Tag Archive for: Reserves

Australia needs a civilian cyber reserve. State emergency services are the model

Australia should follow international examples and develop a civilian cyber reserve as part of a whole-of-society approach to national defence.

By setting up such a reserve, the federal government can overcome a shortage of expertise in cybersecurity and increase national resilience to cyber threats. It could be modelled along the lines of state emergency services.

In doing so, the government should consider the way state emergency services are formed and mobilised when needed. Legal safeguards will also be needed to protect the recruits and also organisations that would receive assistance from the reserve when subject to cyberattack.

Malicious cyber activities are a persistent threat faced by nation states globally—from cyber operations against critical infrastructure, to cyber-enabled disinformation operations seeking to undermine social cohesion.

As noted by the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Mike Burgess, the cyber threats faced by Australia include those from nation states seeking to pre-position themselves in Australia’s critical infrastructure, allowing them to carry out more disruptive and destructive attacks in the future. At the same time, a global skills shortage in the cybersecurity workforce undermines the capacity to defend against these threats.

In response to these issues, several countries are seeking to harness volunteers in cybersecurity and defence. Funded by the Department of Defence’s Strategic Policy Grants Program, we are currently carrying out research mapping out some of the key initiatives around the world.

The United States, for example, is carrying out a pilot project establishing a Civilian Cybersecurity Reserve. This was in response to recommendations made by the US National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service which in 2020 argued that a federal civilian cybersecurity reserve would allow US agencies to obtain additional cybersecurity capacity from cyber experts when needed. These recommendations were echoed in the 2020 final report of the US Cyberspace Solarium Commission which argued that a cyber reserve would play a key role in mobilising surge capacity using existing links between the private sector and the government.

The developments in the US follow similar developments elsewhere. Ukraine’s IT Army made headlines in 2022 when it called on hackers from around the world to join Ukraine’s defence against Russian aggression.

Estonia’s Cyber Defence Unit, within its Defence League, was established already in 2011 following large scale distributed denial of service attacks against Estonia a few years prior. Another example is the Cyber Peace Builders NGO which helps connect corporate volunteers with not-for-profit organisations to improve their cybersecurity.

The proposed US federal-level cyber reserve also follows from developments in several US states that already have similar structures in place. These began with the Michigan Civilian Cyber Corps, established in 2013; a growing number of states including Ohio, California and Texas have followed suit. These civilian cyber reserves engage in a variety of activities, ranging from education in schools and public organisations, cybersecurity audits, and incident response. They can provide high-level training and certifications for their members for free and organise cyber war games exercises for participants.

Often compared to volunteer firefighters or other volunteer-based emergency services, cyber reserve organisations provide an opportunity for cyber experts to give back to society and help increase cybersecurity awareness, resilience and preparedness. For example, in March 2025 the Ohio Cyber Reserve responded to a cyber incident affecting the municipal court of the city of Cleveland, and it also deployed in 2024 when the city of Cleveland was subject to a ransomware attack by Russia-affiliated actors.

Australia should follow and create a civilian cyber reserve. However, several considerations must be addressed for it to be effective. These include the appropriate structure, membership, criteria for organisations to be eligible for support, and relevant legal safeguards.

In terms of structure, it could be modelled on existing organisations such as state emergency services which operate at the state level and are designed to help communities both prepare and respond to natural disasters. Initial members could be recruited from those with a high level of cybersecurity expertise, but gradually the membership base can be built through training and upskilling of volunteers with general cybersecurity skills or other relevant subject matter knowledge.

The identification of eligible organisations should start with public organisations at the state and local levels, including schools and hospitals. Finally, appropriate legal structures will need to be explored to protect volunteers, as well as to protect the confidentiality of organisations seeking support.

Creating a civilian cyber reserve can promote a culture of cybersecurity and be an avenue through which volunteers can use their expertise to help others and give back to the community. Having a structure like this in place in peacetime also provides a potential capability that can be harnessed in times of crisis or conflict.

Reservists should be integrated with regular forces, not separate

In a military context, the word ‘reserve’ is usually understood as meaning some group on standby for use as field commanders decide. However, in today’s Australian Defence Force it now generally refers to individuals. This is part of a trend of at least 50 years in which the Defence Force Reserves as an organisation have become less important while reservists as individuals have become fundamental to the functioning of the Defence establishment.

It is in fact a trend towards what we need—towards a single, cohesive force, in which reservists are integrated, not ancillary.

The long-term decline of the navy, army and air force reserves organisations may soon culminate in their disappearance. The 2024 National Defence Strategy had a chapter on workforce but no mention of the reserves. The 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR) did recommend a strategic review of the reserves, which was again noted in the 2024 Defence Workforce Plan. This review may report by June 2025.

Regular forces are generally more effective than reservists, as full-time training enables them to reach a higher standard than part-time personnel. Intuitively, having distinctly different groups that are required to work closely only in times of crisis is inefficient and ineffective. Integration would be better.

A 1995 review of the Ready Reserve Scheme considered that if Defence had unlimited resources, ‘the strategic arguments for relying solely on regular forces would be overwhelming.’ This echoed the 1974 Millar report, which said that the principal justification for having the reserves was economic: part-time personnel were cheaper than full-time personnel.

Today, driven by a pressing need to staff the permanent force, many reservists have been integrated into the regular forces under the Total Workforce System, which aims to increase the flexibility of defence personnel. This has been made easier, because many reservists are now ex-regulars, not citizen soldiers. The DSR said that Defence adopting ‘the Total Workforce Model has significantly improved the utilisation of the reserve workforce.’

On the other hand, the DSR also calls for the reserves to ‘provide the expansion base for the ADF in times of crisis.’ Reserve forces will generally need additional training before being used for warfighting tasks. The costs of this are rarely considered, and it isn’t certain whether such ‘times of crisis’ will arise at all. Investing in the reserve forces as an expansion base is an investment in a force that may never be needed.

In the Vietnam War, the government chose conscription and training civilians from scratch rather than activating the available, but only partly trained, reserves. The army’s reserves in the 1960s were strategically irrelevant but still expensive.

The Army Reserve is the largest of the three reserve organisations. Unlike navy and air force reservists, some of the army’s are not ex-regulars. The Millar Report grumbled that the land force’s reserve force ‘for much of its history [had] around 20,000 [personnel], despite the fact that the national population nearly trebled in the past 50 years. This demonstrates a declining level of interest in such service.’ Fifty years on again, the Army Reserve is now about 15,500 and the population has more than doubled again.

Given this steady long-term decline, if the role of reserves becomes more than filling gaps in the regular workforce, their purpose may need to be narrow and specific. The DSR called for army reservists ‘to provide area security to the northern base network and other critical infrastructure.’ The 2024 Integrated Investment Program gives this idea limited support in allotting $200 million to $300 million over the next decade.

Vital area protection shaped discussions about the reserves across most of the 20th century. However, an analysis, noting the long historical antecedents, found that the role had ‘proved somewhat uninspiring’ for the reservists actually involved and that retention was a problem. Sustaining adequately sized reserve forces may be difficult without suitable motivation.

The overall ADF workforce balance between full and part-time defence personnel has steadily moved in favour of the full-time. Indeed, the new workforce plan funds integrating 1000 reservists more closely with the regulars, including through moving them to full-time service. Emphasis is generally placed on reservists as individuals and how they may be integrated within permanent units, rather than on Defence Force Reserves as formed part-time units with specific, long-term roles. They are seen as working effectively on demand, as the ADF requires. If the Australian society has adopted gig economy workforce ideas, in a broad sense so has Defence.

The DSR recommended investigating ‘innovative ways to adapt the structure, shape and role of the Reserves.’ Australia’s more-than-a-century reserve history can be usefully mined to provide different ideas and warn of likely problems. However, any innovations will need to be implemented in the contemporary geostrategic context and against a long-term trend of decline. The long history of Australia’s Defence Reserve Forces does not guarantee them a place in Australia’s future.

The solution to finding the balance between regular and reserve forces may be resolved by simply discarding the reserves while embracing and institutionalising part-time service. The gradual disappearance of Australia’s reserve forces is likely unintentional, but rather a consequence of the steady evolution of strategic thinking and policies over more than a century.

Quite likely, we need reservists but not reserve units.

ADF Reserves: understanding difference and delivering change

Australian Army Reserve soldiers from the 12th/40th Battalion, The Royal Tasmania Regiment, training in waterborne patrolling with a Zodiac from the Hobart-based Navy Reserve Diving Team 10.Last week saw National Reserve Forces day, which recognises former and current reservists and thanks their employers and families. But did anyone notice?

Over the last few months, there have been a number of policy changes affecting ADF reserves announced, including remuneration, and enhancing their ability to serve. In one media release, the Assistant Minister for Defence, Stuart Robert, stated that those changes reflect ’the fact that Reservists are becoming increasingly integrated into the total ADF workforce’.

But where’s the evidence of that integration?

Plan Beersheba proposes a more integrated force structure for Army, where the Force Generation Cycle ensures that combat brigades, specialist capabilities and part time forces consistently train together. Is that integration, or another attempt at assimilation? Read more

Reserving judgement

With another Defence white paper in the offing, opinions abound on what that document should prescribe for the ADF’s force structure. As always, the challenge is setting a structure that meets Australia’s defence needs without exceeding its budget.

Even if it’s never used, force structure has two pricey elements: personnel and their equipment. Nowadays, personnel tends to be the more expensive component in Western militaries (about 42% in Australia). With this in mind, and as Nic Stuart forecast for the last white paper, one of the options that the new document should again consider is the ADF’s mix of Regular and Reserve units. The traditional premise for this consideration is that Reserve forces are cheaper than Regular ones when they’re not being used.

In most militaries, regular–reserve mix is a fraught issue, influenced by ‘empirical’ questions of cost, quality and readiness, to say nothing of vexed aspects like professional credentialism, local interests and politics. Accurately gauging even the empirical pieces is complicated by rubbery metrics. But the last 12 years provide a powerful case study of the employment of Reserve forces in major conflicts that could be useful to the white paper deliberations. Read more

What is the strategic environment telling us about what the ADF needs to be able to do?

Afghan special police from the Provincial Response Company – Uruzgan (PRC–U) and Australian soldiers from the Special Operations Task Group continue to conduct partnered missions across southern Afghanistan as part of the transition of security responsibility from ISAF to Afghan control.

Andrew Davies has taken me to task on one part of my reply to Nic Stuart’s post on the use of reserve forces in the ADF. How do I plead? Not guilty, your Honour.

Apart from the discussion on the efficacy of Reserves, I made one simple point and I stand by that point. There is no point in coming up with single solutions such as a greater use of the Reserves, a sub or JSF or amphib-heavy force until there has been an assessment of the strategic environment. Rule No 1 for Force Structuring: It does not matter what you put in your force structure if you don’t know why you are force structuring.

An assessment of the strategic environment should and can produce an answer to the question that defence bureaucrats (in and out of uniform) have failed to address since I started looking at strategic guidance in 1976: What is it that you want the ADF to do? The consistent failure to answer this question effectively has produced decades of dysfunctional ADF force structure and inter-Service fighting. The failure by bureaucrats and politicians to link policy and strategy through some form of operational statement (ie what is it that the ADF is supposed to do) to tactics and materiel has meant that the ADF has never been able to operationally achieve the strategy (often implied) that emanates from policy. The only reason that this is not blindingly obvious is that Australia has not been tested. When the US was dominant and most world strategic problems occurred far, far away, perhaps this mattered less. Now it does matter. Read more

Reader response: Reserves, force structure and need

A commando from 2 Company, 1 Commando Regiment, looks out for enemy movement during a mission rehearsal exercise at the Cultana Range in South Australia in preparation for an upcoming deployment.

Like so many people with very little firsthand experience of creating and using defence capability at any sophisticated level, Nic Stuart has effortlessly come up with yet another answer to the financial problems of Defence—Reserve manpower.

It was only a matter of time.

Although he does not state it directly, the only fair conclusion from how Nic structured his article is that he believes that the use of reserve manpower was successful in the past, we had too much manpower in WWII, two-year national service was all that was needed in Vietnam, the only thing that we face in the future is an invasion of the continent (and there isn’t much chance of that), and in these financially tight times, greater use of Reserve manpower would enable the RAAF to buy the JSF and the RAN to buy the future submarine. There are, to risk massive understatement, some problems with this line of logic.

What produces quality Australian soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women is not whether they are full or part time, regular or reserve, it is the quality of the recruits combined with first class equipment, quality leadership and realistic training. If a Reserve serviceman or woman does a few weeks per year of training, and so likely never reaches any real level of individual or group deployable operational capability, then you get exactly what you are paying for—not much. I wonder if Nic thinks that being capable in combat is so simple that anyone can do it with just a few weeks’ training per year. Read more