Procurement planning
Defence procurement starts with the capabilities the strategy asks for.
A tender can only ask for a capability somebody has already established will be needed. FORCE reads the strategies, doctrine and concept papers you release, places every passage under one of six combat functions, and names the passage each capability was read from.
Six combat functions
Five working days
Only the documents you release
In one sentence
For the procurement desk that has to know which capabilities will be needed before a tender can be written, FORCE reads the strategies and concepts you release and returns a capability map in which every entry carries the passage it was read from — and gives no recommendations for action.
The situation
Which capabilities does a defence procurement programme have to ask for next?
A tender can only ask for a capability that somebody has already established will be needed. That judgement is made before the specification exists, from strategies, doctrine, concepts and programme papers written by different authorities in different years.
Thousands of defence documents are published every year, and the ones bearing on a single capability sit across several of them. A MOD procurement case, a Bundeswehr Beschaffung and an armasuisse Ausschreibung all rest on documents from several authorities across several years, read one at a time and clear that way. Read as a set they are hard to compare, because nobody applied the same frame twice.
A specification is drafted before the strategy set behind it has been read
What it costs: The tender repeats what the last one asked for, and the capability the strategy names stays unbought.
Two publications from the same ministry point different ways on one capability
What it costs: Both positions are rebuilt from the source documents before the specification can be written.
A committee asks which document establishes the need behind a line
What it costs: A holding answer goes back while the basis is reconstructed, PDF by PDF.
In practice
How is a strategy read into the capabilities a tender can ask for?
A strategy states an intent, and a tender has to name a capability. FORCE places every passage of the released set under one of six combat functions, holds each capability apart from the enabler it depends on, and names the passage each one was read from.
Which capability answers which intent stays with the ministry. FORCE establishes what the released set argues for and where it is silent; deciding what to develop and what to tender remains with the customer.
What the map shows
Which capabilities the released strategies and concepts argue for
Which enablers those capabilities depend on, held apart from them
Where two authorities describe the same capability differently
The alternatives
What are the five routes to a documented capability basis?
A procurement desk has no capacity outside the tasking it already owes, and the strategy set still has to be read before a specification can be written. Five routes are open, and four of them cost less to start than FORCE. What separates them is elapsed time, whose reading of the set it is, and whether a finding can be traced to a passage afterwards.
| Route | What it gives you | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| Do nothing | No release, no contract and no cost. Nothing leaves the estate and the week stays with the answers already owed. | The next specification repeats the last one, and the capability the strategy names is discovered when a programme is already running. |
| Read the set in-house | The reading stays with the people who know the ministry's position, and no document leaves the estate. | Coverage is whatever one reader got through before the deadline, the reading is the first thing cut when a tasking date moves, and two readers apply two frames. |
| Commission a consultancy or think tank | A position comes back, argued by people who follow the field full time. | It costs more and takes longer than the window before a tender goes out, and what was read, and what was not, is rarely on the page. |
| Run the PDFs through a language model | An answer in minutes, at low cost, from tools already accredited on the estate. | A silence gets filled with a plausible paragraph, no passage ships with the finding it produced, the standpoint the set was read from is not fixed, and a set pasted into a public service has left the estate. |
| FORCE | One frame over the released set: six combat functions in five working days, every entry shipping the passage it was read from and the standpoint it was labelled from. | No entry names a capability to tender; that decision stays with the ministry. The set is read by OriginStamp AG in Switzerland, and no price is published here. |
What you get
What does a capability map establish before a tender is written?
A capability map states what the released strategies and concepts argue for, function by function, and holds each capability apart from the enabler it depends on. The published worked example ranks 52 topics that way.
Which capabilities the released set argues for, and which enablers they depend on
Where two authorities describe the same capability differently, each under the same combat function with its passage beside it
Why one topic was ranked above another, with the grounds recorded during the run
Deliverables
What comes back, and when?
Four deliverables come back within five working days of the released set arriving, and four stages run before them. Nothing is transferred until the quotation is accepted, and custody is agreed in writing before the set is handed over.
Capability map
Six combat functions across the columns, three relevance tiers down the rows. The columns follow NATO Allied Joint Doctrine, and an empty cell means the set is silent, not that the capability is absent.
Capabilities and enablers separated
The capability the set argues for is held apart from the enabler it depends on, with the enablers your set attaches listed against it. A capability that recurs with no enabler attached is a finding in its own right.
Source traceability
Every entry carries the passage it came from, down to a character range in a named document. Topics are compared against each other rather than counted, and the grounds for each comparison ship with the result.
A complete summary, in one interactive document
One interactive and editable HTML document carries the findings and the source passages behind them in full. A disputed entry resolves to one sentence rather than to a bibliography, and nothing is installed.
How an engagement runs
Stage one
The enquiry
You describe the decision that has to be taken and roughly which documents could be released. No document changes hands.
Within two working days
The scoping reply
A written reply states what an analysis of that set could and could not establish.
At your speed
Sizing and custody
The set is sized in pages and quoted against four page bands. Custody is agreed in writing, and nothing is transferred until the quotation is accepted.
Within five working days
The capability map
The five working days start when the released set arrives. The summary, the capability map and the source passages come back in one interactive document.
One step
Send us the question, not the documents.
Describe the capability decision that has to be taken and roughly which strategies, doctrine and concept papers could be released. A scoping reply comes within two working days, stating what an analysis of that set could and could not establish.