Core Competencies for the Royal New Zealand Air Force

The US Air Force has developed core competencies which can be shown to be a product of vision and mission, and strategic context and policy guidance. This paper will investigate whether the USAF core competencies can be used by the Royal New Zealand Air Force. Firstly it examines the process by which the USAF developed its core competencies. It considers the mission, vision and policy direction that the USAF follows. Those factors are broken down into their basic elements and then recombined to form the core competencies. The similarities and differences of the USAF and the RNZAF are then discussed and it is concluded that the specific USAF core competencies are not transferable to the RNZAF. The process of core competency development is however transferable and is thus applied to the RNZAF. Policy guidance for the RNZAF is examined, as is its vision and mission. The same process that the paper identified as the USAF s path to its core competencies is then applied to the RNZAF case. Five core competencies are the result. They are Precision Attack, Directed Air Mobility, Long Range Maritime Patrol, Interoperability, and Effective and Efficient Sortie Generation.