Ready for action?

The ADF is at risk of being caught in a no-man’s-land, neither doing enough to deter aggression, nor being ready for a conflict today, nor investing in capability and technology in a way that will prepare us for a future one.

Australia needs to build up its mass through an increased defence and industry workforce, produce more munitions in high volume at low cost, invest in autonomous systems and reverse the strategic mistake of cutting national space capabilities. Those changes are needed for us to both continue being a genuine partner for our most important security ally, the US, while also investing in our own self-reliance.

No matter who wins the election, Australian defence policy will focus on the release of the next National Defence Strategy (NDS) and Integrated Investment Program (IIP) in 2026. Our threat perceptions will continue to be dominated by the need to deter China, given its accelerating defence capabilities and intent to project military power into Australia’s environs and willingness to challenge Australia’s security interests across the region. The strategy and the plan must be focused on how Australia can be both defence ready now and plan for an uncertain future.

The next government needs to confirm that the key focus for the ADF is deterrence and war fighting to ensure the defence of Australia and to support our key allies and partners in Indo-Pacific stability. That includes deterring while preparing for the possibility of protracted high-intensity major-power war within our region that would likely see Australia come under direct threat of attack and include war fighting in domains such as space and cyberspace.

The growing risk

With that in mind, the ADF needs to be ready to burden share with regional allies and partners to a greater degree as part of a coalition, and with the US as our vital strategic ally. The latter is particularly important, especially given the dramatic changes now occurring in the foreign policy of the US under the Trump administration. A greater focus on burden sharing can mitigate risks and ensure that the US remains committed to its critical defence and security relationships, including those with Australia, such as ANZUS and AUKUS.

But Australia faces some challenges in this regard. The opportunity cost of AUKUS, both in terms of Pillar 1 and the optimal pathway for acquiring nuclear-powered but conventionally armed submarines (SSNs), and critical technology cooperation in Pillar 2, absent a significant boost in defence spending, generates the risk of insufficient funding to sustain other critical ADF capabilities separate from AUKUS.

It could also see an inability to ensure ADF readiness for major-power war in the short term—within this decade—in favour of preparing for possible threats in the medium to long term. Without boosting defence spending significantly higher than currently planned for in the 2024 IIP and in Defence Portfolio Budget Statements, AUKUS could risk unbalancing, rather than focusing, the ADF.

The 2024 NDS notes the rapid growth of China’s military capabilities in the region:

“In line with its growing strategic and economic weight, China is improving its capabilities in all areas of warfare at a pace and scale not seen in the world for nearly a century. This is happening without transparency about its strategic purpose … (1.28)”

At the same time as it rapidly builds up its military power, China is adopting a much more provocative posture in the region, for example in the South China Sea, particularly against the Philippines, as well as unprofessional actions by the PLA against ADF deployments in international airspace and waters. China recently deployed a naval taskforce into the Tasman Sea that conducted live-fire drills without advance warning and subsequently circumnavigated Australia. That followed aggressive Chinese actions against an RAAF P-8A Poseidon over the South China Sea.

Most worryingly, the Chinese Government has declared that the unification of Taiwan with the PRC is ‘inevitable’ and refuses to rule out the use of military force to achieve it. That means there’s both the opportunity for miscalculation that leads to conflict as well as a deliberate act of aggression from Beijing.

Further afield, the ongoing rapid shifts in US policy vis-a-vis Ukraine risk seriously undermining the unity of NATO and the security of Europe, and indeed the existence of an independent Ukraine. Against that strategic backdrop, China may feel emboldened to act more aggressively towards Taiwan and in the South China Sea.

With that troubling context in mind, what should the next government do immediately after the election to ensure that the ADF is ready to meet this challenge?

Is the ADF ready?

The first challenge is workforce—notably, addressing recruitment and retention, given the small size of the ADF (as of July 2023, it had 57,346 active duty and 32,049 reserve personnel). The 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR) and the 2024 NDS and IIP both committed to increasing the workforce as a priority, but that will take some time, and the latest information suggests that efforts to boost the workforce are failing.

The workforce challenge means that Australia must constantly rely on a technological and qualitative advantage to ‘punch above its weight’. In past decades, that was relatively easy to achieve and maintain. In many key capability areas, particularly in missiles, space capability and naval and air combat capabilities, that edge has largely disappeared in the face of China’s rising military power.

Furthermore, constraints in the workforce, together with insufficient stockpiles of munitions and very limited industrial capacity, make it very difficult for the ADF to sustain high-intensity military operations over an extended period (of months or longer).

The continuing lack of sovereign munition production capacity poses a serious risk to Australia having the means to sustain high-intensity military operations and should be prioritised. The Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) Enterprise is proceeding on a ‘crawl, walk, run’ basis, which means that the ADF can’t quickly produce or replenish key weapons capabilities, especially guided weapons in the short term, in the event of a major-power conflict occurring this decade.

Even with GWEO, the ADF will have only limited access to certain types of guided weapons. For example, GWEO will assemble only limited numbers of the short-range Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) from the end of 2025, which is hardly sufficient to undertake ‘impactful projection’. Other key guided weapons systems being acquired by the ADF, including the air-launched Joint Air to Surface Missile—Extended Range, the Long-Range Antiship Missile and sea-launched Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, which do have longer range, will be acquired ‘off the shelf’ in only limited numbers.

Local production of Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile (NSM) and its air-launched version, the Joint Strike Missile (JSM), may alleviate this challenge to a limited degree, but those weapons also only have limited range. The Army eventually intends to acquire the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), which has a 500-kilometre range, with future ‘increments’ extending that out to 1,000 kilometres, and able to be launched from the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, but it remains uncertain how many of those weapons will be acquired, or when they’ll enter service.

With the immediate absence of a sovereign weapons production capability that can produce large numbers of long-range guided weapons quickly, Australia remains dependent on foreign supplies of critical military capabilities, at least for the foreseeable future. Efforts towards sovereign production of weapons won’t see real capability suitable for long-range deterrence by denial and impactful projection for at least a decade. Current planning for GWEO to produce such weapons (that is, apart from GMLRS, NSM and JSM) is vague and ill-defined.

Integrated air and missile defence (IAMD), without which our northern bases are exposed to attack, should be made a top priority. This area has been underinvested in by the current government despite advice in the 2023 DSR urging the government to fast-track the acquisition of effective IAMD capability. The 2024 NDS and IIP did announce significantly increased investment into the ADF’s northern base infrastructure to prepare it to support high-intensity military operations, which is important but less effective if the bases can’t be defended.

Australia needs to move faster on deploying the ‘effectors’ of IAMD—specifically, missile interceptor systems. The government has supported the acquisition of a Joint Air Battle Management System under Project AIR 6500, after decades of delay, but won’t decide on the interceptor missiles until the 2026 IIP, despite commercially mature and operational capabilities being available now.

The ADF also must overcome the risk posed by a boutique and exquisite force structure that leads to a brittle capability for war. The small size of the ADF is apparent not just in personnel but in platforms. Greater investment in and operational acquisition of a range of autonomous systems—in the air, on land, on the oceans and under the waves—can partly address that lack of mass, but only if such capabilities are acquired in a manner that emphasises ‘high volume, low cost’ acquisition.

In other words, autonomous systems can’t simply be acquired in the same way as expensive crewed platforms such as the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter, or the Hobart-class Air Warfare Destroyer. Autonomous systems offer a path to a larger and more powerful ADF, but only if they’re acquired in a manner that allows mass rather than simply small numbers of expensive and exquisite platforms, absent humans as crew.

Another key area of vulnerability is the ADF’s outright dependency on US military and commercial space capabilities to support a strategy of denial. Denial requires an ability for impactful projection to hold an adversary risk at long range.

Over the Horizon

Yet, the ADF can’t ‘strike deep’ if it can’t ‘see deep’, and the slow pace of development of sovereign space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and uncertainty over the future of sovereign satellite communications following the ‘redefinition’ of JP-9102 in late 2024 means that Australia continues to rely on foreign or commercially provided space support.

Concerns that Australia could be denied access to vital space support, particularly in the event of dependency on commercial systems such as Starlink, are legitimate, and the government should mitigate this risk by properly funding sovereign space capability, including for launch.

The slow and steady pace of defence capability development, as suggested in the 2024 IIP, and the lack of sufficient defence spending—with investment only reaching 2.4% of GDP by the mid-2030s—need to be reviewed in the light of elevated risk to, at the very least, address the areas of concern in this chapter. A failure to do so—a drift forward in the hope that nothing adverse happens for at least 10 years—suggests an unwillingness to close the gap between the government’s perception of risk and its willingness to address that risk.

This article was published by The Strategist.