‘Build the golf course first’ – an organisational and strategic management perspective on UK defence reviews

ABSTRACT

UK defence reviews have generated a flourishing academic debate for the past one-and-a-half decades. Still, the scholarship has hardly applied organisation and strategic management concepts regarding these reviews and therefore omits relevant insights to understand the outcomes arising from these important strategic documents. This article proposes the organisation and strategic management scholarship can contribute significantly to explaining the dynamics of strategy-making and implementation of the UK’s previous and forthcoming defence reviews. The avoidance of budgetary losses and maintenance of corporate autonomy by any formal organisation – including the UK Ministry of Defence – are particularly powerful concepts for explaining the dynamics of strategy-making and implementation. These concepts are critical for understanding how the UK defence budget is actually spent and how its defence reviews are developed and implemented.

KEYWORDS:

• organisational management
• strategic management
• strategy, UK defence reviews, UK Ministry of Defence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. As is common with folklore, the origin of this anecdote is lost in time; its provenance cannot be proven. However, one colleague, a retired USAF officer, told us his father – also a USAF officer – joked about this story, which indicates this anecdote has had a long career. Another colleague, a retired US Army officer, told us he heard this joke regularly at the Defense Acquisition University. He added (dryly) that while teaching at West Point, he lived on base next to a USAF officer who was getting paid a “substandard housing” allowance for living in the same quarters.

2. Although the size of the UK Armed Forces has shrunk significantly since the Cold War, its force structure and the common themes in the strategic reviews have not changed significantly. This is not a UK-specific phenomenon; it is common in many European armed forces. For instance, the force structure of the Bundeswehr still resembles its Cold War era structure but it contains many hollow forces where the organisational elements exist but most of the personnel are missing.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bence Nemeth

Bence Nemeth is a Senior Lecturer at the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London. He primarily teaches British and international military officers at the Defence Academy of the UK. Currently, he serves as the Academic Programme Director of the Advanced Command Staff Course (ACSC), which is the flagship postgraduate course of the Joint Services Command and Staff College centred on the military operational level of warfare. Dr Nemeth is regularly invited to give guest lectures on defence management and planning at European military staff colleges, including the Baltic Defence College, the Czech University of Defence, the Irish Command and Staff School and the Netherlands Defence Academy. Prior to moving to King’s, Dr Nemeth had been working in various defence planning positions at the Hungarian Ministry of Defence for eight years, and also taught at the Hungarian National Defence University.

Nicholas Dew

Nick Dew is a Professor of Strategic Management at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. His teaching and research focuses on entrepreneurship, strategy and innovation in defense and homeland security. He has a PhD and MBA from the University of Virginia and experience working in the international energy industry. He is the author of over 50 research papers and an award-winning entrepreneurship textbook. His teaching and research has been funded by various U.S. Department of Defense agencies and recognised in multiple teaching and research awards. He currently serves as the Academic Associate responsible for the Naval Postgraduate School’s innovative one-year Professional MBA program and the LEAD leadership program with the U.S. Naval Academy. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not represent the official position of the US Department of Defense.