Defending the nation

In a fundamentally shifted strategic environment marked by heightened geopolitical competition and the real prospect of high-intensity conflict, Defence is no longer solely the responsibility of the Australian Defence Force. Australia must embrace a whole-of-nation approach, where national support for Defence becomes the central strategic imperative. Failure to do so risks rendering our military investments ineffective.

This urgency is echoed globally. NATO and the European Union are urgently refocusing on collective defence and resilience, expanding defence industrial capacity, improving cross-border logistics, and stressing the necessity of whole-of-society preparedness to sustain forces in a prolonged conflict.

The concept of national support for Defence—involving the integration of Defence with all levels of government, industry and civil society—is essentially about strategic logistics and national resilience. As David Beaumont has argued, logistics forms the inviolable triptych of the art of war, alongside strategy and tactics.

In the face of potential conflict, three main factors inform the importance of national support for Defence:

Sustaining the force. In high-intensity conflict, the ADF will require rapid and sustained access to materiel, energy, medical supplies and critical infrastructure (including ports, airfields and transport networks). Most of these capabilities reside in the civilian sector. A defence force that cannot be supplied, repaired and reinforced is a force destined for failure, irrespective of its combat capability.

Wartime mobilisation. The ability to scale the national effort—putting the ‘national’ in national preparedness—is paramount. This includes the surge capacity of the defence industrial base to rapidly produce or repair equipment and the ability to convert civilian industries and skills to support the war effort. This requires pre-planned, well-rehearsed civil-military arrangements, a concept that has been historically underdeveloped in Australia.

Homeland defence and resilience. With reduced strategic warning, Australia itself will be the base for operations and a potential target. National support ensures that critical national functions (such as energy, telecommunications, food and governance) can continue under duress. This must involve robust civilian crisis planning and trusted public communication to maintain societal cohesion during a crisis.

While these make the strategic need clear, Australia’s implementation of national support for Defence faces several significant, systemic challenges.

Australia lacks a clear, overarching strategy that formally links the National Defence Strategy with the efforts of all other government portfolios (including the departments of Infrastructure, Health and Industry, for example). As a result, whole-of-nation initiatives are often unclear in their funding, commitment and accountability across non-Defence government agencies, obscuring a truly integrated national defence concept.

And while past concepts of ‘national support base’ have existed within Defence, the actual legal and operational frameworks for rapidly directing or harnessing civilian resources (such as industry capacity, skilled workers, infrastructure and economic priorities) in a crisis are either outdated, insufficiently detailed or politically untested.

Support is also challenged by workforce and industrial capacity constraints. The ambition to build a more potent, focused force—particularly for major projects such as submarines, naval vessels and the joint enablers for combat—is heavily constrained by the national skills base.

Defence is in real competition with the civilian sector for highly skilled workers, including engineers, IT specialists, cybersecurity professionals and tradespeople. Meeting the recruitment and retention targets for the ADF and defence industry (such as the potentially significant demands of nuclear-powered submarine maintenance) is a major, ongoing challenge.

Additionally, Australia’s defence industry lacks the depth and scale needed for sustained, high-intensity conflict. Years of prioritising just-in-time logistics and commercial efficiency over resilience and redundancy have left the national support base vulnerable to disruption. Rapidly scaling production of key items, and holding excess capacity to surge into crises, in areas such as guided weapons and munitions, remains an enormous task.

Australia’s unique geography—vast distances and a population and national infrastructure base clustered around the southeast corner of Australia—presents further logistical challenges.  As operations will likely be launched from the north, the resilience of infrastructure in Northern Australia (such as ports, roads, fuel storage and airfields) is critically important but currently limited and vulnerable to both military action and natural disaster.

Moreover, Australia is deeply embedded in, and reliant on, complex global supply chains for everything from fuel and essential medicines to critical components and raw materials. A crisis would expose vulnerabilities in these commercial flows, which lie largely outside of Defence’s direct control.

Overcoming decades of bureaucratic silos and peacetime thinking is difficult, leading to inertia within culture and governance. A coordinated whole-of-government and whole-of-nation approach requires breaking down traditional departmental barriers and establishing common digital foundations and shared data. And establishing national preparedness requires clear, credible communication and public trust in the government’s security narrative. Without this, efforts to mobilise society could be undermined by disinformation or public cynicism regarding the urgency and necessity of the measures.

Australia’s most urgent challenge is to transform the concept of national support for Defence from an abstract policy goal into a concrete, funded and legally underpinned national program. This whole-of-nation effort is not just desirable; it is the foundational requirement for effective deterrence and the only way to ensure the ADF can be sustained to fight and win if called upon.

This article was published by The Strategist.