Most of the major defense projects are carried out in civil-military
partnerships. In the early days of these partnerships, responsibilities are shared, with
the armed forces playing a key leadership role in ensuring efficient coordination,
operationality, and political influence. However, today's major Defense projects are
costly, risky, and complex. Emerging technologies and capabilities such as artificial
intelligence, quantum technology, and sensor fusion technology present challenges.
Primarily due to budget restrictions, limited personnel, and high turnover resulting in a
shortage of knowledgeable staff, the armed forces have transferred many
responsibilities to the civilian side, such as research and development, quality
assurance, testing, and risk management. The duties of the armed forces are currently
limited to defining the operational and technical requirements. At the same time, the
Defense industry is tasked with delivering a product ‘off-the-shelf,’ i.e., ready to be
operated in a military environment. This raises the question of what role a military
project manager should fill and what competencies are required? Remarkably, the
value and importance of project leadership in the military are being called into
question. This chapter aims to demonstrate that leadership is not necessarily as
important as it used to be, but technical skills concerning the type of project are of the
utmost importance for understanding the environment and situational awareness. The
proposed model, where a project manager of a complex project should be selected
based on their technical skills even to the detriment of leadership competencies, is
based on both the real-life experience of one of the authors and a reconciliation of this
experience with a literature review. Pragmatically speaking, prioritizing technical skills
over leadership at the level of the project manager and their team, such as a PMO,
could generate significant benefits and reduce, for example, the risk of cost and/or
deadline overruns. Thus, the operationalization of the model tends to show the
advantage of choosing a management team with high technical competency over a
team with solid leadership abilities when a major project becomes highly complex in
terms of technology.
Keywords: Competencies, Defense, High technologies, Leadership, Organization, Project management.
