Many people rejected the very idea of building a modern defence technology company when I founded Anduril Industries in 2017. They thought the international rivalries and confrontations of the past had faded with the end of the Cold War and modern conflict would remain a limited affair. It was almost unfathomable in a time when a ‘rules-based order’ promised eventual prosperity for all that a major war between great powers could occur in such an interconnected global economy.

Such wishful thinking has yielded to the harsh reality of the present. A year after Moscow began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian people continue to fight bravely for survival in a war that has killed and wounded hundreds of thousands, with no end in sight. The West has flooded Ukraine with arms and equipment. And in the small Ukrainian city of Bakhmut we have witnessed savage trench warfare not seen since World War I.

Meanwhile, in the Indo-Pacific, aggressive Chinese military exercises and missile launches over Taiwan have become the ‘new normal’. North Korea recently threatened to use waters near South Korea and Japan as its ‘shooting range’. And China’s use of economic blackmail and threatening posture towards Australia and other neighbours have heightened fears in the region of a future conflict.

This dangerous world is why Anduril exists: because the West must have critical tools to preserve our way of life, uphold the values of free and fair societies and deter powerful adversaries from dominating weaker nations.

You can’t credibly deter war without superior technology. If the Ukrainians had an arsenal of technologically sophisticated weaponry from the start, if they were a prickly porcupine that nobody wanted to cross, then this conflict likely never would have started.

America’s tech industry has catapulted forward, while our defence industrial base, which once produced technology beyond what we imagined in science fiction, has largely stopped innovating. There’s more artificial intelligence in a Tesla electric car than in any US military vehicle and better computer vision in your Snapchat app than in any system the Department of Defense owns.

Tomorrow’s weapons—autonomous systems, cyber weapons and defences, networked systems and more—are enabled through software. And the talented software engineers who can build faster than our adversaries reside in the commercial tech sector, not in defence industry.

China and Russia are determinedly seeking asymmetric advantage using technologies developed for the consumer and business sectors and applying them to their military projects. They’ve been spending their resources on, for example, cheap autonomous systems that are uniquely suited to go up against exquisite weapons that cost an enormous amount of money per shot.

Anduril recognises the important role Australia plays in the Indo-Pacific. As an island continent with a relatively small population, Australia faces unique security challenges—primarily its need to defend a vast coastline and maritime border from adversaries. Fortunately, advanced technologies like autonomous systems, sensor fusion, computer vision and artificial intelligence can provide Australian soldiers, sailors and aviators with asymmetric capabilities to help them do more with less.

As retired Australian Army major general Mick Ryan says, such technologies ‘are too cheap, too available and too capable for military and other national security institutions to ignore’. And this new tech will increasingly take on the dull, dirty and dangerous jobs, so that warfighters can operate safely out of harm’s way, understand their surroundings and focus on making critical decisions.

In December, my company partnered with the Royal Australian Navy and the Defence Science and Technology Group to build extra-large autonomous underwater vehicles to survey and protect Australia’s vast coastline. These Ghost Shark submarines are designed to scout and patrol waterways without risking human life. Australia will be able to see what’s hiding beneath the waves along its massive maritime border, autonomously monitoring the seas while making it harder for the submarines of any adversary to operate there.

This is the kind of smart tech that can deter war. But such capabilities are only developed by investing in military technology to remain competitive, provide an effective deterrent and prevent conflict.

Unfortunately, there’s no secret government silo of advanced technology to save us if war breaks out. If the allied democracies are to prevail, we will need action at scale. The only way we’re going to end up with a silo of advanced technologies is if we build it—and not just Anduril. We need dozens of new innovative companies and tens of thousands of new engineers who uphold the values of a free and fair society to modernise our military.

Fortunately, there’s still time, and so many in Australia, the US and elsewhere are committed to securing a future that is safe, prosperous and free. That future will be assured so long as our military personnel are provided with advanced technology today to face the challenges of tomorrow’s battlefield.

Fixing issues at the expense of positioning Australia for the future is likely to be a theme of the 2022–23 federal budget to be released later this month. It’s a case of focusing on the pressures of today often at the expense of longer term opportunities. The growing list of government reviews, including the royal commission into the ‘Robodebt’ scheme, the defence strategic review and the review of Covid-19 vaccine deals, reinforces a fixation with looking at the past through the rear-view mirror to find answers for the future.

It is an understatement to say that we are living in a complex world. The interconnectedness of everything we do and the speed at which we’re operating add to the complexity. The Covid pandemic and the floods across the nation as we face another La Niña year are reminders that stressing a complex system at one point can create unexpected and unintended consequences in other areas—economic, social and defence.

The national security significance of northern Australia has been well argued for in the context of its contribution to food supply, agriculture and sovereign capability. Not so for national prosperity. The north has infrastructure that’s not fit for purpose and its fragile communities will continue to be challenged by the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events.

The information age ensures that an overabundance of data is available on any specific problem or mission. However, future-focused strategy requires more than mitigating failure or risk and could even require accepting inevitability.

Recently, I was reminded of a 2008 ASPI paper, A new agenda for national security, in which national security expert Carl Ungerer posited that national policy has two key elements: national prosperity, encompassing social policy, economic policy and environmental or climate change policy; and national security, encompassing homeland security and strategic policy.

Ungerer breaks the elements down further and positions economic security, energy security, health security and natural disasters under social, economic and climate policy. Unsurprisingly ‘homeland security’ includes transnational crime, counterterrorism and intelligence and security as well as emergency response and border security. Under strategic policy, he placed defence and international policy, including diplomacy, multilateral institutions and development assistance.

The last and key aspect of Ungerer’s model was that when these elements combine, they enable the achievement of national resilience.

In many ways, this framing isn’t surprising on the national security side, but to someone who has spent a considerable part of their career in ‘other government’, the national prosperity components seem light-on.

Nevertheless, Ungerer’s central thinking endures with this statement:

Above all, national security policy must be tethered to core national interests—in our case the security and economic prosperity of the Australian people. Our security interests are closely tied to both regional and global developments. And anything that narrows our strategic choices or limits our policy options is a potential threat to national security.

More than 14 years later, it’s interesting to reflect on Ungerer’s framing, particularly in the light of the changes Australia has seen in recent years. There’s a growing understanding of the interconnectedness between strategic policy and wider government, community and industry challenges and opportunities.

After all, it’s one of the reasons ASPI established the Northern Australia Strategic Policy Centre, and why governments and industry in the north are acutely aware of and focused on our uncertain strategic environment.

The reality is that most of us are comfortable handling one priority at a time, prioritising, reprioritising and deprioritising as we go. It’s a process of simplifying that often means that the most difficult, most challenging and most distant problems don’t get addressed—at least not until they become urgent. Regional communities in Australia are increasingly aware of the implications of avoidance and neglect.

Despite the reinvigorated interest in systems thinking, the public sector’s focus continues to be solving yesterday’s problem and preferably via a mechanism that involves lots of emphasis on discussion often at the expense of resolution. One could argue that all the key departments and interests are in the room, so the outcome will be achieved. But even then, it becomes a process of oversimplification.

The 2020 defence strategic update articulated the objective of growing the Australian Defence Force’s ‘self-reliance for delivering deterrent effects’, which in ‘some areas’ requires ‘sovereign industrial capability’. Defence also committed to ‘work closely with industry and other government agencies’, including through alignment with broader government initiatives.

Further amplification of this theme is in the terms of reference for the defence strategic review. One task required of the independent leads is to ‘outline the future strategic challenges facing Australia, which may require an Australian Defence Force operational response’. However, the review shouldn’t focus solely on the ADF and the capability it needs. This aspect will perhaps be overshadowed by another review task: to ‘identify and prioritise the estate, infrastructure, disposition, logistics and security investments required to provide Australia with the Defence force posture required by 2032–33’.

To deliver on the terms of reference, the independent leads must adopt a broad, whole-of-nation view. All levels of government, industry and the community have a role and a unique contribution to make. To optimise the value of these contributions, Defence should articulate the strategic effect required, which in turn will create a more collaborative operating environment and foster engagement around which wider government, industry and communities can rally.

This is a whole-of-nation challenge—one in which those in northern Australia have an intensely personal interest. We must remind ourselves of Ungerer’s framing and recognise that national resilience is achieved through equal focus on national prosperity and national security. I’m not advocating an expansive national security strategy, but it’s time we thought about national security beyond defence capability and crisis response.

In this uncertain strategic environment, we can no longer afford to neglect the social, economic and infrastructure needs of northern communities; their prosperity is as important to national resilience and security as investment in defence.

Australia is to refashion defence policy with a force posture review, not a white paper.

The policy the Labor Party took to the federal election on 21 May was for a ‘defence force posture review’. To deliver as promised, Labor is emphasising the value of a sharp focus on posture over the complexities and choices of a white paper.

In the words of Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles, ‘[W]e’re not interested in doing a white paper and devoting all the resources that that would imply.’ He says he’s ordered a start on the new posture review to inform his decisions on ‘a generational reinvestment in the size, capability and structure of the Australian Defence Force’.

Labor’s policy offers this explanation for the review:

Australia cannot rely on a timely warning ahead of a conflict occurring, because of growing regional military capabilities and the speed at which they can be deployed, and therefore Australia cannot assume it can gradually adjust military capability and preparedness in response to emerging challenges.

The need for speed means the review is set to be done with Defence, but not by Defence.

Labor’s policy states that the review will have ‘independent chair(s)’, experts drawn from inside and outside Defence, a call for outside views and ‘an internal panel to collect information required from the Department of Defence’.

The flexibility offered by such a review is that a government can take or leave the ideas offered. By contrast, a white paper is big ‘P’ policy, affirming government commitment and intent.

As Peter Jennings observes, white papers seldom ‘propose genuinely new and different military capabilities. Typically, white papers validate the status quo, replacing like with like.’

A review conducted at arm’s length from Defence, Jennings hopes, could offer ‘fresh consideration of policy settings that have accreted like stalactites and take just about as long to grow into reality’.

Labor claims there’ve been only two fully fledged force posture reviews (both under Labor governments)—the seminal 1986 report delivered by Paul Dibb in 1986, and the 2012 review by two former defence secretaries, Alan Hawke and Ric Smith. Labor says it’ll go back ‘to audit the 2012 review for unimplemented recommendations’. Disregard the politics to add a third document to that list: the 2015 first principles review, Creating one Defence, conducted for a Coalition government.

Labor has the freedom to set the hounds running (and cut to the finish with any decisions) because it accepts the strategic settings and geopolitical understandings bequeathed by the Coalition government.

The new government’s review promise took as its starting point the 2020 defence strategic update outlining ‘the rapidly changing strategic circumstances in our region’.  As Marles bluntly put it while in India last week, ‘China is our biggest security anxiety’, and Australia must ensure it has the defence capability it needs ‘to defend itself in the toughest strategic environment we’ve encountered in over 70 years’.

A repeated talking point from new ministers is that they’ll provide continuity on foreign policy and defence issues while offering ‘a change of tone’. On the strategic settings, though, the tone rhymes.

Marles promises that his review will look with ‘fresh eyes’ at the $270 billion to be spent on new defence capability.

And that brings us to the question that will define the conduct and impact of the review: how bold will Marles and Labor want to be on defence?

In his March national security speech, Labor leader Anthony Albanese promised to deliver ‘a frank assessment of our capabilities and pipeline on arrival in government’, pointing to ‘30 major defence projects that are running a total of 79 years late’.

Albanese said Labor wanted a quick increase in Australia’s strike capabilities by considering Tomahawk missiles for the Collins-class submarines, a review of the Hunter-class frigate project, and upgraded weapons on the Arafura-class offshore patrol vessels or through additional Hobart-class air warfare destroyers.

Beyond getting kit quickly, the boldness question becomes truly cutting when a government says no to or even cancels a capability.

Discarding a defence capability is so hard it almost never happens in Australia. The most notable example was one of the first decisions of Bob Hawke’s Labor government on taking office in 1983, announcing that Australia would not buy a replacement aircraft carrier for HMAS Melbourne.

Much as Albanese might want to emulate Hawke, don’t expect any such Melbourne moments.

Instead, one of the significant capability announcements, in coming months, should be the winner of the multibillion-dollar contract for up to 450 infantry fighting vehicles to replace the army’s 60-year-old M113 armoured personnel carriers.

The army is assuring the new government—and Australia—that the destruction of hundreds of Russian tanks in Ukraine doesn’t signal the end of the need for armoured vehicles in warfare.

The choice is between the Redback, designed by South Korea’s Hanwha, to be built at Geelong in Victoria, and the Lynx KF41, designed by Germany’s Rheinmetall, to be built at Ipswich in Queensland.

The previous government was expected to announce the decision before the election as another demonstration of its strong defence credentials. The failure to announce a choice was more pre-election caution about offending voters in Ipswich or Geelong than any doubts about armour. And, of course, never discount the speed with which decision recommendations emerge from the Defence labyrinth.

An Australian-built infantry fighting vehicle sits close to Labor’s heart, and its commitment to self-reliant sovereign capability via a defence industry development strategy.

If Defence’s recommendation is for the Lynx (built in Ipswich), that will be a character-bracing moment for Marles; his parliamentary seat is Geelong.

Getting the defence posture right always demands hard choices.

Just for a change, there’s a bit of heat around discussions of the future of armour and surface ships. I thought ASPI analyst William Leben’s recent Strategist piece was a good one in its attempt to find some common ground.

I think a lot of the argument centres on a semantic misunderstanding of what it is for something to be ‘obsolete’. I’ve been guilty of using the word speciously myself, most recently on the subject of surface combatants, when what I really meant was ‘significantly reduced utility’. Strictly speaking, no capability is ever entirely useless. There are probably still occasional circumstances in which the crossbow, horse cavalry charge or 16-inch guns of a battleship would still be effective weapons. But those instances are so rare that no one sees the benefit of including them in modern force structures.

Militaries are by their nature conservative organisations that tend to hold onto capabilities that have provided sterling service, often for longer than they really should. (See the first chapter of this book for a good explanation of the phenomenon.) So, weapons systems usually don’t disappear overnight; instead, it happens gradually over time. There were several horse cavalry charges during World War II (and many of them were successful), and the last two Iowa-class battleships (the Missouri and the Wisconsin) took part in shore bombardments during the 1991 Gulf War. There are just more reliable or cost-effective ways to produce those effects these days.

As I pointed out in my piece on surface combatants, there are things they can do that are currently hard to replicate by other means. And the persistent requests from Ukraine for armoured vehicles, despite their own success in countering Russian armour to date—Russian vehicle losses so far in this war have likely exceeded those of the Red Army during the first phase of the gigantic Battle of Kursk in 1943—show that we haven’t yet reached the point where armour is ‘obsolete’ under any meaningful definition.

Supporters of the continued acquisition of armour point to poor Russian tactics and the possibility of developing counters to anti-armour systems in future evolutions. Similarly, naval aficionados point out that the Russian navy must have been asleep at the helm to lose a cruiser to a couple of subsonic missiles and a drone. In the spirit of Mark Twain, we might observe that assessments of the demise of armour and surface ships are, at least for now, an exaggeration.

But—and anyone who has read much of my stuff knew this was coming—while I accept all of those points, I think both systems are now in the decline phase of their history, and it will only get harder for them from now on. I think that can be understood by looking at some very broad historical trends.

A post of mine during the early days of The Strategist included some historical data for two important military trends. The first is the phenomenal increase in the ability of militaries to deliver lethal force swiftly and precisely. It’s hard to exaggerate how rapid that increase has been—it is well beyond exponential. The result has been a steady, though less mathematically dramatic, decline in the density of combatants on the battlefield, as militaries take a small-target approach through dispersion. Of course, there’s a tension there. Militaries wish to avoid large formations being destroyed by enemy strikes, but also need to concentrate their forces to be able to deliver decisive effects when required.

A certain amount of ‘lumpiness’ in a force structure is acceptable if it can avoid being seen and struck by an adversary for long enough to get the job done, and the ‘fog of war’ allows for that in many instances. Similarly, a lump of capability (a working definition being ‘anything worth an expensive missile’) can be relatively safe if its physical size is less than the typical aiming error of the weapon targeting it. The Ukraine war provides examples of both success and failure in avoiding successful targeting. For example, a single ship—even a stationary one—would be unlucky to be hit by a ballistic missile with a 100-metre uncertainty in its landing point. But when three ships are tied up alongside an important port facility, the odds of such a missile hitting something valuable increase, and taking the shot becomes worthwhile. That seems to have been the fate of a Russian landing ship.

Tanks and ships are inherently lumpy. Up to now they’ve managed to get by with more or less acceptable loss rates because the offensive weapons they face have generally been just a little too slow in arriving or a little too inaccurate to completely overwhelm the defences. But it’s also clear that the speed and accuracy of weapons systems are still improving, with the added complication of the ubiquity of drones of various shapes, sizes and lethality. It’s always possible to develop new defensive systems, but they tend to be more expensive than the weapons they are defending against and they drive up the unit cost of the platforms they protect without providing any additional offensive value.

All of the elements of the calculus weigh against expensive lumpiness. Like the weapons systems of the past that are now universally agreed to be obsolete, today’s major systems will one day be anachronisms. The only question is when that day will come, and I’d be betting that the 2030s will see the end of armour and warships as first-line force elements. I’m tempted to say that they will not disappear with a bang but will gradually fade away—but there will actually be quite a few bangs in the process.

This week ASPI released Agenda for change 2022: shaping a different future for our nation to promote public debate and understanding on issues of strategic importance to Australia. The key message in Agenda for change 2022 is that we need to embrace uncertainty, engage with complexity and break down the silos. Our economic prosperity, national resilience and security depend upon it.

In the lead-up to every federal election, ASPI looks at the big challenges facing Australia and what’s needed to address them. In Agenda for change 2022, the chapter by ASPI executive director Peter Jennings, titled ‘The big strategic issues in 2021 and beyond’, reflects on the ‘deep strategic change’ that has occurred in recent years and revisits his chapter from Agenda for change 2019: strategic choices for the next government.

Jennings highlights the contributing factors from Australia’s hottest and driest year on record in 2019, to the origins and arrival of Covid-19 and the ‘aggressive, hypernationalistic zero-sum-game strategy designed to promote the interests of Xi Jinping (now effectively president for life) and the Chinese Communist Party at the expense of the global strategic balance.’

The 2020 defence strategic update set the scene for the response to some of these challenges. However, 18 months on, the Defence Department is struggling to operationalise the update in a meaningful way.

This chapter looks at these and other changes in the strategic environment, noting that a turbulent three years influenced the announcement of AUKUS in September 2021. While acknowledging that strategy statements ‘carry risk for governments’ given that they constrain policy flexibility, Jennings says that AUKUS needs a strategy to ‘extract maximum value’ from the agreement. He believes the prime minister ‘should make a statement to the Australian Parliament setting out the strategic case for AUKUS and identifying the key deliverables needed at the end of the 18-month pathway to deliver nuclear-propelled submarines’. Jennings is of the view that benefit will arise from ‘lengthy debate in parliament’ and allowing ‘as many members and senators as possible’ to express their views.

Jennings says that an independent review of defence capability is needed—Paul Dibb conducted the last one in 1986. An independent review would serve to ‘rebase the capability plan against current and emerging strategic developments’ as well as guide ‘capability trade-offs’ needed to strengthen Australian Defence Force capability within the next five years. Just as important, an independent review should identify the best options for ending projects and looking for better solutions—avoiding the perennial curse for defence projects of running grossly over budget and way beyond the original (and re-baselined) timeframe.

We also need to engage more in our region and Jennings suggests we need to lift our ‘strategic and diplomatic game’ in Southeast Asia. He says that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade needs an injection of funding to deepen Australia’s regional engagement, but more critical is that DFAT needs to ‘rediscover its policy mojo’. AUKUS and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue are key enablers in developing shared approaches and for the world’s democracies to lift engagement in the region.

Increasing its profile and range of activities in Southeast Asia requires Australia to bring ‘larger numbers of students from the region to our universities’, address ‘access to Covid-19 vaccines in developing countries’ and strengthen ‘regional resilience against Chinese covert interference and grey-zone tactics designed to weaken ASEAN’.

More broadly, Jennings laments the decline of quality policymaking in the face of increasingly complex problems and fast-paced decision-making. In early 2021, I noted that evidence-based policymaking has morphed into evidence-informed policymaking, which has resulted in downplaying the significance of having a reliable evidence base.

Following the 2022 election, Jennings wants to see the government ‘recommit to orderly policymaking’, including by reinforcing cabinet decision-making processes, establishing a mechanism to fast-track defence capability decision-making, and making more use of parliament as the ‘appropriate place to announce and debate’ issues.

In his chapter, Jennings also reviews the strategic challenges highlighted in Agenda for change 2019 and presents an assessment of how his key recommendations were addressed by government. In terms of government telling its policy story, Jennings’s rating was a credit (but can do better). But winning the public debate on submarines was a fail and embracing an ‘ambitious new technology agenda for defence’ only received a provisional pass.

The government’s biggest achievement from the previous agenda, says Jennings, was in facing the threat to regional and global stability represented by China’s increasing influence in the region. Jennings awarded a distinction on that one. Given the seismic shift in defence, regional, cyber and security policy that has occurred since 2019, such a rating seems appropriate.