ABSTRACT Most countries put significant amounts of time and effort in writing and issuing high-level policy documents. These are supposed to guide subsequent national defence efforts. But do they? And how do countries even try to ensure that they do? This paper reports on a benchmarking effort of how a few “best of breed” small- to medium-sized defence organisations (Australia, Canada, and New Zealand) deal with these issues. We find that most countries fail to link goals to resources and pay limited attention to specific and rigorous ex-ante or post-hoc evaluation, even when compared to their own national government-wide provisions. We do, however, observe a (modest) trend towards putting more specific goals and metrics in these documents that can be – and in a few rare cases were – tracked. The paper identifies 42 concrete policy “nuggets” – both “do’s and don’ts” – that should be of interest to most defence policy planning/analysis communities. It ends with two recommendations that are in line with recent broader (non-defence) scholarship on the policy formulation-policy implementation gap: to put more rigorous emphasis on implementation (especially on achieving desired policy effects), but to do so increasingly in more experiential (“design”) ways, rather than in industrial-age bureaucratic ones (“PPBS”-systems).

中文翻译：

---

实施国防政策：一个基准——“精简版”

摘要 大多数国家在编写和发布高层政策文件方面投入了大量时间和精力。这些应该指导随后的国防工作。但是他们呢？各国甚至如何努力确保他们这样做？本文报告了一些“同类最佳”中小型国防组织（澳大利亚、加拿大和新西兰）如何处理这些问题的基准测试工作。我们发现大多数国家未能将目标与资源联系起来，对具体而严格的事前或事后评估的关注有限，即使与本国政府范围内的规定相比也是如此。然而，我们确实观察到一种（适度的）趋势，即在这些文档中放置更具体的目标和指标，这些文档可以——在少数情况下——被跟踪。该文件确定了 42 个具体的政策“金块”——包括“该做的和不该做的”——大多数国防政策规划/分析社区都应该对它们感兴趣。最后提出两项建议，这些建议与最近关于政策制定-政策实施差距的更广泛（非国防）学术研究一致：更加严格地强调实施（尤其是实现预期的政策效果），但越来越多地这样做体验（“设计”）方式，而不是工业时代官僚主义（“PPS”系统）。