Industrial mobilisation

The 2025 Helsinki Geoeconomics Week, held from 11 to 15 August, confirmed a sobering reality: economic power is now inextricably linked to national security and strategic competition. The shifting tectonic plates of geopolitics are grinding away at our traditional certainties. For Australia, on the front line of new geoeconomic realities, our ability to project power and secure our interests rests not solely on the strength of our military capability, but on the depth and responsiveness of our industrial base. The necessity of industrial mobilisation for national support to Defence is now a defining strategic challenge. 

Paul Hasluck’s The Government and the People serves as a powerful reminder of the painful and reactive scramble to convert a peacetime economy into a war machine, as we saw during World War II. The challenge was not just about raising armies, but about creating the essential war-supporting foundations—the factories, the materiel, the logistical backbone and the workforce. His official histories serve as a chilling blueprint of unpreparedness. Hasluck documented the profound difficulties of coordinating resources, redirecting production lines and marshalling a nation ill-equipped for the demands of conflict. 

The hard truth to be learned from WWII is that a successful total national effort requires forethought, legislative authority and a sustained, coordinated investment long before crisis breaks. The very essence of national support to Defence is the civil sector’s seamless, scalable delivery to the warfighter of capability, from munitions to maintenance. To believe that the modern, hyper-efficient and globally disaggregated industrial model will spontaneously pivot to meet the extraordinary attrition rates and surge requirements of major conflict is to ignore history. Hasluck showed that the friction points are not just technical, but political and administrative. 

Recent conflicts have brutally exposed the fallacy of relying on pure efficiency. Strategy and operations have been defined not by war aims, but the industrial capacity of the national support base. The defence industrial base is not a normal market: it has a single dominant buyer and yet, for decades, has been managed with a perverse faith in commercial competition and process over timely delivery and strategic resilience. 

HGW 2025 underscored a growing consensus that the global order is fragmenting and economic statecraft, including the aggressive use of industrial policy, has returned as a primary tool of power. Nations are now consciously using tools such as the US Defense Production Act and export control mechanisms to cultivate domestic capabilities essential for military superiority. This is the new reality. 

Industrial mobilisation is not the heavy hand of government nationalising production. Rather, it is about forming genuine, mature public-private partnerships that distribute risk, share knowledge and align sovereign capabilities with national strategy. The United States’ Defense Business Board has highlighted the importance of industry partnerships that can rapidly expand on-demand capacity in a crisis. 

For Australia, this necessity is mirrored in the National Defence Strategy’s call for industry and supply chain resilience. This isn’t corporate welfare, but rather a strategic investment in deterrence. We must move beyond transactional procurement to relational, long-term partnerships that foster innovation, provide the financial certainty required for capital investment and cultivate the skilled workforce needed for strategic technologies. Industry, for its part, must view Defence not as a niche market, but as a core pillar of future purpose. This means stepping up to co-invest in facilities, skills and research that bridge the civilian and military domains. 

To succeed in providing genuine national support to Defence, both government and industry must embrace a comprehensive, strategic industrial policy that intentionally cultivates the capacity for rapid mobilisation. This requires four related pillars: 

Demand signalling and stability. The government must act as a sophisticated ‘anchor tenant’, providing long-term, predictable demand signals to de-risk private sector investment in surge capacity and critical technologies. This means shifting from episodic procurement to a continuous, strategic relationship, seeing industry as an intrinsic part of military capability, not a mere contractor. 

Sovereign capability prioritisation. We must identify and secure true sovereign industrial capabilities, the non-negotiable capacity to produce, sustain and rapidly adapt key components and systems that underpin defence force generation and sustainment. This involves targeted investment to onshore production in areas where supply chain disruption creates unacceptable strategic risk. 

Skills and workforce mobilisation. Mobilisation is inherently a people problem. We need national-level planning to ensure that specialist engineering, trades and technical skills are available, protected and scalable. This extends beyond Defence’s direct workforce to the vast, hidden under-tier of small and medium enterprises that comprise Australia’s true industrial ecosystem. 

Legislative and administrative readiness. We need legal and administrative infrastructure that is ready to rapidly coordinate civil resources. This means tested plans, delegated authorities and a clear understanding across the government of how to manage priorities between essential civilian needs and urgent military requirements. 

Industrial mobilisation is the ultimate test of national resilience. It is a recognition that the sinews of a nation’s economy are, in extremis, the lifeline of its armed forces. We cannot afford to wait for the conflict to begin before we start priming the pump. Strategic foresight, deliberate industrial planning and genuine public-private partnerships are non-negotiable prerequisites for security in the 21st century. 

This article was published by The Strategist.