The pandemic has many lessons for how Australia’s future economy must operate, with opportunities to build new wealth around the global supply chains that originate with us—in natural resources, energy, food, research and education, for example. But these opportunities are accompanied by some nasty risks that the pandemic has revealed with how Australia manages crises—medical and health crises, but also military ones.

And in military crises, a glaring gap we must close is in our ability to supply the Australian Defence Force with precision munitions—notably missiles. Advanced missiles give militaries the edge in combat. In small, discretionary conflicts like Australia’s deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, precision missiles fired from Australian and coalition aircraft were crucial to protecting the lives of ADF personnel, supporting ground operations and killing terrorist leaders and fighters. Without such weapons Islamic State might still control major chunks of territory in Iraq and Syria.

In an actual war, not just difficult counterterror and counterinsurgency operations, advanced missiles are essential to defeat modern military adversaries. Without them, the most capable ships and aircraft are not just defenceless, they are ‘offenceless’ as well—unable to inflict casualties on opposing forces without turning to mass attrition approaches or perhaps nuclear weapons.

But advanced missiles are in short supply, and they’ve run short even in the limited conflicts the ADF has been involved in over the past couple of decades. The ADF gets its missiles from US, European and Israeli manufacturers, at the end of long global supply chains. And, when the home nations of these manufacturers need missiles urgently themselves, their needs can get in the way of meeting ours.

That’s bad, but the situation is actually even worse. Missiles are slow to produce under current industrial structures, so orders have long lead times between placement and filling—think years, not weeks. Manufacturers can surge production for limited periods, but it’s hard for them to sustain a high tempo of production. And missiles require servicing and updating if stored, meaning they might need to be returned to the manufacturers far away.

This was all known before the pandemic, and the Australian military’s approach makes sense in peacetime, and even with missions like Syria and Iraq. But the deteriorating strategic environment in our region, combined with the heightened understanding of how vulnerable extended global supply chains are, means the current situation has become unacceptable. Military conflict beyond the scale of recent deployments is unfortunately quite credible.

Missiles are like a combination of a medical ventilator and the masks health workers need during a pandemic. They’re complex electro-mechanical devices like medical ventilators, so they can’t be made by just anyone (they’re also more complex than ventilators, with bespoke components that aren’t easily replaced by other items you have to hand).

In war, missiles are more like masks in a pandemic than like ventilators, though. You need many thousands of them and they can’t be reused. Ordering or holding a few hundred just doesn’t cut any mustard outside peacetime training routines. So, production is key.

We know with the pandemic that normal supply chains can get disrupted. The level of disruption we’ve seen so far from Covid-19 is nowhere near the level of disruption we’ll see during war.

We also know that even with the limited demands our military has made on existing missile production and ordering systems, we struggle to meet those needs.

The current approach is simply unfit if Australia gets involved in any significant military conflict.

With precision munitions production and sustainment, we must assess what our needs during conflict are likely to be and plan to meet them—instead of planning for peacetime levels of use and supply and hoping things will be all right during war.

Knowledge that our current approach is not fit for purpose requires action. Here, fortunately, things are possible that will greatly reduce our military’s vulnerability to running out of the means to fight.

Australia is fortunate in having close relationships with the countries whose companies manufacture our missiles, and in having subsidiaries of these companies operating in Australia—companies like Raytheon, Rafael, Lockheed Martin and Kongsberg. We also have a workforce that can do advanced manufacturing, with some high-profile examples on display during the pandemic as firms like Gekko systems shifted from mining tech to making medical ventilators.

We haven’t used these companies and government-to-government relationships in a creative way that would close our missile supply gap, though, and we need to do so now.

Now is the right time politically, strategically and economically.

The Australian economy is in the middle of a redesign, with the government starting to focus not just on supporting current employment, but on what will drive future employment and prosperity in the changed world of Covid-19.

The government’s future stimulus program can and should include the defence industry sector—not by spending more on the huge ship, submarine and land vehicle projects, but by investing in the focused area of missile production and sustainment facilities in Australia. This type of manufacture is the iconic high-tech, niche manufacturing area that Australians can excel at and that is feasible given our demographics and capacities.

Incentives, and even co-investment in facilities by the Commonwealth, can help create centres of missile production here which the ADF can rely upon during a conflict. This is about co-production of missiles that are already in or are entering the ADF’s inventory, done in partnership with the companies we buy them from now.

Strategically, it makes sense for other nations—notably allies and partners almost certain to be fighting with us against any common adversary—to be able to be resupplied from Australian missile production centres to supplement their own supply sources, and to add different elements to supply chains that make disruption during times of crisis harder.

Strategically and politically, getting this to happen will involve the highest levels of our political leadership engaging with their counterparts. It’s at least an issue that must be on the agenda of the next annual meeting between our defence and foreign affairs ministers, Linda Reynolds and Marise Payne, and their US counterparts, secretaries Mark Esper and Mike Pompeo.

Getting agreement to and support for high-end US missiles, like the long-range anti-ship missile made by Lockheed Martin, to be manufactured in Australia as well as the continental US through co-production will only happen if the senior leadership of our nations drive it.

Along with our military leadership, they are the ones who can see the strategic value in diversified sources of supply during conflict. We’ll need to put aside hardwired industrial protection mindsets and probably change some longstanding policies on technology release.

But to ensure our men and women who may be fighting future wars in our region have the weaponry to win, in the numbers they need when and where they need it, there’s no alternative to growing Australia’s and its allies’ missile production capabilities. Having these capabilities is also the best way to deter others from engaging in military conflict.

I noted in the previous post in this series that planned increases to the Defence Department budget are concentrated in its capital investment program, which rises to nearly 40% of the total budget. Since the capital program traditionally is the area that gets hit when Defence has to take a budget cut, that area could be a tempting target should the government need to find funds.

But there’s another potential threat to the capital program, and that’s an internal one. Since the 2016 defence white paper, the capital budget has underspent by around $4.8 billion. Meanwhile, the sustainment program has overspent by a very similar amount. There’s a lot going on behind those numbers (exchange rate adjustments, changes to accounting methods, and so on), but overall it looks like sustainment costs have increased more than expected and Defence has had to dip into capital funding to cover it.

The pressure on the capital budget could get worse as sustainment costs increase. Let’s look at Defence’s four megaprojects. (For the purposes of this exercise, I’ve normalised all costs to real 2019–20 dollars to compare apples with apples.)

The first is the Attack-class submarine. Sustaining the six Collins-class submarines over the past seven years has cost on average $615 million. There will be twice as many Attack-class boats, and they’ll be around 50% bigger. They’ll be more complex, with more subsystems and more software, and will operate more unmanned and autonomous systems. So, it’s reasonable to assume the sustainment cost for the Attack class will be at least three times more than Collins, or $2 billion. Granted, that spending’s a long way off; the first boat won’t be handed over to the navy until 2032, and the twelfth 22 years later.

The second is the Hunter-class frigate. Sustaining the eight Anzac-class frigates has cost on average $361 million over the past seven years. The nine Hunter-class frigates will be more than twice as big (around 8,000 tonnes compared to 3,600 tonnes). They’ll have more capability, like 32 vertical launch missile cells compared to the Anzacs’ eight. Doubling the Anzacs’ sustainment cost would be $700–750 million, and that’s probably understating it. Again, those costs are a fair way off, with the first Hunter expected to be operational around 2030 and the ninth somewhere in the mid-2040s.

The third megaproject is the F-35, but we’ll look more broadly at the air combat fleet. In contrast to the previous two programs, these costs are increasing right now. The air force is in the middle of a long transition from an air combat force consisting of the F/A-18A/B ‘classic’ Hornet and the F-111 to one consisting of the F-35, the F/A-18F Super Hornet and the EA-18G Growler. The total for the air combat fleet in 2007–08 was $335 million. Because the force is in transition, there isn’t a steady state to compare it to, but the cost last year was $691 million and Defence predicts $832 million this year. If we project out to the end of the transition when the classic Hornets have retired and all F-35s are in service, the number could reach $946 million, if the F-35’s hourly flying costs don’t come down. So, overall, the cost of the air combat fleet is at least doubling and coming close to tripling.

The fourth is the army’s armoured vehicle program, LAND 400. Here there’s some worrying new news. Phase 2 acquires 211 Boxer combat reconnaissance vehicles to replace the ASLAV fleet. An economic impact study commissioned by Defence was recently released in response to a freedom of information request. The study was completed in March 2018, the same month the government announced it had selected the Boxer, so we can assume it was based on tendered cost data. The study presents a $9.6 billion out-turned whole-of-life sustainment cost for the Boxer. If we convert that to a constant, or real, number, it’s around $225 million per year (or $1 million per vehicle). According to data provided by Defence to ASPI, the average sustainment cost of the ASLAV fleet over the past seven years is $43 million. So that’s a five-fold increase.

The really worrying bit is when we project that onto phase 3, which will acquire up to 450 infantry fighting vehicles to replace the army’s obsolete M-113 fleet. These tracked vehicles are likely to be even bigger than the Boxer. That suggests they’ll cost at least as much as the Boxer to operate. So, the cost for the fleet will be at least $450 million. The average annual operating cost for the M-113 over the past seven years is only $17 million.

In short, the annual sustainment cost of the armoured vehicle fleet is going from around $60 million to potentially $700 million. Granted, Defence likely hasn’t been using the M-113 much; it’s not a deployable capability so it’s probably being allowed to gracefully degrade. So $60 million might not be a complete picture. But $700 million is more than the Collins, currently Defence’s most expensive capability.

It’s not just the megaprojects and things being delivered far in the future that are showing big increases. The offshore patrol vessels will be around $200 million per year, based on information Defence provided to the Senate, compared to the Armidale-class patrol boats at around $100 million (and a doubling seems underdone to me in light of the disparity in size and capability). The army is now completely dependent on software-driven systems (for example, communications, battle management, and fire control systems) all of which will need frequent updates. And there’s new capabilities in Defence’s force structure plan that aren’t replacing any existing capabilities, so they’re entirely new costs.

Defence is making big bets on the affordability of its future force, but is it bound to lose those wagers? Not necessarily. Overall, the economy grows in real terms. Over the past two decades, GDP has grown by around 80% in real terms, with the defence budget growing by 95%. So, even if Defence’s budget stays at around 2% of GDP, its government funding too will grow in real terms.

The problem is that the cost of military equipment also grows in real terms, but generally much faster than inflation. That’s why virtually every Western military is shrinking. While Australia’s defence budget has nearly doubled over 20 years, the Australian Defence Force hasn’t come close to doubling. The number of uniformed personnel has grown by only 14%, and platform numbers have remained fairly stable (albeit with some entirely new capabilities added, like the Wedgetail early warning and control aircraft).

Therefore, the scale and duration of the impact of Covid-19 on the economy will be crucial. A short, sharp recession that’s a temporary blip on the trajectory of Australia’s GDP will make it easier for the government to honour its commitment to increased defence spending. But the affordability of the future force will still be under pressure from the spiraling cost of systems. A prolonged, grinding recession or even depression will affect both GDP and the defence budget, making it very unlikely that Defence will be able to both buy and operate the planned force, even with 2% of GDP.

In the first post in this series, I noted that, so far, the government remains committed to the 10-year defence funding line it presented in the 2016 defence white paper. That funding line is likely to grow past 2% of GDP. In this post, I’ll look at what effect a budget cut could have if that commitment wavers.

Let’s first look at the planned trajectory of the defence budget. Over the remaining six years of the white paper decade, the funding line continues the healthy growth it has shown over the past six years.

Figure 1: The defence budget, 2011–12 to 2025–26 (A$ million)

Source: Department of Defence portfolio budget statements. Real baseline is 2019–20.

But that growth is not spread evenly across the three big subcategories of the defence budget: personnel; operating and sustainment; and capital investment and acquisitions. As the government’s repeated references to its $200 billion investment in defence capability would suggest, the capital budget is by far the biggest beneficiary of the growth. Even in real terms, the acquisition budget grows substantially.

Figure 2: Defence’s capital investment budget, 2011–12 to 2025–26 (A$ million)

Sources: Department of Defence portfolio budget statements and additional estimates statements. Real baseline is 2019–20.

That sustained growth changes the balance of the department’s budget. While there’s no perfect ratio between the big three, in most defence organisations capital is generally the smallest of the three and Australia’s is usually no different. The capital budget bottomed out in 2012–13 but has grown dramatically since then. If it achieves the trajectory laid out in the white paper it will come close to 40% of the total defence budget.

Figure 3: The balance of the big three, 2011–12 to 2025–26

Sources: Department of Defence portfolio budget statements and additional estimates statements; 2016 defence white paper.

I’ve suggested previously that that distribution could be hard to achieve. In short, as you spend more on equipment you need to spend more on people and operating budgets. If we look at the path of the big three, the proportion of capital seems to have stayed fairly constant over the past five years at around 30% of the budget. There may well be a natural balance or equilibrium that is hard to break.

With the department’s funding increasing, the suggestion that it should take a budget cut as a share of the Covid-19 financial pain might appear reasonable. I’m on the record as saying now is not the time to be reducing the defence budget—the government should actually be increasing it significantly—so what follows may appear as special pleading. But it’s helpful to understand the impact of a cut before one advocates for or against it.

The defence budget is emerging from a long period in which Australia enjoyed a post–Cold War peace dividend. Defence spending went from between 2% and 3% (and in some years even more) of GDP during the Cold War to less than 2% for 25 years, under governments of both sides of politics.

That level of funding resulted in the phenomenon described as ‘Defence’s broken backbone’: decaying facilities, equipment lacking spares, insufficient funding to train, lack of war stocks of munitions, and so on. The result was that readiness fell, impacting the Australian Defence Force’s operational capability.

That became clear in 2010 when the ADF didn’t have a single amphibious ship available in cyclone season. One of the most beneficial outcomes of increased defence spending is that the department has remediated much of the broken backbone. Nevertheless, a drive around any defence base will show there are still people working in facilities dating back to the middle of last century.

It’s useful to bear in the mind the maxim that strategy is the alignment of ends, ways and means. A coherent strategy is one in which we know what we want to achieve, know how we will achieve it, and have properly resourced it. If you reduce the resources, then you must adjust your goals; otherwise, strategic incoherence results.

So where could you cut? Reducing people is difficult. Getting rid of uniformed people is bad PR. Moreover, the future force is going to need substantially more people than the ADF currently has. Unmanned and autonomous systems will likely help in the long term, but not overnight. Short-term cuts to personnel are false economies when it can take years to train them at a cost of millions of dollars. Some ranks in some trades are already critically rare commodities.

It’s hard to see Defence further reducing its civilian numbers. They’re already at the lowest level in 20 years. The cost of public servants is only a small part of the defence budget, so cuts wouldn’t help much. Plus, getting rid of public servants often shifts work to the private sector as consultants and contractors are called in.

It’s always tempting to find savings in operating budgets, and despite many years of Defence finding savings through ‘shared services’, there’s no doubt that more can be done. But there’s not too much to be found in taking the scalpel to the budget for photocopying.

The vast bulk of the operating budget is in the sustainment of Defence’s systems (around $12 billion this year). Sustainment costs are trending upwards. That’s because new systems always cost more than the ones they are replacing. Always. It’s certainly possible to reduce sustainment budgets, but if it continues for any length of time it inevitably leads to the broken backbone. And there’s already pressure on the sustainment budget, as I’ll discuss in the next part of this series.

So that leaves the capital budget, which may look a tempting target. When governments need money, they often turn to Defence’s capital budget. But Defence’s investment program always plans on spending every single dollar, so if the capital budget is reduced, Defence will have to change the plan. The usual way it does that is to delay projects. Repeatedly delaying projects creates a ‘bow wave’ effect of deferred investment. That means existing capabilities stay in service longer, and new capabilities that are needed to meeting emerging threats aren’t delivered. Eventually that results in zombie capabilities that can’t be deployed because they are effectively obsolete and present unacceptable capability risk.

So, the government could cut the defence budget, but it will affect capability. The longer the cuts last, the more enduring the effect and the harder the recovery. The government would have to restore coherence to its strategy by realigning ends, ways and means.

That doesn’t mean the current plan is perfect and can’t be improved. Indeed, Defence Minister Linda Reynolds has directed the department to review it. In a future post, I’ll look at ways Defence could deliver better value for money and get more bang for its buck, particularly considering what we’ve learned from the Covid-19 crisis.

Australia’s ‘black summer’ of bushfires and the Covid-19 pandemic caught authorities and citizens off guard, but they shouldn’t have. Experts were warning about catastrophic fires from mid-2019, while national security agencies have worried about a global pandemic for decades. In each case, the sheer scale of the crisis appears to have made it difficult to imagine and plan for ahead of time.

Scanning the horizon, what other large-scale risks does Australia face? An obvious one is a major, destructive cyberattack.

Last year, the defence force’s head of information warfare revealed that although Australia has strong cyber defences, ‘when it comes to scale, I’m a bit worried’. The bushfire and coronavirus crises have reinforced how difficult it is to manage whole-of-nation emergencies. Coordination problems between state and federal governments impede responses, our national supply chains lack resilience, physical infrastructure can be brittle, and there are subterranean fault lines in our social cohesion. A major cyberattack would expose all of these weaknesses.

A deliberate state-sponsored cyberattack would also differ in important ways. Fires and viruses don’t have geopolitical agendas or make coercive political demands. They don’t intend to hit us where we are most vulnerable, and they don’t adapt their strategy to outfox first responders. Indeed, just as Australian national security analysts will use recent crises as learning opportunities, foreign adversaries are likely also observing our strengths and weaknesses with interest.

So what can be done?

One good policy idea is to organise and train ‘cyber resilience’ volunteers. It’s not a new idea: calls for some form of cyber civil defence have been mooted in Canberra for years, including most recently by the shadow cybersecurity minister writing for this site.

Importantly, this model is nothing like the state-sponsored hackers used by other countries or groups of ‘cyber vigilantes’. Offensive cyber should be left to Australia’s capable and appropriately authorised federal agencies. Volunteers would support whole-of-nation cyber risk reduction and, if needed, response and recovery efforts.

Recent experiences with bushfires and Covid-19 help illuminate four reasons why this idea deserves serious consideration.

First, Australia doesn’t have state or local authorities with significant cyber defence capabilities. In the event of a crisis, the roles and responsibilities of the states, and how private sector talent and infrastructure could lawfully be used, remain unclear.

A volunteer organisation could help bridge that gap. Significantly, volunteers would not only be technical experts—just as not all volunteer firefighters work on the front line. Skills in business, planning, communications, trades and engineering would be essential.

Second, and most important, recent experience has shown us that crisis response and recovery need federal coordination and resourcing, but must also be responsive to local needs. Effective crisis management has a yin and yang: clear top-down direction, plus robust bottom-up capacity.

For bushfires, Australia’s decentralised approach allows communities to be active in risk reduction, and state and volunteer emergency services are experienced with the conditions in their areas. However, as climate change increases the fire season’s severity and duration, state-based services alone are no longer sufficient—a shift evidenced by the government’s unprecedented deployment of more than 6,500 defence personnel this summer.

While the gap in our 2019–20 bushfire response was a lack of early federal involvement, in a cyber emergency the weak link would be the absence of decentralised response and recovery capabilities.

Our top-down approach to cyber defence hinges on federal agencies like the Australian Signals Directorate and the Australian Cyber Security Centre. However, the systems and networks which states, local governments and businesses rely on are as varied and distinctive as conditions in different regions in a bushfire season.

Cyber volunteers could add vital on-the-ground knowledge to response efforts. Their contribution could also help authorities better prioritise federal resources. For example, Defence’s contribution to bushfire recovery assistance allowed state authorities to focus on fighting fires in critically affected areas. In the event of a destructive cyberattack, the inverse could happen: volunteers could help communities and small businesses patch systems or temporarily restore local infrastructure, while federal authorities engaged in the broader cyber fight.

Third, Covid-19 has emphasised the importance of ensuring that government advice and expert information cut through a sea of global misinformation. In fire season, volunteer services play a key role in informing the public via town hall meetings, door-knocking local residents and social media updates.

In a cyber crisis, volunteers could support federal messages by supplying trusted, relevant information to their communities. They could also be a significant conduit for information at all times. Like local fire services do with fire awareness, local cyber volunteers could build cyber literacy within communities and schools, and amplify the government’s cyber safety campaigns.

Fourth, Australians share in a proud volunteer tradition. More than 500,000 of us regularly contribute to non-government emergency organisations. A failure to embrace this volunteer spirit would be a wasted opportunity. Indeed, in a disaster, it’s likely that spontaneous volunteers would look for ways to pitch in. Now is the best time to determine how to harness this goodwill; resolve issues of command and control, quality assurance and training; and draw legal boundaries.

Establishing a cyber volunteer capability would send a powerful signal to all Australians about the need to understand the cyber risks we face and prepare for their consequences so we’re not caught off guard by another foreseeable crisis.

There’s a constant in Australian defence: not enough people. In peacetime, the defence organisation’s difficulties with recruitment are an ongoing saga, occasionally surfacing in headlines like ‘Sailor shortage strands Australian warship HMAS Perth in dry dock for two years’. With less drama, ASPI’s Marcus Hellyer revealed real problems reaching workforce objectives; since 2016, the number of Australian Defence Force personnel has risen by only 600 against a target of 1,730.

In wartime, it’s even worse. In both world wars, Australia’s defence workforce reached capacity. At the end of the day, Australia has a small population, yet it has big ambitions and wants to punch above its weight. Constraints from a workforce of limited size are inevitable.

It may get worse. Australia is a small country living in, as Coral Bell termed it, a neighbourhood of giants. Unexpected events can make it smaller, as happened with the pandemic and the government’s call to temporary visa holders to leave. Hundreds of thousands who were in the workforce at the start of 2020 have left and it’s been suggested that about 600,000 will be gone by year’s end.

An former immigration official recently said, ‘We could be on the verge of the biggest percentage and absolute decline in our population since 1788’. It may take years to get back to the population size Australia had four months ago. All of this will accelerate the demographic ageing of Australia’s overall workforce. The pool of younger people the ADF can recruit from will become even smaller.

These developments will not help Defence with its workforce issues, in peace or war. A smaller Australian workforce affects all sectors. None will be immune.

One way to do more with fewer people is to automate, and today that means digital transformation. High-tech systems are now embedded in Australia’s major port facilities, supermarket chains, mail distribution centres, construction industry services and even our homes. A recent study of the mining industry predicts that the application of digital technology over the next decade will occur in three stages.

Mining companies’ use of automation today involves individual, non-interoperable, semi-autonomous vehicles. By 2025, mines will feature smart sensors, autonomous vehicles, limited self-learning systems and some pieces of equipment that will operate together. From 2030, autonomous machines will work in mines with other such machines to complete tasks.

Open-source platforms will integrate readily with similar equipment, allowing machine-to-machine communications and real-time data exchange so they self-learn and can make decisions. Mining companies are doing this with large productivity gains. If they can do so, why can’t Defence?

Mines are fixed sites, but Defence has many bases that offer similar opportunities. The most obvious are airbases.

My recent paper published by the Air Power Development Centre, Surfing the digital wave: engineers, logisticians and the future automated airbase, goes into this possibility in detail. The range of commercial technologies that airbases may employ includes artificial intelligence, digital twins, big data, cloud computing, the internet of things, autonomous operations and robotics, 3D printing and human augmentation. Digitally transformed airbases could generate more aircraft sorties, faster, with considerably fewer people than now.

Robot turns of serviceable aircraft, including refuelling and weapons loading, could be possible. Predictive maintenance using artificial intelligence would make unscheduled maintenance rare, or at least uncommon. Real-time stock tracking would ease logistics, while 3D printing means airbases might resupply themselves with some items.

Airbases would appear uninhabited, with personnel at central control centres managing engineering and logistics tasks both there and at remote airbases. Bases might even generate their own power to become semi-self-sufficient.

This wouldn’t be just for southern main bases. Automation as a concept is equally applicable to Australia’s northern bare bases. Fewer people would be needed to activate them if the robots were already there, just waiting to be switched on. Offshore airbases may need air-transportable automation to go ‘live’ but, technically, that seems doable.

Notions of generating more airpower using fewer people draw inspiration from the Israeli Air Force’s first day of the Six-Day War. The IAF had only about 200 combat aircraft but flew 1,000 sorties. The crucial step was to emphasise very rapid aircraft turnarounds. Generating more sorties gave a virtual, if not literal, increase in air combat fleet size. Automated airbases could bring this step-up to Australian airpower.

If mines, other industry sectors and, potentially, airbases can be digitally transformed, that suggests that many other ADF fixed bases could be as well. Airbases could lead the way.

Keeping up with the rest of Australian society is not necessarily a good argument for the ADF embracing digital disruption. However, unless it does, by 2030 its fixed bases may be lonely outposts of 20th-century technology in a 21st-century world.

The capabilities of the digitally transformed national support base would then need to be dumbed down when engaged on ADF bases. If such incompatibilities arise, the ADF won’t get the full benefits from the fourth industrial revolution. Technological stagnation would have a price.

Events over the past few months make digital transformation even more important. A post-pandemic Australia with a smaller national workforce would increase the pressure on the ADF to embrace automation at its airbases. The possibility that the post-Covid-19 era will leave us with fewer people makes airbase digital transformation essential.