New Zealand — Army Strategic Plan — Chief of Army Foreword

The NZ Army Strate­gic Plan is a com­pre­hen­sive and well con­sid­ered doc­u­ment that will help direct us on our jour­ney towards the Army of the future. This doc­u­ment details the strate­gic objec­tives and ini­tia­tives we will focus on in order to tran­si­tion from Today’s Army (out to 2015) to the Next Army (out to 2020), and then to the future New Zealand Defence Force (2030).

Our cur­rent strate­gic envi­ron­ment is com­plex. It is char­ac­terised by increased oper­a­tional tem­po; ongo­ing change through the Defence Trans­for­ma­tion Plan (DTP); changes to Army’s respon­si­bil­i­ties for finance, capa­bil­i­ty devel­op­ment, logis­tics, train­ing and edu­ca­tion, and human resources man­age­ment; increased shared ser­vice link­ages; and like­ly pol­i­cy changes aris­ing from the Defence White Paper (DWP).

Despite these chal­lenges, our val­ues, vision and mis­sion are endur­ing. We will con­tin­ue to be a world class Army with mana with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly ‘own­ing’ all the resources we need to do that. 

I require all com­man­ders and staffs to look beyond our cur­rent chal­lenges towards the Army of the future. We need to be an Army that pro­vides com­bat effec­tive force ele­ments for cur­rent oper­a­tions, pre­pares to fight the next con­tin­gency and con­tin­ues to devel­op warfight­ing capa­bil­i­ty. Our forces need to be shaped for the secu­ri­ty envi­ron­ment of the future, which is like­ly to con­sist main­ly of joint, inter­a­gency and multi­na­tion­al deploy­ments across the full spec­trum of oper­a­tions in fail­ing or failed states, most prob­a­bly (but not exclu­sive­ly) in the South West Pacif­ic region. Although the detail will be deter­mined by our force devel­op­ers, my over­all vision of the future is an Army:

• that pro­vides sus­tain­able, com­bined arms task groups that are effec­tive­ly led, trained and equipped to con­duct close combat;
• has agile and robust struc­tures that can inte­grate quick­ly into deploy­able task groups to deliv­er the required effects;
• has an embed­ded bat­tle­field com­mand phi­los­o­phy that cre­ates an empow­ered, adap­tive and inno­v­a­tive war-fight­ing cul­ture at all lev­els; and
• has sol­diers with enhanced com­bat effec­tive­ness and sit­u­a­tion­al aware­ness, able to achieve deci­sion superiority.

Our com­bat effec­tive­ness has improved sig­nif­i­cant­ly through com­bined arms train­ing over the last decade, and while we have made a lot of progress, there is still much to do. Over the next five years we will con­tin­ue to focus on build­ing our capa­bil­i­ty around com­bat effec­tive­ness, so that by 2015 we will have the abil­i­ty to quick­ly assem­ble, deploy and sus­tain com­bat-effec­tive com­bined arms and light task groups. This ‘Next Army’ of 2015 is our inter­me­di­ate objec­tive, not the final objec­tive. In the longer term, I am already look­ing towards the ‘Army After Next’ of 2030 and beyond, and I want you to do like­wise. I now need you as Com­man­ders, lead­ers and mem­bers of the New Zealand Army to under­stand your role in the strate­gic future for the NZ Army. I will expect Com­mand Teams to back brief me on how they view their role over the next few years in achiev­ing the Army Strat­e­gy, over­com­ing the chal­lenges that we have and excelling at what they do best. 

Major Gen­er­al Rhys Jones
Chief of Army 

View the Chief of Army’s video intro­duc­tion [wmv file | 31MB]
View the elec­tron­ic ver­sion of the Army Strate­gic Plan Brief­ing Pack [PDF | 11.3MB]

Source:
New Zealand Army