Strategy and Defence Planning: Meeting the Challenge of Uncertainty explores and examines why and how security communities prepare purposefully for their future defence. The author explains that defence planning is the product of interplay among political process, historical experience, and the logic of strategy. The theory of strategy best reveals both the nature and the working of defence planning. Political 'ends', strategic 'ways', and military 'means' all fed by reigning, if not always recognized, assumptions, organize the subject well with a template that can serve any time, place, and circumstance. The book is designed to help understanding of what can appear to be a forbiddingly complex as well as technical subject. A good part of the problem for officials charged with defence planning duties is expressed in the second part of the book's title. The real difficulty, which rarely is admitted by those tasked with defence planning duty, is that defence planning can only be guesswork. But, because defence preparation is always expensive, not untypically is politically unpopular, yet obviously can be supremely important, claims to knowledge about the truly unknowable persist. In truth, we cannot do defence planning competently, because our ignorance of the future precludes understanding of what our society will be shown by future events to need. The challenge faced by the author was to identify ways in which our problems with the inability to know the future in any detail in advance-the laws of nature, in other words-may best be met and mitigated. Professor Gray argues that our understanding of human nature, of politics, and of strategic history, does allow us to make prudent choices in defence planning that hopefully will prove 'good enough'.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Defence Studies.
This book examines four different basic frameworks for defence planning, and demonstrates how states can make decisions coherently about the structure and posture of their defence forces despite strategic uncertainty.
The volume also highlights the adhocism in the planning process. This volume is a must read for defence analysts, scholars, practitioners of statecraft and those dealing with defence planning, security and strategic issues.
This book examines the subject of strategy and its relationship with politics.
Problems in Australian Defence Planning
This book provides a short and accessible introduction to the theory of strategy, examines the general theory of strategy in accordance with 23 key Principles and explains its nature, functions, and intended consequences.
This report presents an approach to strengthening the U.S. defense planning process. The approach centers on a simple but rigorous framework that links official statements of national security and national...
In Search of a Maritime Strategy: The Maritime Element in Australian Defence Planning Since 1901
In this original essay, Colin S. Gray, world-renowned scholar of strategic thought, discusses the meaning of strategy and its importance for politicians and the military as a means of achieving desired outcomes in complex, uncertain ...
Most interwar volumes examine only the 1920s and the 1930s. This new volume goes back, and forward in time, to draw on a greater expanse of history in order to tease out lessons for contemporary planners.