Military capability

• 1. Introduction

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  Military capability, as the Australian Defence Force defines it, is "the ability to achieve a desired effect in a specific operating environment." That definition sounds clean and bureaucratic. But what it conceals is a tangle of competing pressures: budget politics, the unpredictability of future threats, and the stubborn reality that most of what shapes a battle cannot be changed once fighting begins.

  Three interdependent factors hold the concept together: combat readiness, sustainable capability, and force structure. Pull on any one of them without accounting for the others, and the whole framework strains. The questions at the heart of this subject are not simply about guns and tanks. They reach into how nations plan for wars they cannot fully predict, why the gap between what a military promises and what it can actually deliver is so common, and how a growing body of research is challenging the long-held assumption that money and manpower alone explain military power.

• 2. Technology and the Arms Race

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  Modernising military technology has been a persistent demand on European states since the Middle Ages, when artillery entered warfare and set off an arms race that would outlast every dynasty that tried to win it. Firearms followed, and with each new weapon came pressure on rival states to match it or be outpaced.

  In the European Union today, capability development is managed through a Capability Directorate that organises its work across three primary areas. The first, called IAP, covers Information Acquisition and Processing. The second, GEM, addresses Guidance, Energy, and Materials. The third, ESM, focuses on Environment, Systems, and Modelling. Together these categories span the knowledge, engagement, and manoeuvre dimensions of modern operations.

  A national Capabilities Development Plan is the instrument states use to get a broader picture of where their needs are, which trends are shaping capability, and where shortfalls may appear. That planning work sits upstream of procurement, shaping what a country decides to build or buy before any contract is signed.

• 3. What Cannot Be Changed at War's Start

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  When a conflict begins, existing military capability in armed forces is what gets employed. Only minor enhancements are possible once fighting is underway. The geography of the area of operations, the culture and demography of the enemy, and the preparedness of the opposing forces are factors that generally cannot be altered at the start of the conflict.

  This constraint puts enormous weight on the decisions made in peacetime. Military capability is often tested before any conflict arrives, using scenario methodology to analyse performance, frequently in the form of war games. Those exercises exist precisely because changing course mid-conflict is so difficult.

  Military science is substantially devoted to finding methods of defeating an enemy using available capabilities through existing and new concepts. The success of that effort shows up in the effects on an enemy's ability to continue to resist. Any use of military force is also bounded by the Rules of Engagement, which introduce a range of political, legal, and ethical factors that constrain how capability can be applied.

• 4. The Capability Gap

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  The difference between expected and deliverable military capabilities has a name: the military capability gap. The same term is sometimes used in a second sense, to compare the capabilities of potential future belligerents against each other.

  Gaps of the first kind emerge because planning for future capability is widely regarded as a difficult task. The predictability of future threats is limited. Defence policy can shift with changes in government. The range of response options a government may want as a matter of future national policy is itself a variable. Future capability decisions are made based on analysis of experimentation and testing of existing performance, but that analysis must project into scenarios that have not yet occurred.

  A military's strategic role in all of this is to advise civilian leadership on what military forces can actually execute. Where that advice and the political ambitions of leadership diverge, the capability gap widens.

• 5. Beyond Budget and Manpower

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  The vast majority of international relations studies and defence analyses assume that military power is a direct product of material resources. Size of defence budget, size of military forces, and gross domestic product are the standard measures used to rank states.

  A growing body of research, however, challenges that assumption. Certain non-material factors, researchers argue, significantly affect the ability of states to translate their resources into actual fighting power. What those factors are and how much weight to give them remains an active area of debate.

  Military capability is also described in terms of low, medium, and high, though that language typically refers to the type, quantity, and sophistication of technology being used in combat operations and the severity of the threat to the security of a state. Those gradations sit on top of the deeper question of whether material measures alone can capture what makes a military effective in practice.