DEFENCE
Defence Assessment 2021: A maritime (not naval) view A proactive defence strategy focussed on the Pacific requires a higher level of persistent presence and more flexible platforms, writes maritime capability specialist and former Royal New Zealand Navy Officer Andrew Watts.
In an over three-decade career in the RNZN, CAPT Watts RNZNR commanded HMNZ Ships Pukaki, Wellington, Resolution and Te Mana, and served as Director, Capability Development and Programme Director Network Enabled Capability, and Captain, Fleet Personnel & Training. He is a Defence Adviser at KPMG based in Riyadh.
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Defence Assessment 2021 (DA21) provides clearer capability pointers than any comparable document since the mid-1990s. It pulls very few punches in highlighting the deterioration in our strategic environment and what that might mean for Aotearoa/New Zealand, and it requires a significant reevaluation of our strategy and our force structure. This article offers some thoughts on both. To my way of thinking, the most significant break from the past in DA21 is embodied in this statement: “We consider New Zealand’s defence policy should shift from a predominantly reactive risk management-centred approach to one based on a more deliberate and proactive strategy. A more strategy-led approach would better enable Defence to pre-empt and prevent security threats, and better build resilience against the impacts of climate change and other security challenges.” The Pacific is an oceanic space. Proactively addressing security concerns in the Pacific requires a maritime strategy. In the bad old days of single service parochialism, such a statement would have been greeted with outrage, and even now, many will no doubt find it unsettling. However, it’s my contention that an effective maritime strategy requires seamlessly integrated naval and
land capability, with neither taking precedence or priority for resources over the other. A maritime strategy also requires special forces, air mobility, and the best possible intelligence and information management capability. The joint maritime force must be mission-flexible, adaptable over time, available when it is needed, and affordable. “Maritime” capability means something very different from “naval” capability. Maritime capability provides the means to act in an ocean dominated space, including the means to act on land. Naval capability is the subset that enables sufficient control over the ocean environment so that we can use it for our own purposes (sea control); deprive an adversary of its use (sea denial); and project soft power (disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, capacity development) and hard power (combat forces) into a land space. Sea control and sea denial require the highest level of maritime domain awareness that our resources can provide, while to state the obvious, soft and hard power projection requires land forces to project. The whole must be supported by a command and control capability that allows our people to make better decisions more quickly than our adversaries. Line of Defence
