Super
oversight
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The
RDFWA monitors Defence conditions of service and draws attention
to policies that could disadvantage members.
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Photo
illustration by PTE John Wellfare
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I
REFER to an article “Super choice on the money”, which
appeared in the July 28 edition of Air Force News. It was sourced
from the Defence Personnel Executive and provided by the Directorate
of Pay and Conditions.
I don’t like the thrust of the article, but am particularly
concerned with the statement that the DFRDB was “carefully
designed to meet the special needs of ADF members”.
It
wasn’t designed at all; it was forged during fiery negotiations
between my predecessors in the Regular Defence Force Welfare Association
(RDFWA), the Department of Defence and a parliamentary sub-committee,
which were initiated because pre-emptive changes contemplated
to the superannuation of ADF personnel were extraordinarily disadvantageous
and plainly wrong.
We won that fight to the degree that the parliamentary sub-committee
recommended that the RDFWA continue as the voice of Service and
ex-Service personnel in welfare matters. The Chiefs of the Services
and relevant ministers agreed.
In other words, our efforts to adjust the DFRDB to actually “meet
the special needs of ADF members” resulted in official acknowledgement
that there should be customer input into the welfare debate –
at the time it was a unique achievement.
The RDFWA continues to overview Defence conditions of service
and we have a plethora of unresolved issues, some major, some
minor, which we believe disadvantage service personnel.
Anyone interested should go to www.rdfwa.org.au.
Terry
Jones
Vice President, RDFWA
What is the war coming to?
By Wing Commander Callum Brown
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Scenario
planning is about imagining a range of possible futures,
not making a precise prediction.
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Photo
illustration by PTE John Wellfare
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ONE
of the main criticisms of conventional strategic planning is that
the concepts, methods and techniques employed to undertake it
tend to reinforce the present. But the future is inherently unpredictable,
therefore, the overriding emphasis should be on imagining a range
of possible futures and not on making a single precise prediction
of the future.
What is needed is the development of alternative futures, and
scenario planning makes this possible. Scenario planning has been
used previously by the military as a decision-making tool in the
face of uncertainty. Military organisations in particular need
to be prepared for surprise and plan for discontinuity.
Scenario planning allows us to discover, invent, examine and evaluate
possible, probable and preferable futures. It provides the opportunity
to highlight dangers, alternatives and choices that need to be
considered before they become urgent. Publishing a future scenario,
or scenarios, allows others to become engaged in the discussion
about the future.
But scenario planning takes time and the results are not always
immediately apparent. Further, the result is not a plan in itself
but a range of options to test existing or new plans against.
In practice, scenarios resemble a set of stories built around
carefully constructed plots. Each of these stories represents
a plausible alternative future, against which plans can be tested
and implications identified. Well-developed scenarios will require
decision-makers to question their basic assumptions. In scenario
planning, institutional inertia is often faced and needs to be
challenged. One must always remember that scenarios are not predictions
but are projections of potential futures.
How many scenarios need to be developed? Current thinking is that
four scenarios encourage divergent thinking and are useful for
developing a vision, three scenarios leads to the expectation
that one is “the forecast”, and two scenarios tend to
be labelled as “good” and “bad”.
Although more than four scenarios allows better coverage of all
possible future outcomes, the extra work involved is not usually
found to be beneficial. Scenario planning is usually carried out
through a process of scanning, surveys, questionnaires, interviews,
brainstorming, and workshops. The more people with different viewpoints
that participate in the process the better.
The ADF uses a set of defined scenarios for contingency planning
and wargaming purposes. Although these provide a useful resource
for wargaming and experimentation, care should be taken in using
them to determine future force structures – the ADF’s
current scenarios were not designed with this in mind. Experiments
usually require a future concept to examine, whereas force structure
planning requires examining real capability gaps. But the Air
Force has used the ADF’s scenarios for experimentation purposes
in the past.
What else has Air Force done in terms of scenario planning? In
the late 1990s, Air Force, in conjunction with Toffler and Associates,
developed four future scenarios for the year 2030 in a project
lasting about two years. The project was called Oracle 2030 and
the results eventually found their way into a document called
Air Force Concepts for 2015.
This
document was then used to influence annual Air Force plans over
the next few years. Given what has happened in the world since
the late 1990s, the salient question is whether or not it is time
to go through a similar process again? In terms of the future
development of Air Power, scenario planning has the potential
to challenge embedded ways of thinking about the use of air assets
in future contexts. Are we prepared to be challenged to that extent?
Wing
Commander Callum Brown is the Deputy Director Future Concepts
at the Air Power Development Centre.This article is based on
John Ratcliffe’s, Scenario Planning: an Evaluation of
Practice which appeared in Futures Research Quarterly, Winter
2003.
