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).