Investigating the Impact of Leadership, Planning and Strategic Thinking Variables on Building Defense Excellence (Case Study: Project-Based Defense Organizations)

In order to enhance defense deterrence and gain a competitive advantage in the production of military products, the level of diversity of research projects, as well as their ability to meet new needs, must be significantly increased. Therefore, environmental knowledge of various defense fields in the world, as well as determining strategies and directing research projects towards emerging projects of surprising knowledge, is a necessity in planning and directing Iran's defense projects. Examining the current and past projects of defense-oriented project organizations and comparing them with defense research projects in developed countries, shows that focusing on environmental knowledge as well as directing research projects towards effective outputs, needs significant improvement. Be. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate how the three components of strategic leadership, strategic thinking and strategic planning interact in project-based defense organizations to create a sustainable competitive advantage compared to developed countries.
Research data were collected using a questionnaire. In order to test the statistical hypotheses of interaction between the three components, the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique was used. The results showed that the strategic leadership of defense research projects can directly and indirectly and by interacting with the components of strategic planning and thinking, to the extent of 0.855 to create a competitive advantage of defense project-oriented organizations.