talking about this part of the NZDF, perhaps because a lot of these changes occurred under National’s watch! Chris Penk is a very good advocate, being a former RNZN (and RAN) officer, but e was not serving in the NZDF when these changes were made.
The camp Admin Centres replaced Unit based staff during Morris Dodgson’s tenure, they were amalgamated into the National HR blob at about the time that most functions were removed from Service Chiefs. That occurred about the end of Gen Jerry’s time as CDF and the early stages of Rhys Jones time along with the COO. The driver for those changes along with disbanding most military bands was to show Treasury we were reducing spending on overheads, the point missed was that the overheads were in part at least the difference between a Wellington based bureaucracy and a deployable military organisation.
Tim may have cut the uniformed admin staff but they had been rendered surplus by the organisational changes. More serious was the abolition of the old Education Corps by the new Defence College, they had two roles, managing military education to raise the Officer Corps standards and providing English and Maths coaching to lift our soldiers ability to progress. Didn’t fit the way Navy and Air did business but was making a difference for Army.
Yes thanks for that – good details.
I totally agree about the sad demise of the Army Education Corps – the services ‘offered’ by NZDC totally pale in comparison to what we used to get from education centres.
It was interesting that Navy fought to keep their writers as a separate trade, and now Army is struggling (massively!) to fill the void from having ditched that role. Lt Gen Keating’s decision (as CA) to disband them is one of the most regretted decisions in the organisation right now.