Call to Merge the three Armed Forces

[Dave Homewood]

Some senior lecturer at the Unviersity of Victoria, Dr Lance Beath, is calling for the three Armed Forces to be merged into one entity , which according to Teletext he reckons will "help build a more effective force with more bang for less money".

How would that work? I cannot see it as being cost effective at all unless it meant the loss of more bases and roles. The entire Armed Forces is cut to the bone as it is, they cannot surely trim much more.

[furd]

Dave, my immediate thought when I first read your post was that the gentleman in question was probaly another typical socialist academic who has never had a real job in his life, with little practical knowledge of the military, spouting forth as they do from time to time. In fact nothing is further from the truth in this case. I "Googled" his name to discover that he is highly experienced in military matters and has had a number of "real" jobs over many years with the Govt and MFAT. He appears to be pro-airforce as well as he was quoted as saying in 2008 "NZ needed to move away from a defence strategy based on the army with navy and airforce in support and move to more warships and a return to a combat airforce". I do not agree however with his call to merge the three armed Forces. Our current setup of Three Services, one Defence Force I believe works well and I cannot see any cost savings or improved effectiveness in a single entity. The Canadians tried this some years ago and it was a disaster and now operate as three services within the Canadian Defence Force. At the end of the day "If it ain't broke don't fix it".

[phil]

Under DTP many support functions, HR and training will be merged anyway. To what extent remains to be seen but the writing is on the wall.

Combining the three services is unlikely to be worth while. Once the higher echelon functions are merged, nothing would change in practical terms on the bases. Army camps would still have the same people on them, the ones that want to be infantry, engineers, sigs, artillery etc. The same principle applies to the personnel on the other bases. You wouldn't suddenly have grunts posted into maintain helicopters, or helicopter pilots posted to battalion as platoon commanders.

We do have different cultures between the three services, and we have that for a reason. Army are not taught to question orders, air force technicians are taught to question everything, it stops aircraft falling out of the sky.

The type of people attracted to the life of an infantryman respond to a different training and work environment than someone who is say an avionics technician.

[Dave Homewood]

Thanks Furd. I agree that the costs savings is a baffling one, unless it's about saving on uniforms by making them all the same, and the same going for paperwork, computer systems, etc. But that really doesn't seem like something that would save enough to make it worthwhile. I mean there would still have to be specialist soliders, and specialist aircraft people, and specialist sailors, each with their own special kit.

[Dave Homewood]

Thanks Phil, you posted while I was typing but I see we agree in our thoughts.

[nige]

I've heard him say before that the NZDF should be a "Marine Corps" type force, fully adept at operating on land, sea and air etc, with assets suitable for these purposes.

This is probably what he means, but it would mean massive capital injections eg replacing LAVIII's with something that can swim, let alone the costs to change the services procedures etc, so I doubt much will come of it etc.