Source: Radio New Zealand
A scrutiny week committee at Parliament heard the Defence Force (NZDF) was aiming short term to about double its recruiting capacity to 1500 a year.
A NZ Army platoon boards an Air Force plane in Christchurch. Supplied / NZDF
The head of Defence says the country needs to be able to add five-fold or even 10-fold to its armed forces and quickly.
A scrutiny week committee at Parliament heard the Defence Force (NZDF) was aiming short term to about double its recruiting capacity to 1500 a year.
Air Marshal Tony Davies said it was also “dusting off the history books” to see what was done in 1938 to quickly boost the ranks.
“We need to be prepared to raise that number significantly higher than that as the situations dictate just as our forbears did around each world war or each major conflict,” he told MPs.
“We need to be able to raise that two-fold, five-fold, 10-fold in a very short space of time.”
However, in the last financial year the forces only recruited 700 personnel against a target of 800.
They had however had cut the average time it took to recruit a person from 300 days to under 200, and were aiming for just 90 days a year from now, head of people Jacinda Funnell said.
It did not help that Defence paid well under the market rate for many roles, the committee was told.
“It’s a tough situation. We are making the best we can,” said Davies.
Attrition was stabilised under seven percent and it was addressing “hollowness and gaps” left by a mass leaving after Covid.
The more volatile international environment had actually helped keep people in the military, seeing as a primary reason for joining was a “sense of purpose”, he added.
The new equipment being bought under the Defence Capability Plan also helped.
Air Marshal Tony Davies. RNZ / Ashleigh McCaull
‘Spend money and lose it’
On that score, the Secretary of Defence said the military needed to be prepared to spend on new technology and lose.
Brook Barrington told MPs the range of new tech and the speed it was developing at posed big pressures, and would force Defence to change its appetite for risk.
“Potentially in new technology to be prepared to spend money and lose it,” Barrington said.
“And that’s not something in the course of my career I would have said to this committee.”
But the speed and also low cost of some new tech made the “fast fail” a real option. For instance, it might buy an off-the-shelf drone for $5000 and find it was not fit for the military “but it was worth spending the $5000 upfront” to find out, he said.
The trick was to develop the ability to keep up.
Another pressure was the scale and speed of having to virtually replace the entire naval fleet by 2035, as well as transform how the Navy operated, he said.
But its existing capability management system was proven, and it would adopt a new approach of “minimum viable capability”, meaning Defence would trade off the full range of “bells and whistles” if it had to, in order to get a weapon or system two or three years earlier. Scope would be sacrificed for urgency.
Secretary of Defence Brook Barrington. Ministry of Defence
‘We are not blind to it’
Space is the number one priority in the defence industry strategy.
Green MP Teanau Tuiono asked if NZDF was at all reliant on Starlink given the unpredictability of its owner Elon Musk.
Davies said it mostly relied on military systems, though did use Starlink with its Bluebottle marine drones in the Pacific on illegal fishing patrols and the like; and if it needed that system to help aid in a disaster in the Pacific, it would do that.
New Zealand’s involvement in three international space programmes was sketched out to the committee – a satellite monitoring system, and two multinational space forums or alliances, one called Operation Olympic Defender, all led by the US – before Barrington laid out some of his thinking about space.
“I know that space is a matter – at least in some parts of the New Zealand public – a matter of concern, you know, the militarisation of space.
“We share that concern. We are not blind to it.”
But the stable door was open and the horses bolting, not least because a lot of space tech was now dual use, civilian and military, he said.
One reason New Zealand had joined the space groups “is to try and work with others and not just Five Eyes but France, Germany, Norway, to reinforce good behaviour in space and to call out bad behaviour”.
“So it’s an area where there should be public debate in my view because none of us round this table, more broadly, want to see the militarisation of space, but it also seems to me that we have to tackle this with a degree of realism,” Barrington went on.
“Where we would like to be is not where we are globally and I don’t think we will ever get back to that, so it’s now a matter of trying to make sure that the future is rather more secure for us than where we currently are.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
