Research on Functional Analysis Methodology to Strengthen CBP Concept in ROK’s Defense Planning System

To execute the defense budget efficiently, the ROK military has emphasized effectiveness and efficiency in selecting defense capability improvement needs and promoting projects. Accordingly, the “Defense Acquisition Program Act” is continuously being revised. In addition, the ROK JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) is working to benchmark the development trends of advanced countries’ defense planning systems and apply the concept of “CBP (Capability-Based Planning)” to strengthen the JCS of ROK authority to make necessary decisions. However, these efforts have mainly focused on formal systems and procedures. The focus must shift to implementing concrete measures and detailed methodologies to implement formal systems and procedures. In this study, we proposed a plan to more actively accept the concept of CBP in the ROK military’s defense planning system, which currently has a strategic planning-requirements planning structure, and improve it to a structure of strategic planning-capability planning-requirements planning. In other words, by converting the perspective of defense planning limited to individual weapon systems to a capability unit, a high-level strategic concept encompassing the military’s overall operational area was reflected in individual weapon system requirements. This concept is meaningful because it groups capabilities into functional units in the ROK military’s defense planning method, which has bottom-up characteristics and broadens the horizon to strengthen necessary and insufficient capabilities from the perspective of operational capabilities. Additionally, this concept helps evaluate capabilities against threats that are difficult to define as a specific unit weapon system, such as cyber threats, which have recently emerged as a new threat. Accordingly, this paper presents the concept of “capability planning” under CBP. It presents the concept and analysis method of “functional analysis,” which classifies force by function to evaluate capability.