Ranking the Performance of European Armed Forces

Abstract

The degree of collectiveness aimed for in European defence policy raises issues such as burden sharing and relative performance measurement of the European Armed Forces (EAF). This paper compares EAF performance rates on three dimensions: input, throughput and output. In order to express performance, over the period of 1995-2008, differing measures are formulated for each of these dimensions. It appears that, in ranking the burden-sharing behaviour, it is the selection of a specific measure that defines the position of each European country. The implication of our study is that in meaningfully ranking the performance of EAF in the context of burden sharing, various indicators should be combined.

The defence performance measurement framework: measuring the performance of defence organisations at the strategic level

“…However, most initiatives identified in the literature focus on functional and structural levels other than the strategic-level. This includes a focus on a particular service (Bush 2005;Stevens 2004), department (Beeres, De Waard, and Bollen 2010;Hepler 2008), aspect (Beeres and Bogers 2011;Hackleman, Johnson, and Ahner 2014), and entity (Schriver 2000;Webb and Candreva 2010). Further it can be noted that different services 4 have different priorities (Posen 2016) and therefore tend to use different frameworks to optimise their performance (Keathley, Du, and Olliges 2015), leading to various performance-oriented mental models within the overall organisation.…”

“…Second, the need to demonstrate accountability and value to an increasingly diverse and complex set of stakeholders complicates the PM effort (Band 2004;Boynton and Vaughan 1998;Tomlyn 2005). Third, within defence organisations themselves, it remains particularly challenging to define and measure some of the KPAs and critical "outputs" (Beeres and Bogers 2011;NATO 2011). According to Tomlyn (2005), this is because a significant part of the value generated by defence activities are cognitive and non-tangible (e.g.…”

“…First, defence organisations tend to be amongst the largest, most complex, and most diverse public sector organisations with a huge number of activities: this complicates any PM effort (Marquis et al 2006). As a result, existing PM efforts that are based on highly consolidated frameworks do not adequately reflect this complexity (Beeres and Bogers 2011;Cavoli 2004). Second, the previously mentioned use of different performance-oriented mental models within the organisation hinders the successful organisation-wide adoption of PM Systems as this likely creates duplication, incompatibilities and misalignment between strategic-level leaders using different "languages" to discuss performance (Folan and Browne 2005).…”

“…efficiency and profitability-related metrics which are not the ultimate criterion of performance for defence organisations (Beeres and Bogers 2011;Marquis et al 2006;Tomlyn 2005). Linking this to the failure of defence organisations to use specific military terminology in their PM efforts clarifies why many military PM management initiatives suffer from a lack of face-validity and legitimacy (Keathley, Du, and Olliges 2015).…”

Economics, Logistics, and (Human Resources) Management in Military Sciences

“…In contrast, a number of continental European partners in the NATO alliance have been repeatedly admonished by the US government to increase their budgets for defense and security. Nations such as Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, and Italy are pressurized to expand their expenditures up to the level of at least 2% of their national economies, a level they currently are far from reaching (e.g., Beeres and Bogers 2012;Hartley 2018). After all, says the US government, there are so many threats and dangers waiting to manifest themselves sooner or later.…”