Rising to the challenge of joint-warfare: Colin Robinson looks at the creation of the New Zealand Joint Forces Headquarters along the lines of the British and Australian models.

• Author: Robinson, Colin D.

Military organisational change is as old as warfare itself. Throughout recorded history military forces have changed their structures to adapt to changing conditions. They often adapt due to an external threat of some kind, and emulation of foreign armed forces, and those processes can be affected by resource constraints and domestic politics. (1) But as Theo Farrell writes,

militaries are famously slow to change. Indeed, all organizations are resistant to major change. Organizations run on routines, and depend on stability. Moreover, military organizations, as socially conservative communities ... are especially disinclined to innovate. (2) But the nature of warfare is ever-changing, and technological change, especially the increasing speed of information links, demand that British and Commonwealth armies adapt to new conditions to carry out national policy as effectively and efficiently as possible.

The background to the creation of Headquarters Joint Forces New Zealand in 2001 evokes two parallels with the evolution of the British armed forces. First, the ever-growing need for the three individual services to co-operate to achieve success on operations-joint warfare; and, second, the ways in which military changes are adopted, whether they are adopted by armed forces themselves, or by being imposed, overruled, by civilians. The United Kingdom, with worldwide military expeditions for over 200 years, was forced by circumstance to consider joint organisation much earlier than New Zealand, which since the South African War of 1899-1902 has mostly dispatched single-service expeditionary groupings to join larger joint forces, first under British and then more recently under US command. This longer record of joint operations probably seasoned British politicians and military officers to consider joint organisational evolution more favourably. Second, the last major changes forced upon the British Army from above were the Cardwell/Childers reforms of the late 1800s. In contrast, New Zealand's greater isolation, and less urgent need to consider expeditionary deployments left politicians appearing to have to force change upon the New Zealand Defence Force after 1997. In Farrell's terms, there was less of a threat. The result was that, unlike the United Kingdom and Australia, the adoption of a joint operational headquarters was delayed, and had to be imposed by civilians to a much greater degree.

Joint evolution

Multi-service actions by British armed forces date back at least as far as the capture of Gibraltar in 1704, before the Acts of Union. By the 1980s, beyond the NATO area, the United Kingdom designated one of the single-service operational headquarters for the infrequent times that large expeditions might have to be mounted. The Royal Navy headquarters of the commander-in-chief, fleet, was utilised to run the Falklands campaign, for example. (3) New Zealand's forces tended to operate in single-service groupings as part of larger British Commonwealth, or later US forces, of the same service.

As the 1990s wore on, the United Kingdom and Australia began to carry out more far-distant operations as part of multi-national coalitions. This began to put a strain upon the single-service arrangements. In 1994 it was determined that 'in recent years and increasingly in the future operations have and would be conducted on a tri-service basis'. (4) Purpose designed joint solutions began to look better. Thus in 1994, Major-General Christopher Wallace, late Royal Green Jackets, was tasked to set up the new Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ). (5) There are isolated pieces of evidence that...