The Why, What, and How in Defence Procurement Reform

Policy and planning matter as much as process in military acquisition

Canadian defence procurement needs to be reformed. What that reform should look like depends on who you talk to, but there are common themes: the government must be far less risk averse; there are too many ministers, departments, and competing incentives involved; agile methods should be embraced and a new approach to emerging technologies is required. As these themes suggest, calls for reform are concerned with process, and more specifically, the overabundance of process in the procurement system.

I agree that tackling excessive process is vital. But we also must be mindful of the policy and planning sides of the procurement equation.

To explain what I mean, let’s break defence procurement down into three parts: the why, the what, and the how. Process largely dominates the third: how we acquire military capabilities. Calls to streamline the procurement system are about the how. When we argue that Canada should speed up defence procurement, we’re saying that the government should accelerate how it buys stuff. This is where most observers agree that there’s an urgent need for improvement; how we acquire capabilities is simply too complex and too lengthy, procedurally speaking.

What about the why? Things get more contentious here, since the why question looks at the aims of defence procurement. It’s tempting to reduce the purpose of defence procurement to buying what the military needs. But that leaves out a critical part. Defence procurement is about buying what the military needs to meet the government’s policy objectives. Democratic civilian control of the armed forces demands that the military follow the government’s (legal) decisions, which includes the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s choices about what we want the armed forces to do.

This doesn’t mean that the military has no say. Quite the contrary. The defence department and armed forces translate the government’s policy objectives into a force plan and capability requirements. They take the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s lofty policy goals and derive a future force structure from them. That translation function gives the defence department and armed forces a good deal of influence over what capabilities are acquired.

There’s a case to be made for giving the armed forces a bigger role in certain procurement decisions. Eliot Pence recently made a compelling argument that commanders and operators should have more power to equip their units for specific missions and tasks. Provided that their budgets were capped at a certain level, that type of delegated procurement would make sense, particularly for consumables and rapidly evolving technology. Taken as a whole, however, the military already has a strong voice in the procurement process.

Counterintuitively, when it comes to improving the why side of the equation, I think we should be asking more of ministers. We should be calling for ministers to exercise their defence policymaking authority more decisively, and perhaps empower them to make far bigger procurement calls based on their judgment of what’s in the national interest.

While it’s often said that procurement is too politicized in Canada, that tends to refer to cases where governments have allowed partisan politics to drive decisions, such as when Jean Chrétien cancelled the EH-101 maritime helicopter contract. But politics isn’t only about partisanship. Making defence procurement an instrument of statecraft is a form of politics as well. Canadian governments have tended to shy away from making military acquisitions political in that sense --as a tool of diplomacy, nation-building, and indeed, realpolitik. There are signs that this is changing, as the National Shipbuilding Strategy and Canada’s involvement in ReArm Europe highlight, but ministers must be bolder, especially if we want a more self-sufficient and sovereign Canadian Armed Forces. Making that happen quickly and effectively will require the Prime Minister and Cabinet to make better use of their policymaking authority.

Ministers also need to appreciate the capability implications of their policy decisions. The words that the Department of National Defence writes in defence policy documents aren’t just fine prose. When ministers sign off on these documents, they’re giving the military direction about how the armed forces will be equipped and for what missions.

To illustrate the point, ministers shouldn’t be surprised if policy documents directing the armed forces to maintain an ‘operational advantage over adversaries’ in combat settings ultimately result in a military largely equipped with advanced American capabilities. If ministers think the armed forces should have other priorities than fighting alongside the United States, they need to say so explicitly.

That leaves us with the what. We’ve already touched on various aspects of this part. It deals with building a force structure to meet the objectives set out by defence policy and deriving requirements for specific programs and projects based on an overall plan. It asks what kind of military is required to give effect to policy. In answering that question, the what side addresses a bunch of thorny issues, such as managing fleets and supply chains, ensuring jointness, integration, and interoperability between systems, and optimizing effects, all within a defined fiscal envelope and with limited human resources.

I get far more cautious when it comes to these what issues. I understand the desire to go fast and break things, but we don’t want to smash or weaken the planning side of procurement.

In their must read book, How Big Things Get Done, Bent Flyvberg and Dan Gardner emphasize the importance of proper planning for successful large-scale endeavours. If you want to speed up the how of procurement, the what shouldn’t be rushed. You need to think slow to act fast.

Flyvberg and Gardner tell cautionary tales about thinking too fast in their book. We can find them in Canadian defence procurement, too. As a wise friend often quipped when I was reviewing military procurements: the shortest distance between two points is always a straight line. Shortcuts and cut corners can end up delaying things quite a bit. The CF-18 replacement saga is a good example. Trying to sole source the F-35 in 2010 ended up delaying the acquisition of a future fighter for more than a decade. Had a competition simply been held at the outset, Canada would probably have signed a contract for the F-35 much sooner and with a lot less grief.

Does this mean that the what side of things shouldn’t be touched or reform? No. There’s always room for improvement. But it’s important to recognize the value of careful planning for defence procurement. I’d argue that this is especially true in Canada. The public is currently supportive of major defence spending increases. But Canada being Canada, it won’t take much for that support to evaporate. If rushed or reckless planning leads to a series of procurement controversies, the public may sour on defence spending. If that happens, we may have a faster procurement system, but one that has far fewer things to buy.