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WELLINGTON — Withdrawal from its major deployments, delayed upgrade projects and the effective absence for more than six months of the Navy’s flagship are included in a brief prepared for New Zealand’s new Defence Minister, Jonathan Coleman.
The Ministry of Defence document says that the first priority of the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) is operations, both at home and abroad. These include assisting other New Zealand government agencies, for example, by doing maritime patrol in support of the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Living Mammals.
Such patrols are ongoing, whereas over the next three years there will be a steady drawdown from current operations in Afghanistan, Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands.
Some withdrawals are imminent, such as the New Zealand Special Air Service deployment to Afghanistan that is scheduled to end next month.
The ministry brief says that upgrades of Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) aircraft have taken twice as long as expected.
“Combined with deferral of routine maintenance for the aircraft awaiting upgrade, this has left the NZDF short of aircraft for certain tasks,” says the brief, warning that the first quarter of 2012 “will require careful management to ensure the availability of aircraft for tasks in support of multiagency outcomes (for example, search and rescue and maritime surveillance in New Zealand and the Pacific).”
Moreover, the Navy’s only sealift ship, the 430-foot HMNZS Canterbury, will be taken out of service for scheduled maintenance from September 2012 until March 2013, and this maintenance period will be extended for other remediation work.
Defence’s second priority is described as implementing the 2010 Defence White Paper, notably the Cabinet-directed savings and redistribution target of 350 million to 400 million New Zealand dollars ($291 million to $332.6 million) per year by 2014-15.
An accompanying chart shows that in fiscal 2011-12, savings of 103 million New Zealand dollars have been achieved against a target of 173 million New Zealand dollars.
For fiscal 2012-13, the target is 225 million New Zealand dollars; savings of some 97 million New Zealand dollars have already been achieved.
The brief cautions the minister that “after 2020/21, and assuming the policy settings of the White Paper are unaltered, significant capital injections will be needed to fund the replacement of key assets, including the C-130H Hercules and B757 transport aircraft, the naval combat capability and the P-3K2 Orion maritime surveillance aircraft.”
Key areas of focus for the next five years, the brief says, include introducing an amphibious task force and integrating units from the Navy, Army and Air Force to operate as one force.
New capabilities scheduled to come into service over the next five years include upgraded C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, P-3K2 Orion patrol and surveillance aircraft, and new A109 and NH90 helicopters.
The first two new NH90 helicopters were delivered last December, although they have not yet been formally accepted into service.
The brief points out that the NZDF is “rebalancing its workforce and civilianizing some positions.”
The minister is advised that civilianization “will provide the flexibility for military personnel to continue on to a second career in the NZDF, and for the NZDF to retain a comprehensive level of professional knowledge within the organization.”
However, the brief also acknowledges that civilianization “has inevitably impacted on morale, leading to staff retention issues and associated costs and risks from lost expertise.”
There has been an increase in attrition rates throughout the NZDF, not least within the Air Force, where attrition rates have doubled from between 6 and 7 percent to 13 percent within 12 months.
Air Vice Marshal Peter Stockwell, chief of the Air Force, told Defense News that the attrition rate “is certainly getting our attention.”
Independent defense business analyst Gordon Crane told Defense News that the briefing candidly admits the challenges involved in finding fiscal savings and simultaneously managing the civilianization process.
“With fewer than 8,800 regular personnel at the end of 2011, the NZDF has very little fat from which to trim uniformed staff. Moreover, the changes have severely upset people who may have given decades of service. More than 300 people already have been directly affected by the civilianization process, and as many as 150 more this year are likely to be sacked or reassigned.
‘To make deeper fiscal cuts in such circumstances is going to be very challenging, indeed,” he said. “For some years, all three services have had critically small numbers of crucial technicians, and someone falling ill or resigning or being sacked could have a disproportionate and damaging impact on operational outputs.”
