David Fisher: NZDF needs a lot of cash and Judith Collins could be the way to get it

ANALYSIS: NZ Defence Force is in crisis with experienced uniformed staff leaving in droves, serious equipment and bases overhaul projects required, and a Government aimed at cutting public spending. David Fisher has investigated the gaps and found that huge investment is required - and that Minister of Defence Judith Collins is the politician that could make it happen.

There is the need for a lot of money to be pumped into the NZ Defence Force.

That is clear from a review of papers released through the Official Information Act and the work underway in the Defence Policy Review.

The OIA papers tell of an organisation that has lost an extraordinary amount of human capital in critical places. Roughly a third of personnel have left over just a few years.

The Defence Policy Review, due to be completed next year, sets out a challenging strategic future requiring capabilities beyond those New Zealand currently possesses.

The current “crisis” - and yes, that’s a word used by NZDF commanders - has not happened in isolation.

It followed the ill-fated civilianisation project in 2010 that sought to shift funding from back office functions to the front line. Instead, it generated few savings and devastated morale.

It also saw a period of high tempo deployments from Timor to Afghanistan and beyond - exactly what many signed up to do - but the systems supporting those missions, and the people who went, became exhausted at the unrelenting pace.

We created around 30,000 contemporary veterans over that time. A good number of those veterans perceive post-service support as negligible and an abandonment of the country’s obligations to those who served.

Then came Covid-19. For those who served, not only did deployments virtually disappear overnight but so did training opportunities and career development. Instead, they guarded hotels.

With prior pressures, it seems this became an inflection point at which a difficult balance was profoundly disturbed and people left in droves.

Among the dangers, highlighted in one document, is one of ever-decreasing circles. A Navy briefing spoke of the loss of personnel leading to fewer days at sea (we currently have four of nine naval craft unable to leave port), meaning less time for training leading to “compounding effects for trade regeneration”.

This spiral of doom is such an issue that the Navy raised concern over “safely training the next generation of sailors”.

Yachts pass by the HMNZS Canterbury as it makes its way up the Waitemata Harbour.

It is the same across the three branches of service. In the Army, the significant loss of senior NCOs - lance corporals, corporals and sergeants - has removed a depth of experience critical in maintaining and developing a strong military.

They are the skeleton on which the rest of the body relies to stay upright.

The Royal NZ Air Force, too, has lost many of those whose job it is to keep aircraft running. It is reminiscent of a story told about Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown when he ran Auckland’s health board and summoned surgeons to meet the lowly disinfector of surgical tools. “You’re nothing without him,” he is said to have told the surgeons.

Take, as one of many examples, the lack of Navy propulsion specialists. It’s their job to keep the engines running in ships. With 57 per cent gone, the lesson is that you don’t need to sink a Navy ship to take it out - just offer a key staff member a decent paying job and working conditions.

Paid below public sector average

Pay is only one place to start but it’s an important beginning. People won’t stay if they if they feel they are being taken advantage of.

For those in the military, it has tended to sit about 5 per cent below the average public sector wage. A lack of money in recent years has meant that gap has widened to as much as 16 per cent.

But it’s not only pay. And, as Massey Univeristy’s Dr Nina Harding found when embedded for research prior to Covid-19, they won’t stay unless they are in a place that allows self-improvement. Her research argued that it was through developing skills and expertise that today’s generation expresses its service to society.

The stop-gap retention payments ($419 million over four years) are only a temporary fix. The state of military accommodation is beyond deplorable and will cost a fortune to fix. Skill development and training has been sidelined for the sake of plugging gaps. The way in which veterans are supported is - and has been acknowledged from the Beehive - not good enough with price tags for improvement costing in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

And then there’s the equipment. Ron Mark, Minister of Defence from 2017-2020, made great strides in replacing the aged P8 patrol and surveillance aircraft and the Hercules work horse. Much more needs replacing - as the Prime Minister found with the 757s before Christmas - among which will be the two frigates that reach the end of their working lives just over a decade away.

A RNZAF Boeing 757 taking off from Wellington Airport. Photo / Mark Mitchell

And replacement isn’t enough. The battlefield is changing. There is new, better technology for warfighting and disaster relief. And that will need training and specialisation.

It has taken 15 years from NZDF exploring drones to step into that space properly with the recent order of Vector drones for reconnaissance. On today’s battlefield, that is minimum kit. A project to get “loitering munitions” - drone-enabled explosives - has been parked despite it becoming clear that this will be a necessity on the modern battlefield.

Those drones are part of the Network Enabled Army project which - to be done properly - requires deep, serious investment. Anything less is inviting disaster and New Zealand’s history of trying to skimp on big IT projects doesn’t bode well.

The environment is also changing. Our role in the Pacific region will build and intensify with climate-related disasters. We will need the right ships to get the right aircraft and right people with the right equipment and skills to what is likely to be a number of different places at the same time.

As it stands now, we would struggle to help anyone in the Pacific if New Zealand was dealing with its own disaster. In our absence, the extra load on Australia would prove harmful to transtasman relations. Worse, still, if we created a void that told the Pacific it needed to look to China for help.

What New Zealand gets in return

These needs have been growing for years. Some effort has been made to meet them - the aircraft replacements couldn’t be put off any longer - but there is a chasm of need which will need a lot of money to fill.

In return, New Zealand gets world standing. Our ability to project our military force in a particularly New Zealand way buys seats at many tables. It bring returns in the form of better economic and foreign relations.

NZDF not only has to rebuild a severely depleted organisation, it has to do so in the context of two shifting frameworks - that of an organisation that needs to change operationally to meet the future and one that must function in a more complex and shifting threat environment.

That’s not just changing the tyres on a car. It’s doing so with uncertainty as to the surface you will then drive it on (and whether those tyres are fit for purpose), the difficult routes that must be navigated, driving a car that needs extensive repair and upgrading - if its even the right type of vehicle for the journey.

Our current spending on defence at $5.3 billion sits around 24th in the world on per-capita spend ($970) a person and 94th in the world for GDP (1.3 per cent). National’s coalition partner has talked about working that upwards to 2 per cent.

NZDF used SurfZoneView to support beach landings on a recent mission in Fiji.

Given the situation we are in, there is a good argument for surge funding over a decade at least with the acknowledgement there will also need to be additional spend on big capital projects, like the frigate replacements.

Surge funding creates its own challenges. Too much and waste becomes a factor. Too little and it won’t have any impact. Rebuilding is going to be a monumental task.

Getting money for defence is not easy. A long line of Chiefs of Defence have walked into their ministers’ offices with a wish list in their back pocket and a scaled-down “reality list” in their hands.

Ministers have taken that “reality list” to Cabinet and found Defence suffers when contesting for limited public funds against projects from other ministers that will, for the public, be more tangible or visible.

The consequence, for decades, has been not enough. There has been a culture of ingenuity around stretching that money further - and goodness knows New Zealand soldiers are worse than magpies around foreign partners’ kit - but eventually that “stretch” will turn to “snap”.

It’s now on Judith “Crusher” Collins, the 43rd person to serve as Minister of Defence (and, it has passed without mention, the first woman to hold the role). As a politician, she’s in the mould of Margaret Thatcher - a lady (as the quote goes) that is not for turning.

Determined and tough, bullet-headed and bloody-minded, if any politician can get the money NZDF needs then it is her. And she understands the principle of service. The NZSAS is in her Papakura electorate and more than once has she stood before its memorial wall, reading the names of those who have fallen.

Those names have all been etched more recently than most adorning our war memorials. Collins understands very well NZDF is not just about Anzac Day, that patriotic touchstone that connects most Kiwis to the military one day a year.

She will understand that service takes place every day in uniform and can carry the greatest of costs - particularly without investment in people and equipment.

If she can take that understanding to the Cabinet table, this term as Minister could be her finest hour.

David Fisher is based in Northland and has worked as a journalist for more than 30 years, winning multiple journalism awards including being twice named Reporter of the Year and selected as one of a small number of Wolfson Press Fellows to Wolfson College, Cambridge. He first joined the Herald in 2004.