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Analytic approaches to understanding future Defence workforce needs

A campaign of analysis has been conducted to help workforce planners to understand future Defence workforce requirements and design coherent, achievable and targeted workforce growth options for the Australian Defence Force (ADF). This paper reviews the wide range of analytical approaches that were employed to underpin the potential growth options, which will generate a robust, resilient and effective Defence workforce over the next 20 years. In 2020, Australian Department of Defence released the Defence Strategic Update, accompanied by a new Force Structure Plan which detailed the government’s intentions for capability investments. This 2020 Force Structure Plan identified that the Defence workforce needs to grow in order to support a larger number of morecomplex capabilities, including to build capacity in cyber, intelligence, electronic warfare and space. An analysis campaign to review the long-term workforce requirements for Defence became the focus of the 20202021 Defence Capability Assessment Program, which is the primary force design process for the ADF. This analysis campaign brought together two distinct disciplines of capability-based planning and workforce planning. Capability-based planning focusses on maximising the “capability” of the force, being the ability to achieve an effect, and testing the effectiveness of these capabilities within the context of scenarios. However, understanding the strengths and limitations of workforce capability is much more challenging than the traditional assessment of weapon systems, and analysis methods from human resource management are also needed to ensure an achievable workforce plan. Five complementary analytical approaches were employed, drawing on expertise in Defence People Group, Defence Science and Technology Group, and the Force Design Division of the ADF Headquarters. Based on a series of wargames, operational demand modelling provided a detailed estimation of the number and types of people Defence will need to meet a future warfighting scenario. A Bayesian network model captures how the constituent parts of Defence contribute in a warfighting context, and this model was used to quantify the expected benefit from proposed workforce investments. The supporting and enabling functions of Defence were considered through both a prioritisation of proposed investments and mapping how the entire organisation supports Defence capability. Whereas the above methods focussed on future demand for workforce to deliver capability, supply modelling focussed on the ability to grow and train that workforce. The workforce growth model provides realistic estimations of achievable growth rates to inform both the likely limit on how quickly Defence can grow overall, and the ability to generate specific skill sets in different locations. It also provides guidance for how many recruits should be targeted to achieve the desired number of trained personnel, and this in turn informs the required investment in supporting functions such as facilities and recruitment. The campaign of analysis to understand future Defence workforce requirements created new connections between different analysis methods. This strengthened each individual approach and enabled the design of coherent, achievable and targeted workforce growth options for Defence. The analytical campaign described in this paper has provided much-needed detail to underpin how Defence will reshape and reskill its workforce in response to emerging requirements.