Technology support for military capability based acquisition

Abstract

The evolution of military warfare and its increasing complexity has made planning for future military deployments more difficult. The need to plan for more uncertain military operating environments makes it more complex. There exists a significant gap between capability planning and acquisition of product systems in the SANDF. (Thaba J et al, 2015). The need for decision support tools and technologies to assist capability planners to close this gap and make sound decisions has become more critical. As such, many defence forces have made a conscious decision to move away from threat based planning approach to the capability based planning (CBP). " The concept of CBP recognises the interdependence of systems (including material and people), doctrine, organisation and support in delivering defence capability, and the need to be able to examine options and trade-offs among these capability elements in terms of performance, cost and risk so as to identify optimum force development investments. (Botha et al, 2012) The implementation of CBP in the South African National Defence Force will also influence the acquisition of military systems and reduce the risk of prioritising military capabilities. In order to achieve high levels of efficiency in implementing Capability-based acquisition, decision support tools would have to be implemented. The implementation of CBP will be defined by the Capability Life Cycle (CLC), which will be the cornerstone of managing capabilities rather than managing product systems. The management of the CLC requires various decision support tools for the capability manager to be effective. These tools are amongst others, architecture and knowledge management, capability engineering support, concept development and experimentation. These tools are discussed in this paper.