Some musings on the new Defence Capability Development Manual (DCDM).
The new ADF command and control structure has meant they have had to give Barney (Air Marshal Barney Stoush, my boss the VCDF) a colonel to act as his chief-of-staff when Barney wears his new second hat as Chief of Joint Operations.
I now no longer have to always be the bag carrier when Barney attends briefings. The downside is that I still cop all the meetings that keep Russell Hill humming but often so unproductive.
Another downer is that I no longer get to accompany Barney as often, when he is periodically able to flee the great grey sponge to visit real live sailors, soldiers and airmen doing what they’re meant to do.
The other day Barney and the colonel, luckily a cavalryman who knows LAVs upside down and inside out even before they are blown up, were away sorting out the PM’s sudden change of tack over reinforcing our commitment to Mesopotamia.
I took the opportunity to make a brew, reached into the in-tray to extract the shiny new Defence Capability Development Manual 2005 hidden there, and sat back to read.
While obviously not yet a bestseller at Angus & Robertson, the manual provides ‘authorative guidance’ (of course) to the dark and mysterious processes, whereby strategic guidance from our political masters, when it emerges, translates into deciding which things will most efficiently kill the Queen’s enemies.
Of course this does not mean the most effective kit is necessarily then bought. That is the role of procurement, a completely different and often unconnected process, with its own separate bureaucracy and a host of competing imperatives.
The most important of these potential saboteurs to operational effectiveness is the cheapest and/or most nefarious tenderer, followed closely by the manufacturer or importer who can best rig a connection to a factory or a glorified boat-building ramp in a marginal electorate.
A raft of inter-state rivalries, ideological fixations, academic pet theories, financial formulae, project management gobbledygook and terms of trade mumbo jumbo also apply.
The end result of the development and procurement processes sometimes produces neat ‘solutions’ for the managerialists but no-one else. One such lurk is to buy kit fitted-for-but-not-with all its component parts, including weapons.
As Barney remarked when the Al Muthanna deployment was announced, this inevitably means the ADF have to scramble to find, buy and fit the missing bits when the troops have to be suddenly rushed off to some crisis involving the proverbial two-way firing range.
Inevitably the new manual is already known as the DCDM. At least this rolls off the tongue much better than its predecessor, the acronymically dissonant Capability Systems Life Cycle Management Manual (CSLCMM).
Even more usefully its list of applicable acronyms and abbreviations is down to a two page menu for alphabet soup comprising only 74 ingredients. Mercifully only three of them denote committees; although I noted the department’s senior capability decision-making committee has changed its name again. No doubt to further the illusion of genuine reform.
This reminded me that I had once asked Barney what the Chiefs of Staff Committee now did seeing that the Defence Capability and Investment Committee, among others, had usurped its role.
After some thought he confessed to a degree of puzzlement on the question himself, but perhaps that’s because he is only an invited member.
Eventually Barney proffered the judgement that maybe it just hadn’t been abolished yet, or transmuted into legal limbo ? like the old inter-departmental defence committee and the statutory defence council, which became zombie organs of state because the civvies felt outnumbered when the CDF had the Service Chiefs present to back his professional judgement up.
Sipping my brew I noticed that someone old enough to remember pre-dinner ABC TV in the 1970s and 80s has even managed to slip the acronym TARDIS into the list.
Perhaps they figured a timelord from the planet Gallifrey was needed to make sense of The ADF Requirements Development Information System.
This naturally triggered a recollection of one of Barney’s horror stories of the bad old days of capability development during and after the Tange dynasty.
Barney had commented in passing that 1980s Force Development and Analysis Division types were nicknamed Daleks by those too polite to openly question the legitimacy of their ancestry. When I asked why, Barney said he thought it came from the timeless philosophical dichotomy where the Daleks always referred to themselves as ‘the supreme life form in the universe’, whereas everyone else called them ‘the most evil life form in the universe’.
After flipping through the manual’s ten-page glossary of technical terms, about 20 per cent of the total text, I turned to reading up on the ‘Needs Phase’.
This began, fittingly, with a great photo of our obsolescent and soon to be scrapped patrol boats, followed by a diagram illustrating the strategic capability planning process.
The accuracy was admirable, being circular and predicated on the pious hope of receiving the strategic guidance needed to initiate the cycle.
Luckily the phone then rang to rescue me from further exertions on the comprehension front.
Barney and the cavalryman were now returning earlier than anticipated. I quickly hid the manual back in my in-tray lest Barney see me reading it and post me to Capability Development Group.