Defense Institution Building: Training in Support of Defense Planning

Abstract

Training for senior officials is always a problem of high complexity, and training on defense issues is even more complex, for several reasons. Defense is becoming an increasingly specialized field, with a wide array of professional instruments, especially in the area of planning, but it lacks the concreteness of other public domains, such as health or education, as the success of good governance in national defense reveals itself only under special conditions. Senior-level trainees exposed to new defense planning approaches come to their training experience with a wide array of knowledge and experience, and they are skilful in handling complex issues. Some of their skills, knowledge, and experience are of great value in introducing new topics, but other elements of their background may bias them in properly understanding the depth of those new topics. Their seniority also implies that their attention span and their learning curves are different than those of young and fresh students. Senior officials seldom are able to dedicate themselves full-time to training. Usually, training is only a part, and not necessarily the most important one, of their professional agenda. When the training is of an international nature, the trainees are of different backgrounds and cultures, and establishing a common denominator that fits every one of them may result in significant lapses of practical knowledge if the training process is not handled wisely. Taking into account all those aspects, designing an interactive training course for senior officials on national defense policy with an emphasis on defense planning proved to be a very challenging task for the team at NATO Studies Center in Bucharest when we were asked to conduct such an event for a group of international participants at a conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, in April 2005. This article is an attempt to take stock of the experiences gained through planning that training program, and it proposes some general themes of reflection on training senior officials in support of defense planning. The first part presents a theoretical framework, with some considerations regarding defense planning that we thought any trainees should be aware of when embarking on a training program dealing with defense policy formulation and implemen-