The Need for a Kriegsbild for the Role of Army and Army Reserves in Major War
For the first time in many decades, the defence of the Australian continent is at the core of Australian defence policy. What structure and purpose flow from this for the role of the land force in general, and of the Army Reserve in particular? Understanding the role of the 2nd (Australian) Division (2 Div)[1] (and possibly a re-raised 3rd (Australian) Division) today requires consideration of three related but quite different questions: What is the role of land power in great power conflict facing Australia? What role within that is suited to Reserve formations? And how do armed forces think about future conflict in a way that can help develop coherent answers to these questions?
This article argues that the latter question is crucial for Army today. In a period of rapid reorganisation and change, there is an ever-present danger of latching onto specific ideas about capability, concepts or organisational structures on the basis of decontextualised historical analogies or nascent technological development. Rather than engaging with the changing character of war or implications of geography in abstract, general terms, or with specific tactical or operational concepts and challenges in isolation from their political context, Army must develop a coherent image of future war—or Kriegsbild—that captures the implications for land power of future war in the specific technological, geographic, and geostrategic and political context of Australia today.
Current policy prioritises ADF operations in and from Australia’s north and its northern approaches, where the 1st (Australian) Division (1 Div) would contribute to denial and deterrence through littoral operations. But Australia’s strategic centre of gravity in war against great powers was and remains its economic, logistic and political ability to remain in the fight against an adversary that has the ability and motivation to directly attack its main centres of population and industry. From a historically informed Kriegsbild of the defence of Australia in major war, the article develops implications for coastal and territorial defence that point to the centrality of the Army Reserve, the strategic role of 2 Div and arguments for a possible re-raised 3rd Division.
Regular and Reserve Forces and the Impact of Changing Policy Concepts
Defence planning needs to link the structure and posture of a country’s armed forces with the threats that a nation seeks to be able to meet with armed force.[2] For the regular land forces, different frameworks bring changes in the balance between the combat arms branches, in the geographic scope of future operations (with resulting implications for strategic mobility and the expected climate, geography and human terrain for operations), and—especially if conscription can swell the ranks—overall size. Current changes to 1 Div to focus it on littoral operations in Australia’s approaches are but the latest of such changes, which include the ‘core force’ of the 1970s and 1980s; the post-1987 Army structured for low-level conflict in the north, which culminated in the ‘Army in the 21st Century’ and ‘Restructuring the Army’ transformation of the late 1990s;[3] and the ‘Plan Beersheba’ structure that supported continuous and concurrent global operations of limited scale.
But beneath these fluctuations there is also a considerable permanency on which the regular Army can form a more enduring identity and purpose.[4] Its members and units can expect to deploy and operate together. Regardless of the threat environment, the regular Army remains the nation’s custodian of professional mastery of arms in the land domain, and thus has an incentive—one might say a duty—to remain concurrent with the changing technological character of war on land. Whatever its role in the overall defence strategy, the reason for its existence ultimately lies in its character as a force-in-being able to seek out to capture or destroy the enemy, to hold and to take terrain in major battles.
In contrast, the role and identity of the reserve component of Army is much less fixed, and impacts of changes in the strategic policy framework on it are even more profound.[5] Indeed, one can argue that while the purpose of the regular Army is to provide a capacity for combined arms manoeuvre in (relatively) short-warning conflict, serving as an enduring anchor, it is the changes in the role and structure of the reserve component that provide the necessary flexibility for land forces as a whole to adapt to changes in the strategic context. Hence, historically reserve forces have been skeleton units for eventual mobilisation (as during the ‘core force era’), personnel pools for the round-out of regular units with individual personnel (especially in the 1990s and beyond), or formed units akin to those in the regular force (at lower readiness) to as a second echelon (in the 1987 Defence of Australia (DoA) framework). Some have or had unique and enduring operational responsibilities in their own right, such as the Force Surveillance Unites, that complement but are significantly different from those of the regulars, but require similar readiness timescales to those of the regular force. But despite this variability, the role of reserves has often received much less attention than that of the regular force. Hamish Mundell uses the term ‘first battle bias’:
The natural tendency of institutions [is] to prepare for the most immediate, visible challenge. Forces that must demonstrate readiness are under pressure to prioritise capabilities that are rapidly deployable, easily exercised and politically expedient. This creates an incentive to invest in exquisite platforms and headline capabilities; and a corresponding tendency to neglect less demonstrable forms of resilience such as reserve forces, deep stockpiles and industrial mobilisation.[6]
Army and the Defence of the Australian Continent
When examining the strategic role of 2 Div and the role of Army Reserve in general, it is thus particularly important to examine the broader strategic context in which we conceive of having to defend Australia. In the era of Imperial Defence, local dominion defence was part of a broader strategic framework that had as its core the ability of the Royal Navy and the Commonwealth collectively to deploy and concentrate forces across the globe. The main implication at the time was that the threat would be (amphibious or air) raids rather than invasion, leading to an Army organisation in Australia that emphasised coastal and territorial defence of main population centres. In the era of forward defence, the Citizen Military Forces (CMF) withered as attention shifted to ‘forward defence’ in South-East Asia.[7] When Australia grappled with the question of how to prepare for its defence when there was no obvious threat to the continent after the Vietnam War, it first tried to prepare for future conflict through the ‘core force’ concept. Army adopted a light-medium-heavy brigade structure in its regular Army to maintain professional skills, but structured for its ability to expand to a total of five divisions for counter-invasion operations.[8] After the 1986 Dibb Review, the answer then changed to a focus on ‘low’ and ‘escalated low’ level conflict in the north, loosely modelled on Confrontation with Indonesia.[9] This new approach led to the 1st Brigade moving to Darwin and the development of the Bushmaster for mobile operations in the north. In the era of the ‘balanced force’ of the early 21st century, any practical requirement for DoA then seemed to reduce to supporting civil power in domestic counterterrorism, border protection (including through Army’s Regional Force Surveillance Units) and disaster relief.
That era has now also ended. The 2024 National Defence Strategy (NDS) endorsed the recommendation of the 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR) for the ADF to become a ‘focused force’ and called for ‘[a]n Army optimised for littoral manoeuvre with a long-range land and maritime strike capability’.[10] The brigades of 1 Div are thus being reorganised and co-located with new amphibious vessels in Australia’s north. The DSR called for Army Reserve brigades to ‘provide area security to the northern base network and other critical infrastructure, as well as providing an expansion base and follow-on forces’, and for ‘select capabilities’ within them to be ‘postured in Northern Australia’.[11] Commander of 2 Div, Major General David Thomae, commented in 2023 that his division thus ‘must generate, deploy, and then sustain security and response task units to protect key areas in Australia’s north’, and ‘be able to do so quickly or at least with minimal warning time’.[12]
Debating the Role of Land Forces
But littoral operations in, from and beyond Australia’s north are only a very partial answer to the question of what is the role of land power in the defence of Australia as a whole. The notion of littoral operations in the north says little about the wider conflict within which they would need to be conducted—and hence also little about the operational or political motivations of an adversary to attack Australia itself. As Mark O’Neill has pointed out, the notion of ‘littoral operations’ is rather unmoored from any clear notions of what these operations are to achieve, and in what circumstances.[13]
In the context of the adoption of ‘adaptive campaigning’ in the ADF, Chris Smith bemoaned in 2018 that Army tended to spend a lot more time on purported solutions than on analysis of the problem it had to solve. According to Smith, Army had an institutional bias towards ‘intentional’ concepts that focus on developing and refining a prescribed approach or solution, resulting in concepts that were an awkward mix of unduly specific and definite statements with banal generalities.[14] He contrasts this with the way the German Reichswehr developed the concepts for what was later termed Blitzkrieg in the 1920s and 1930s as an example of exploratory development, noting: ‘Rather than begin with a clear end or goal in mind, one begins with a question expecting that in the attempt to answer it, something valuable will emerge’.[15] This then raises the issue of how we should frame the questions about future conflict to which Army’s preparations can be developed as the solution, in a way that avoids the pitfalls of both ‘intentional concepts’ and ‘first battle bias’ (and a general lack of interest in supposedly undemanding home defence).
In Australia, geography[16] has long animated debates about the meaning of DoA[17] and its links with Australian strategic culture,[18] and it echoes in notions of the ‘land–sea–air gap’ and ‘land bridge’ to Australia’s north—notions that are also conveniently apolitical in a country where any naming of potential adversaries remains politically fraught.[19] If not in geographical terms, the ‘changing character of war’[20] can be dissected as to its various facets from the influence of urbanisation,[21] to drone technologies, to its impact on the profession of arms, while equally staying on safely apolitical grounds.[22] But examinations of geography and character of war, or the ‘intentional concept’ of littoral warfare, are ultimately not very fruitful avenues for thinking about future conflict if they are not grounded in an examination of the actual wars the nation is preparing to fight. Colin Gray highlights that in the context of the ‘vital distinction drawn by Clausewitz between war’s “grammar” and its policy logic’, it is important to consider both in context:
Future warfare, viewed as grammar, requires us to probe the probable and possible developments in military science concerning how war could be waged. From the perspective of policy logic, we need to explore … motivations to fight.[23]
Army is far more comfortable situating its role in discussions of the former than in the latter. Compartmentalisation focuses on practical problems and minimises straying onto sensitive grounds. The NDS itself emphasises ‘littoral manoeuvre’ and denial while avoiding a discussion of the kind of conflict in which these would need to be applied. It is tempting to argue that the question of what future conflicts to prepare for is one for government, informed by intelligence and political assessments of the international environment, with armed forces simply being shaped in response to strategic guidance.
But strategic guidance tends to be indeterminate in terms of many practical implications, and does not absolve Army of its responsibility as the nation’s custodian of land power to question, develop, test—and contest—the role of land power in meeting the nation’s strategic challenges. How can Army not just engage with geography, character of war or specific ‘intentional concepts’ but also explicitly integrate what Gray termed ‘the motivations to fight’, by Australia and its future adversary, into the thinking about the role of Army in the defence of the continent?
Kriegsbild: Imagining Future War in a Defined Setting
Chris Smith is far from the only observer to highlight the German development of Blitzkrieg as an example of military innovation and adaptation. But rather than (just) the result of a specific procedural approach, military innovation and adaptation in the German Army in the 1920s was grounded in a way of war that was shaped by the enduring challenge of how to wage war if surrounded by generally larger adversaries in a continental, logistically well-developed theatre. Geography and changes in the character of war were crucial for how Germany approached this problem—but not in isolation from each other, or from the political context and objectives in and for which Germany expected to go to war.[24]
Since at least the early 20th century, and to this day, Germans thus discuss future war through a term that has no direct English equivalent, which captures the totality of the geographic, technological, societal and political aspects of the future war that the nation is preparing for. The term Kriegsbild, literally ‘image of war’,[25] emphasises the unity of future war from the individual-tactical to the political-strategic and societal level.[26] It is grounded in Clausewitz’s dictum that war can take different forms,[27] and focusing on the Kriegsbild reflects his comment:
The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish … the kind of war on which they are embarking.[28]
A Kriegsbild thus never exists in the abstract but always refers to the image of the war that is underlying defence preparations in a specific country at a specific time.
In German (and Austrian) writing, examining the underlying Kriegsbild is thus used as a way to examine how different countries structure their forces for war,[29] as well as for practical questions such as the qualities and competencies required by military leadership and officer corps.[30] It rose to particular prominence in the Cold War as the question of how to prepare for a major land war on a nuclear battlefield was a pressing and daunting question with profound implications for technology, operational concepts and doctrine, defence strategy and society, as well as even the individual soldier’s motivation to fight.[31] Today, Germany’s 2026 equivalent to the NDS, which explicitly places Germany as a geographic and strategic linchpin for collective defence of Europe against Russia, also contains a chapter entitled ‘Kriegsbild’ that examines implications of technology as well as adversary strategy in such a conflict—noting for example that ‘Our adversary will deliberately undermine the distinctions between homeland and battlefield, civil and military, internal and external security, war and peace, and combatant and noncombatant’—and highlights the need for national resilience ‘in view of Russian interference’.[32]
Even if the term Kriegsbild itself is rather Teutonic, developing a coherent image of war that synthesises geographic, political and technological considerations into an overall image of war suitable to guide defence preparations is not uniquely German.[33] Of particular note is the development and evolution of the US War Plan Orange for war with Japan in the interwar years. Taking the guise of an operational plan, it correctly predicted the overall phasing of the war in the Pacific based on the consideration of possible causes of war in their geographic context, and led to the development of key capabilities including amphibious doctrine, long-range submarines and patrol aircraft.[34]
Rather than approaching future war through decontextualised discussion of geography, character of war or intentional concepts, if we are to examine what the defence of Australia means for the ADF and Army we must thus ask: what is the ‘image of war’ or Kriegsbild that we have in mind as the war in which Australia needs defending? Since 2020, Australian defence policy has squarely focused on the risks from great power competition and conflict. But there are significant differences between competition and limited or major war.[35] The 2023 DSR observed that it was important to:
assess different potential levels of conflict, as the core strategic risks in each are different. This is critical to ensure Defence priorities are developed on the basis of the levels of conflict that are credible now and for the foreseeable future, and the time available to develop military capability to respond.[36]
But despite the above recommendation, levels of conflict have not been taken up in the public version of the 2024 or 2026 NDS. Hence, it is thus not surprising that the 2024 Strategic Review of the Australian Defence Force Reserves primarily advanced workforce issues rather than the strategic role of the reserves in general, and 2 Div in particular. To borrow Clausewitz’s dictum, the Australian government has yet to make ‘the first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment … to establish … the kind of war on which they are embarking’. But that does not mean that the concept of a Kriegsbild is not useful for understanding different levels of conflict in which Australia itself will be under direct threat.
The Kriegsbild of Low-Level (or ‘Grey-Zone’) Conflict
Historically, the 1987 turn to the north during the DoA era occurred on the basis that Australia was preparing for ‘low-level’ or ‘escalated low-level’ conflict, with a hypothetical regional adversary that had strong parallels with Sukarno’s Indonesia during Confrontation.[37] The fictitious Kamarians that were the training adversaries for generations of the Australian Army reflected Indonesia’s tactics during Confrontation[38] and caused endless frustration among Army members of the period who found themselves on exercises guarding water tanks and other infrastructure against possible sabotage. In terms of technology, Australia only contemplated regional adversaries that lacked long-range force projection capabilities beyond the north; and sought to maximise its ‘capability’ edge from access to advanced technology—‘asymmetry’ in today’s parlance. In theory, even then, Australia’s strike capabilities through F-111 and submarines provided it military options other than protracted defensive operations in the Top End. But in practice, political-diplomatic considerations by both sides in what would today be called ‘grey-zone’ or ‘hybrid’ conflict would have placed significant limits on such escalation.
While this Kriegsbild arose from hypothetical conflict with Indonesia, its core tenets also remain valid for grey-zone conflict with a great power. In conflict where competition escalates to covert and overt political-military pressure, political constraints on escalation remain paramount for both sides: for Australia, as it would seek to avoid escalation against a great power; for China, because its strategy of grey-zone coercion seeks to avoid open use of armed force that would trigger a wider international reaction. The 2020 Defence Strategic Update, for example, expressly specified that the ADF should operate to ‘prevent … coercive or grey-zone activities from escalating to conventional conflict’.[39]
As in the ‘low-level’ conflict of old, Australia’s strategic centre of gravity would be the ability to keep domestic, economic-political and international diplomatic costs of managing a conflict at tolerable levels.[40] The strategic role of the ADF, including Army, would be to reassure the public through presence and demonstrated ability to react to provocations, work with international partners to demonstrate that Australia was not isolated, and maintain civilian life and enable continued economic activity in the country if we were harassed by adversary air and naval forces. The ability of 1 Div to maintain persistent presence for collective deterrence in the archipelago to Australia’s north and to provide military and political support to regional partners through forward presence[41] would be an important element of this, as would be the ability of 2 Div to secure rear areas and military bases, maintain situational awareness and project anti-access capabilities from within Australia’s north. All of this is very much consistent with the overall policy direction of the 2024 and 2026 NDSs, with their emphasis on littoral operations, counter-coercion through denial, and collective deterrence—although the 2023 DSR explicitly required the new ‘focused force’ to leave the tenets of ‘low-level conflict’ behind.
A Historically Informed Kriegsbild of the Defence of Australia in Major War
There is, however, also a second, coherent Kriegsbild of a conflict in which the Australian continent comes under attack, which leads to notably different priorities and roles for land forces—and it is the kind of conflict that Australia actually fought in 1914 and 1939–1945. In major war with a great power, restraints on escalation, if they exist at all, are mostly limited to fears of retaliation in kind, rather than stemming from political-diplomatic considerations. Victory rests not on exploiting political, diplomatic and legal restraints and conventions below the threshold of open war, but on the physical disruption and destruction of the enemy’s armed forces, and the economic and political exhaustion of its society. Against a great power and in major war, Australia’s strategic centre of gravity is the societal will, economic strength and military capacity required to stay in the fight, despite direct and indirect attacks on Australia’s centres of population and industry.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Army posture for the defence of the continent was thus very different from that which emerged in the 1980s, and focused on the defence of major population centres in the east, south and south-west. Regular personnel manned coastal defence batteries at all of Australia’s major port cities, and manoeuvre units—which, given fiscal constraints, were largely skeleton units of the part-time militia of the day—were aligned to repel raids against main centres of population and industry.[42] As spending increased in the late 1930s, priorities were again placed on coastal defences, and on increasing the ability to defend the industrial centres of Sydney and Newcastle in particular.[43] After 1939, making up for perennial underfunding of the militia organisation had to compete with the concurrent raising of the Second Australian Imperial Force. But Army did create regional defence commands and assign substantive forces to local defence tasks in all major population centres at the outset of war in Europe, with the Eastern District (Newcastle and Sydney) as the ‘centre of gravity for home defence during this period’.[44]
This does not mean, of course, that there would not be fighting in the north. In 1914, an Australian expeditionary force evicted the German presence in New Guinea. In 1942–1944, US and Australian forces turned back the Japanese advance through the same islands, and Darwin and other ports and airfields were repeatedly bombed. But in the end the German bases were a problem for the same reason for which the Japanese sought to push into the South-West Pacific: to interfere with Australia’s logistic and economic links to its allies, to disrupt Australian and allied mobilisation, and ultimately to be able to deploy force against Australia’s main centres of industry and population to end Australia’s participation in the war by force. Given the technology available at the time, access to bases in Australia’s northern approaches would have been necessary for direct Japanese attacks on Australia’s main centres of population and industry to become economically and politically crippling.
But the mantra of the post-Vietnam era that a threat to the continent must come ‘from or through’ the archipelago was already not true in either of the world wars. Japan mounted strikes across vast geographic distance against major basing areas to destroy Allied naval forces and disrupt and delay their ability to mount a counteroffensive. This includes the major carrier raid against Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in 1941, and the raid against British bases on Ceylon in April 1942—a raid that could as easily have been directed against Australia’s main bases at Fremantle and Perth. Submarines ranged all around the Australian coastline,[45] laid mines, sank ships (including inside Sydney Harbour), and in mid-1942 shelled Newcastle[46] (as well as Ellwood in California).[47] In both world wars, German ‘auxiliary cruisers’—converted civilian vessels with concealed armaments—disrupted maritime communications. Given technology at the time, their ability to attack land targets was limited, but KMS Emden landed forces to destroy the cable station at Cocos Islands in 1914.
In the end, the attempt by Axis powers to interrupt the British Empire’s mobilisation had only limited success in both world wars, and the Axis powers’ attempts to quickly overwhelm Western democracies before they were ready for major war failed in 1940–1941. But in the two world wars, direct and indirect targeting of the adversaries’ homelands to undermine their industrial economy, food production and national will were key elements, including the Allied blockade of Germany in World War I, unrestricted submarine warfare by Germany in both wars (and by the US against Japan), and strategic bombing from Germany’s Zeppelin and Gotha raids in World War I, and the mass destruction wrought by conventional (and, in the end, nuclear) strategic bombing in World War II. The priority placed on the defence of Australian centres of population and industry in the interwar years thus reflected enduring strategic incentives and dynamics in major war, even if the combination of remote geography and limitations on technology meant that Australia (like Canada and the continental United States) was far less directly exposed to attacks on its homeland than most other countries.
The Need for Persistent Coastal and Air Defence
The strategic dynamics that have shaped interwar defence preparations and the pattern of conflict in both world wars are thus substantially different from those which have shaped common understandings of DoA since 1986. What technological and strategic considerations would need to be taken into account in developing these historically based patterns into a coherent Kriegsbild for the defence of Australia in major war today? What does this mean for what will be required of Australian land forces, and the role of the reserves in particular?
A first point relates to the overall pattern and phasing of the conflict. The basic pattern of war in the Pacific that was correctly predicted by War Plan Orange consisted of a rapid, surprise attack to destroy adversary forces in the Western Pacific, so as to maximise the window of opportunity for Japan before the US and Commonwealth could recover and project substantial combat power across the wide distances of the theatre; this was followed by a phase to halt the Japanese advance, and then slowly roll it back and attrit Japan’s forces (and economy) in a long war.[48] This phasing was rooted in geography, the relative disposition of forces, and the (correct) assumption that major war would be initiated by Japan and at a time of its choosing. All of these factors apply in equal measure to China today, leading to predictions of very similar phasing for a major US–China war.[49] It is thus useful to think about future major war in terms of an initial attack with limited warning that aims to destroy and disrupt military forces across the Pacific, if not the globe, followed by consolidation and a likely protracted war thereafter.[50]
Targets in Australia whose destruction would be feasible and that would materially affect the near-term battle in the Western Pacific at the outset of such a war would include submarines and major surface combatants, especially in ports; major aviation fuel stocks; aircraft that would enable long-range operations from and beyond the continent (especially the RAAF’s KC-30 tanker, E-7 Wedgetail AWACS, P-8 anti-submarine, MQ-4 Triton surveillance, MC-55 Peregrine electronic warfare and C-17 transport planes), and some communications and intelligence facilities. As in World War II, Australia’s role would increase in importance over time as US forces flowed from North America to Australia’s northern bases, so general disruption of Australia’s international lines of communication by attacks on harbour and airport infrastructure—much as German raiders caused disruption in the world wars—would be militarily beneficial, if only by binding mobile air and naval forces and complicating convoy schedules and routing. Air attacks on northern air bases (and the infrastructure that supports them) may help delay the flow of US forces but, given the distance and number of munitions required to disable air bases for long periods of time, may well be of a lesser priority in the initial stage.
Australia will still benefit from geography. The cost of deploying ordnance onto the main home bases and sustainment areas of the ADF in south-east and south-west Australia is very expensive as it requires intercontinental missiles or scarce long-range delivery platforms, especially strategic bombers with air-launched ballistic missiles, or naval surface-action groups or submarines that can launch land-attack cruise missiles.[51] In the initial stage of a conflict, such launch vehicles and munitions are likely to have higher priority employment in the Western Pacific, although major naval surface vessels and submarines in port would likely be tempting targets. The circumnavigation of the continent in early 2025 by a Chinese surface-action group also demonstrates that presence of such capabilities around all of Australia is likely to become increasingly normalised.
But the advance of technology and China’s huge commercial transport and fishing fleets multiply the opportunity for such disruption, compared to the world wars. Given old Soviet programs and, at the time, Iranian and Indian experimentation with firing ballistic missiles from barges, covert shipborne attack using ballistic missiles was already part of US (and Australian) discussions of national missile defence systems in the 1990s and early 2000s.[52] Today, thousands of container vessels ply the globe’s oceans, many coming directly from overseas ports to Australian waters.[53] China is developing modern-day versions of Germany’s ‘auxiliary cruisers’—ostensibly civilian vessels which could wield containerised missile batteries, including for land attack, and which could be deployed near major international ports at the outset of a major conflict.[54] There have been numerous attempts by Chinese nationals to gain access to or fly drones over sensitive military sites in a range of countries.[55] Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web, in which it destroyed a significant number of Russian long-range bombers using covertly deployed short-range drones,[56] also demonstrates a new attack vector that could be used by such vessels if closer to shore or in harbour.[57]
A key consideration for the role of land forces in the defence of Australia arising from this is the need to provide defence against air (cruise missile) and drone attack for targets whose destruction would have a direct impact on the ability to deploy air and naval forces into the Western Pacific within the first few days and weeks of the conflict. Many, if not most, of these targets will be in southern states, especially ships and submarines in naval bases and naval repair facilities in Fremantle/Henderson, Adelaide and Sydney; RAAF Edinburgh, Richmond and Williamtown in South Australia and New South Wales; the Navy Ammunitioning Facility at Twofold Bay; and national command infrastructure in the Canberra region. A key element of the Kriegsbild of major war must thus be that the Army and the ADF have to be prepared to find themselves under direct kinetic attack right from the start of the conflict, and in the heart of the population centres in which they—and their families and other loved ones—reside. This has profound consequences for the psychological preparation and readiness for conflict, as well as for the organisation of Army and the role, composition and posture of the Reserves.
Given the importance of surface vessels as possible launch platforms for cruise missile and drone attack, anti-ship capability is an integral, left-of-launch part of air defence in the southern part of the continent. Especially in the early stages of a war, when there will be hundreds, if not more, of unvetted and uninspected but potentially hostile civilian vessels on the worlds’ oceans, protection against surprise attack will require robust enforcement of maritime quarantine zones and inspection before ships are allowed to proceed to within strike range of the coastline. While enforcement will call for strike assets, inspection will require civilian control of shipping and small boat (and possibly helicopter-borne) operations. RAN reserves once did provide port force protection and civilian control of shipping, and operated coastal and auxiliary craft in past wars, but they are not currently structured, resourced and trained to so today.[58] While such operations may also draw on civilian assets, the regional brigades of 2 Div would probably have important supporting roles to play, as would deployable radars of the kind Army is, in small numbers, acquiring to support long-range fires.[59]
As the initiative at the strategic and tactical levels in this stage would lie with the enemy, coastal air and anti-ship defence of fixed installations calls for exactly the characteristics that Army itself has identified as its main contributions to the NDS: presence (to provide reassurance to the population), persistence and value.[60] If anyone argued in the 1920s or 1930s that Army coastal defence batteries would not be required since the RAN could park a battleship off every port, they were rightly not heard. And yet, given the still rather small number of both NASAMS and HIMARS systems and associated radars in Army and their concentration with 10th Brigade, a lot of this defensive burden today would fall on more expensive, more vulnerable and less persistent RAAF and RAN assets.
Besides inadequate numbers, we thus need to question the concentration of the Army’s air and coastal defence assets with 10th Brigade. Operators of the air defence and anti-ship capabilities for Australia’s main population centres need to be familiar with the local conditions and be able to operate in an urban environment, including civilian air and naval traffic and a dense electromagnetic spectrum. They do not need to be trained and equipped for strategic mobility, but they will require significant (organic) close-range drone defence capabilities against pre-positioned threats from within the large urban areas within which they will operate.
Given that the initiative lies with the enemy, these radar, air defence, anti-ship and counterdrone capabilities need to be in place before the outset of hostilities, raising the key question of when this deployment should occur, its political significance, and possible hesitation to take this step in a crisis. The threat and cost may not justify permanent deployment of such defences, as Japan practises with a permanent installation of a Patriot system on the grounds of its Ministry of Defence in Tokyo. But in addition to the operational benefit of training as one fights, regular exercising of these systems in major population centres can normalise their deployment politically and for the local population and make it less escalatory to activate them in a crisis. Serious consideration thus needs to be given to transfer of radar, air and anti-ship defence assets to regionally aligned units in the reserves, where they could be operated by personnel drawn from the local area.[61] This would leave 10th Brigade free to focus on supporting littoral manoeuvre forces, and allow the differences between expeditionary and stationary operations of these systems to be reflected in different tables of organisation and training.
The Societal and Protracted Nature of Major War
After the adversary’s initial campaign in the Western Pacific culminates, a major war is then likely to enter a protracted phase wherein both sides seek to rebuild forces, undermine each other’s industrial ability to do so, and seek victory through attrition and exhaustion. The ability to maintain military operations in the north will be increasingly taxing as attrition of forces and infrastructure takes its toll. In the Top End, 1 Div, as well as RAAF and allied forces, will depend on rear-area security and logistics support that will have to surge through mobilisation of 2 Div. Given the small local population in the north, these forces will continue to have to be raised and deployed from the southern population centres, and be able to operate in austere environments. The increasing need to disperse air assets, in particular, for survivability will only raise the need for such support across large areas. Hence, there will continue to be a need for the ability to mobilise forces within the Army Reserve who can deploy and operate across the large distances of the continent and the austere environments of a logistically denied north.
As the war progresses, conventional munitions will run low and long-range attack capabilities will be attrited on both sides. Unfortunately, this does not mean that the threat to and challenge of operating in the north will decline. Exactly as conventional operations become more challenging, there is a real possibility of escalation to limited nuclear use.[62] Loss of nuclear escalation control in a widely dispersed maritime theatre like the Indo-Pacific would probably be a lesser risk than it was in the concentrated, land-based theatre of Cold War Europe. US and Australian forces operating out of remote bases in northern Australia would in that case be particularly attractive targets: they are not located in US territory; nor would attacks in the Top End cause large-scale civilian collateral damage; and they are sufficiently remote to make it plausible that they could have remained relatively unscathed by intense conventional fighting up to that point. Today, the Australian Army retains some limited decontamination capability within 7th Brigade.[63] But there is little doubt that ability to recover and reconstitute operations on a nuclear battlefield will require the raising of far more substantial chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive (CBRNE) capabilities than exist today. For 1 Div, this will mean increasing organic capabilities in units that are likely to be operating dispersed in littoral operations. In contrast, 2 Div would be a suitable formation to develop more substantial, dedicated capabilities to support post-attack reconstitution for the joint force across the north.
The exhaustion phase of the conflict will, however, also place particular challenges in Australia’s core centres of population and industry. In this phase, the number of relevant targets will significantly expand and may even include purely symbolic ones whose destruction may aim at demonstrating impunity, undermining national will and dividing Australia from its allies via a separate peace: the logic of coercive strategic bombing has a very mixed historical record,[64] but that does not mean that countries have stopped trying. Widespread disruption could be caused by non-kinetic means in the cyber and space domains. If an adversary saw a political opportunity to undermine Australia’s will to stay in the fight, they might well surge significant forces, such as nuclear submarines armed with long-range strike missiles, for a strike campaign that would aim to achieve politically significant destruction. ‘Will Australians really have the stomach to stay in a war after the Opera House or Sydney Harbour Bridge lie in ruins?’, the adversary may ask themselves. If not prepared, Australia runs the risk of finding out.
What seems clear is that the need for air (and to a lesser extent naval) defence of major population centres will persist throughout the conflict. In addition to air and coastal defence, the ability to provide widespread critical infrastructure protection against sabotage and special forces (and now also drone) attacks, and to deal with large-scale disruption of basic services, will also be critical in protracted conflict. While the general need for widespread deployments is in little doubt, determining the specific objects requiring protection, tasks to be undertaken, and specific basic services that will break down, requires not only separate analysis but also acceptance of a significant amount of residual uncertainty.
The global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted Australia’s vulnerabilities arising from supply chain disruptions, but these experiences would pale in comparison to the consequence of total cessation of trade with China. Disruption of cyber and space domains could bring daily life to a halt: the financial system heavily depends on GPS timing signals for electronic transactions, for example,[65] and simply maintaining the physical distribution of food and other essential items to the population could become a major challenge if such systems break down. In part, specific priorities will also depend on the enemy’s strategy. For example, the naval blockades of World War I and World War II, and US targeting of fertiliser factories in its plans for a long war with the Soviet Union,[66] all demonstrate that maintaining the ability to grow and distribute food for urban societies is a vulnerability that adversaries can and do target in protracted major war. Japan and South Korea depend on imports for more than 50 per cent of their food supply,[67] and it is not inconceivable that, in a long war, at some stage Army might find itself protecting critical elements of the agriculture sector such as seed and fertiliser production.[68] What is in little doubt is that the ability of the Australian Commonwealth (and states) as a whole to mobilise, deploy and sustain personnel to protect essential infrastructure and maintain daily life will far outstrip the capabilities currently existing in Australia’s Army Reserve.
Territorial Defence Before and During Conflict
The need for increased territorial defence capabilities will not arise only in later stages of a major war. Real and imagined sabotage will be a real challenge through damage to critical infrastructure as well as to social cohesion even in a pre-conflict time of major tensions. In fact, it is already a well-documented feature of modern state-on-state conflict that is enabled by new technologies. Russia today is conducting an extensive campaign of sabotage using criminals for hire recruited in Europe via the internet,[69] and Iran used the same approach to sponsor terrorist attacks in Australia in 2025.[70] In Europe, suspected Russian drones have been sighted over a range of sensitive installations, leading to significant public concern.[71] Ostensibly civilian merchant vessels in international waters or exercising their right of passage seem to be a major factor in these campaigns.[72] Mass internment of enemy nationals, as happened in both world wars, seems almost inconceivable today—certainly short of open war. But this only increases the importance of maintaining a dispersed and visible presence to deal with actual and perceived threats of sabotage.
Hence, even in a situation where Australia is ‘only’ subject to a concerted grey-zone campaign of political-military pressure, there is a high likelihood that this will generate a requirement for dispersed force and asset protection, and visible presence not least for reassurance of the Australian population. 2 Div is creating the ability to generate ‘security and response’ task units within its brigades, but these would be ‘force generated from within all units within a brigade’,[73] and thus hollow out other units required to support operations in the north. In practice, this means that if 2 Div were also activated for its other tasks, most of the fixed asset protection in Australia’s main population centres today would still be left to police forces with little surge capacity, or to civilian contractors. While ostensibly a civilian law-enforcement issue during a grey-zone conflict, the potential scale of these threats, the military need to be able to control force protection capabilities to conduct operations, and the different legal basis and practical approach to the use of force by law enforcement and armed forces in wartime mean that—as throughout history—territorial defence has to be a military function, not purely a civilian one.
In the past, Australia had a residual capacity to mobilise personnel for such roles in its militia and later CMF forces.[74] European countries that are now rebuilding capability for major war are also once more raising territorial defence forces of significant size. France, for example, announced in 2026 that it will create a new 3rd Division consisting largely of reservists for territorial defence tasks. This builds on a significant expansion of its army reserves through new entrants, which is already underway, with an average age of 38 years (as opposed to 32 years for the regular Army).[75] It is also introducing a voluntary 10-month national service scheme for personnel who would only serve within France itself.[76] Germany also established a Heimatschutzdivision (homeland defence division) in 2025, which is to grow to a ‘high five digit’ number of personnel and will mostly draw on voluntary national service and direct recruitment of reservists who want to serve to protect their local area.[77]
In contrast, the Australian assumption seems to be that, if required, there would be time to generate such forces through recall of inactive reserves and new recruitment—even assuming that the political decision to undertake such a momentous step in a crisis would be taken in a timely manner. This assumption seems to have little basis in light of the Kriegsbild for either grey-zone or major war laid out herein. Hence, serious consideration needs to be given to a significant expansion of the reserves to create new territorial defence units. Insofar as their core task would be closely related to aid to the civil power in peacetime and crisis, these units should be held at relatively high readiness for that role, but the training, physical standards and equipment of such forces does not need to reflect the different role of the infantry manoeuvre units in the current formations of 2 Div. Overseas examples such as France and Germany suggest that dedicated units which are (only) trained and equipped for local defence tasks would provide a distinct and meaningful motivation for service, including for those willing to serve a gap year in the ADF.
Conclusion
The question of what the defence of Australia entails for Army is something of a paradox. On the one hand, generations of officers have dissected, critiqued and at times lambasted the historical concept and policy of DoA in countless discussions and staff course papers. On the other hand, in political debate as well as in defence policy discourse, the term has become increasingly unmoored from the specific questions of against whom, why, and how Australia would have to fight in its own defence, and what this war might entail for the ADF and the country.
Understanding the role of land forces in the defence of Australia requires an image of war—a Kriegsbild—that places geography and technology into the political and strategic concept of a future conflict and can guide understanding of the implications of future conflict from the Chief of Army down to the individual enlisted soldier. If Army is to prepare for the defence of Australia, it must develop an image of the war it will have fight to do so, including the political constraints and motivations of Australia and the adversary in that war; keep debating and developing that image over time; and place the role of regular and reserve forces within it. Dispersed and amphibious ‘littoral operations’ will be an important part of this, not least for collective deterrence and defence as part of the alliance and coalition in which Australia would fight. But they are a sensible answer if the question is ‘What kind of (supporting) operations should 1 Div be able to conduct beyond the continent?’—not if the question is about the role of land forces in the defence of Australia overall.
The considerations in this article are only a starting point for such a debate, and should be further tested and contested. But they already raise significant questions about the alignment of current preparations with likely demands. For operations in the north, considering the role of 2 Div as a rear-area support force that protects the bases from which the joint force can project into the region to Australia’s north is appropriate, although the relatively low capabilities in CBRNE point to some challenging questions about the preparedness for escalation. But the strategic centre of gravity in a major conflict with a great power is the military and political wherewithal to stay in the fight, even as the adversary can project force against Australia’s main population centres. Operations in the north can mitigate that ability to some extent but not remove it, and the land force must carry primary responsibility for the defence of Australia’s main centres of population and industry and key military facilities in the south of the continent against direct and indirect attack.
Two tasks are inherent in this. The first is persistent coastal and air defence, including radars for surveillance. There seems little reason why these could not be provided by reserve units, which would enable 10th Brigade to focus on support to the manoeuvre forces of 1 Div in austere regions in the north, including in littoral operations. Training and tables of organisation for both should reflect their stationary versus expeditionary wartime roles. Reserve air and coastal defence units need to be familiar with the specific electromagnetic, geographic and human urban context in which they would operate, and need to guard against sabotage, including covert drone attack. Their wartime deployment in the heart of some of Australia’s largest cities needs to be normalised through exercises and reduce the political significance of increased readiness in crisis. As Hamish Mundell put it, ultimately ‘it is irresponsible to conceal the prospect of war from a population you will call on for second and third echelon reinforcements’.[78]
The second task is the provision of significant numbers of personnel for territorial defence that need to be able to mount static defence of critical infrastructure and provide support to civil authorities. What they do not need to be able to do is operate as manoeuvre forces in austere environments. International comparisons suggest that they would probably be required in divisional size, but also that a distinct unit identity and mission of defending their local (state) communities could well be a profile that is able to attract new recruits or gap-year personnel who may be deterred by the implied need to deploy in the infantry units of the current 2 Div. Decades of base ‘rationalisation’ have made raising such units increasingly challenging, but the stationary role and light equipment need of such units should make it more feasible to base them on an equally light geographic footprint, which might for example make use of existing infrastructure such as larger council depots.
In combination, the operating context and required capabilities for the defence of major population centres are quite different from 2 Div’s continuing role in reinforcing the north. Both are concurrent needs. Hence, for cultural as much as organisational reasons, the re-raising of a 3rd (Australian) Division focused on non-deployable, territorial defence units should be given serious consideration. For this new division, Garden Island rather than Shoalwater Bay will be a representative training environment.
Light infantry in Australian urban areas, air defence and anti-ship missiles on Sydney heads, and physical destruction from cover and overt, kinetic and non-kinetic attack in the heart of Australia’s cities—the Kriegsbild that needs to guide Army and the role of Army reserves in the defence of the continent is very different from that of the 1987 White Paper that remains so influential today. Reflecting a realistic Kriegsbild of major war will thus have profound organisational as well as psychological consequences for all of Army—as well as ultimately the Australian population, who will inevitably be able to observe these changes. Army does have historical precedents for coastal defence and territorial roles that have, for many decades, seemed outdated and irrelevant—but so after all, we thought, was the possibility of major war. This has now changed, and Army will have to change with it.
Endnotes
[1] 2 Div is a formation for the ‘raise, train and sustain’ function that reports to Army Headquarters. Its operational form when activated is Joint Task Force 629, reporting to Joint Operations Command. Likewise, its regional brigades become joint task groups on operations. For simplicity’s sake, this article will refer to ‘2 Div’ throughout in both contexts.
[2] Stephan Frühling, Defence Planning and Uncertainty: Preparing for the Next Asia-Pacific War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).
[3] Renée Kidson, ‘Army in the 21st Century and Restructuring the Army: A Retrospective Appraisal of Australian Military Change Management in the 1990s’, Masters thesis, Australian National University, 2016, at: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/117069.
[4] Or ‘Theory of the Army’.
[5] For a discussion of different approaches to mobilisation in Australian policy in the DoA era, see Stephan Frühling, Graeme Dunk and Richard Brabin-Smith, ‘The Concept of Mobilisation and Australian Defence Policy Since Vietnam: Lessons and Cautions for Army in the Post-DSR World’, Australian Army Journal 20, no. 3 (2024): 215–244.
[6] Hamish Mundell, ‘The Long War: Fighting Beyond the First Battle’, Royal United Services Institute (website), 20 October 2025, at: www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/long-war-fighting-beyond-first-battle.
[7] Dayton McCarthy, The Once and Future Army: A History of the Citizen Military Forces 1947–74 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
[8] David Connery (ed.), The Battles Before: Case Studies of Australian Army Leadership After the Vietnam War, Australian Military History Series no. 3 (Canberra: Army History Unit, 2016), pp. 1–25.
[9] For the difference between planning and force structuring approaches of the ‘core force’ and Dibb Review, see Frühling, Defence Planning and Uncertainty.
[10] Department of Defence, National Defence Strategy 2024 (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2024), p. 40.
[11] Department of Defence, Defence Strategic Review 2023 (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2023), p. 58.
[12] Robert Dougherty, ‘2nd Australian Division Transitions to Security and Response Role’, Defence Connect, 16 October 2023, at: www.defenceconnect.com.au/land/12974-2nd-australian-division-to-transition-to-security-and-response-from-2025.
[13] Mark O’Neill, In Denial: The ADF and Littoral Manoeuvre, Australian Army Occasional Paper No. 26 (Canberra: Australian Army Research Centre, 2025).
[14] Chris Smith, ‘On Future Thinking and Innovation: How Military Concept Writing Can Unwittingly Suppress Innovation’, Australian Army Journal 14, no. 1 (2018): 121–140.
[15] Ibid., p. 133.
[16] Andrew Carr, ‘What Is Australia’s Strategic Metageography? Island, Continent or Archipelago?’, Australian Journal of International Affairs 80, no. 2 (2026): 226–245.
[17] See, for example, Michael Evans, The Tyranny of Dissonance: Australia’s Strategic Culture and Way of War 1901–2005, Study Paper No. 306 (Canberra: Land Warfare Studies Centre, 2005).
[18] See, for example, David J Kilcullen, ‘Australian Statecraft: The Challenge of Aligning Policy with Strategic Culture’, Security Challenges 3, no. 4 (2007): 45–65.
[19] Richard Dunley, ‘Australian Defence and the Nebulous “Archipelago”’, The Interpreter, 19 March 2025, at: www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/australian-defence-nebulous-archipelago.
[20] See for example the 2024 essay competition of the Army’s The Cove site on ‘The Changing Character of War’, at: https://cove.army.gov.au/article/cove-competition-2024-changing-character-war.
[21] Major General Chris Field, ‘Adapting to the Changing Character of War in the Indo-Pacific Region: Three Australian Army Innovations for Mass Urbanisation in the Littoral’, The Cove, 29 November 2024, at: https://cove.army.gov.au/article/adapting-changing-character-war-indo-pacific-region-three-australian-army-innovations-mass-urbanisation-littoral.
[22] Chief of Army Lieutenant General Simon Stuart, ‘The Challenges to the Australian Army Profession’, speech, Australian National University National Security College, 25 November 2024, transcript at: www.army.gov.au/news-and-events/speeches-and-transcripts/2024-11-25/challenges-australian-army-profession.
[23] Colin S Gray, Another Bloody Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005), p. 39, cited in Warren Chin, War, Technology and the State (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2023), p. 88.
[24] See Robert M Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005).
[25] Words and terms shape thinking, and despite the large number of (19th century) German military concepts and terms, especially originating with Carl von Clausewitz and Hans Delbrück, that have become adopted in either German or translated form in other languages (such as Kesselschlacht, Schwerpunkt, Abnützungskrieg (war of attrition), Auftragstaktik (mission command) and Friktion), Kriegsbild remains a concept largely limited to the German-language discourse. For example, the German title of André Beaufre’s La guerre révolutionaire: les formes nouvelles de la guerre (Paris: Fayard, 1972) was Die Revolutionierung des Kriegsbildes: Neue Formen der Gewaltanwendung (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1973).
[26] For one of the few English-language discussions of the need to have a holistic ‘image of war’, see Carl H Builder, The Masks of War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 115–123.
[27] Johann Schmid, ‘Das Kriegsbild im 21. Jahrhundert und Seine Strategischen Ableitungen für Europäische Streitkräfte’, Strategie und Sicherheit 2014, no. 1 (2014): 415–427.
[28] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976 [1832]), p. 88.
[29] E.g. Schmid, ‘Das Kriegsbild im 21’, pp. 415–427; Friedrich Wiener, Die Armeen der NATO-Staaten: Organisation, Kriegsbild, Waffen und Gerät (Munich: JF Lehmann, 1968).
[30] Jörg Keller, ‘Der Militärische Führer nach dem Jahr 2000: Analyse des Einsatz-/Kriegsbildes und Ableitung von Qualifikationsanforderungen an den militärischen Führer’, Sicherheit und Frieden 17, no. 2 (1999): 77–83.
[31] See Florian Reichenberger, Der Gedachte Krieg: Vom Wandel der Kriegsbilder in der Bundeswehr (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018), pp. 33–62. Major General Wolf Graf von Baudessin, a leading figure in the early Bundeswehr, wrote several books on the question of the evolving Kriegsbild in the 1960s.
[32] Ministerium der Verteidigung, Gesamtkonzeption Militärische Verteidigung (Berlin, 2026), pp. 15–17. Quotes are from the English edition. While the German edition entitles the relevant chapter ‘Kriegsbild’, in the English version this has simply become a more general ‘Warfare’, while the French version—more poetic even than the German term—uses the title ‘Physionomie de la guerre’, or ‘Physiognomy of war’.
[33] See also Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History (London: Allen Lane, 2017).
[34] See Edward S Miller, War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897–1945 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1991).
[35] Stephan Frühling, ‘Reassessing Australia’s Defence Policy (Part 2): What Are Our Strategic Priorities?’, The Strategist, 31 January 2020, at: www.aspistrategist.org.au/reassessing-australias-defence-policy-part-2-what-are-our-strategic-priorities.
[36] Department of Defence, Defence Strategic Review 2023 (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2023), p. 50.
[37] See Paul Dibb, Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities (Canberra: Department of Defence, 1986), pp. 52–55.
[38] Jim Sinclair, ‘The Evolution of Australian Army Training Adversaries: 1948–2018’, Australian Army Journal 15, no. 1 (2019): 95–115. While the Kamarians most closely resembled Indonesia during Confrontation, Indonesia also received significant Soviet arms supplies and—as is now known—direct aid from Soviet personnel for possible operations against Dutch West Papua in 1962. See David Easter, ‘Active Soviet Military Support for Indonesia During the 1962 West New Guinea Crisis’, Cold War History 15, no. 2 (2015): 201–220.
[39] Commonwealth of Australia, Defence Strategic Update 2020 (Canberra: Department of Defence, 2020), pp. 27–29, 35.
[40] Ibid., pp. 27–29, 35.
[41] Stephan Frühling and Andrew Carr, Forward Presence for Deterrence: Implications for the Australian Army, Occasional Paper No. 15 (Canberra: Australian Army Research Centre, 2023).
[42] Jeffrey Grey, The Australian Army, Centenary History of Defence vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 83–86.
[43] Albert Palazzo, The Australian Army: A History of its Organisation 1901–2001 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 113–123.
[44] Dayton McCarthy, ‘The First Half Measures: The Australian Militia and the Fitful Path to Mobilisation, 1939–1941’, Australian Army Journal 20, no. 3 (2024):162–184, quote from p. 169.
[45] See David Stevens, A Critical Vulnerability: The Impact of the Submarine Threat on Australia’s Maritime Defence, 1915–1954, Papers in Australian Maritime Affairs No. 15 (Canberra: Sea Power Centre, 2005), especially Appendix V.
[46] ‘75-Year Anniversary of Night Newcastle Was Shelled by Japanese Submarine During WWII’, ABC News, 8 June 2017, at: www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-08/75-year-anniversary-of-night-newcastle-was-shelled-by-japanese/8575490.
[47] Vic Cox, ‘Submarine Shelling of Ellwood Oil Field in 1942’, Santa Barbara Independent, 2 October 2011, at: www.independent.com/2011/10/02/submarine-shelling-ellwood-oil-field-1942.
[48] Miller, War Plan Orange, pp. 19–38.
[49] Rowan Allport, War Plan Taiwan: Oplan 5077 and the U.S. Struggle for the Pacific (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2026), pp. 195–215.
[50] On the issue of a protracted war, see also Hal Brands, Getting Ready for a Long War with China (Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute, 2022).
[51] For a discussion of the vulnerability of Australia to strikes originating in the Chinese homeland, see Peter Dean, Protecting the Homeland: Accelerating Ground-Based Air and Missile Defence for Australia (Sydney: USSC, 2025), pp. 7–8. Of note, this is also a difference from the United States, which is within range of cruise missiles launched from Russian (and soon Chinese) long-range bombers. Hence, it maintains significant air assets to defend against this threat. As US defence planning focused again on major war with Russia or China after 2014, US homeland defence squadrons received radar and other upgrades to improve their ability in the counter–cruise missile defensive role (John A Tirpak, ‘Saving Old Fighters’, Air and Space Forces Magazine, 28 July 2017, at: www.airandspaceforces.com/article/saving-old-fighters). Analysis by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has identified an enduring need for 140 non-stealth fighters for homeland defence against cruise missiles (Mark Gunzinger, Carl Rehberg, Jacob Cohn, Timothy A Walton and Lucas Autenried, An Air Force for an Era of Great Power Competition (Washington: CSBA, 2019), pp. 126 –129).
[52] See Stephan Frühling, Ballistic Missile Defence for Australia: Policies, Requirements and Options, Canberra Paper on Strategy and Defence No. 151 (Canberra: ANU, 2003), pp. 24–25.
[53] In 2022–23, 6,103 vessels made 16,840 trips from overseas directly to Australian ports. Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts, Australian Sea Freight 2023–24 (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2025), p. iv, at: www.bitre.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/asf-2023-24.pdf.
[54] Zane Tremmel, ‘Containing the Threat of Containerized Missiles’, War on the Rocks, 6 January 2026, at: https://warontherocks.com/2026/01/containing-the-threat-of-containerized-missiles; Ethan Gossrow, ‘Container Ship Turned Missile Battery Spotted in China’, Naval News, 25 December 2025, at: www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/12/container-ship-turned-missile-battery-spotted-in-china.
[55] E.g. Gordon Lubold, Warren P Strobel and Aruna Viswanatha, ‘Chinese Gate-Crashers at U.S. Bases Spark Espionage Concerns’, Wall Street Journal, 4 September 2023, at: www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/chinese-gate-crashers-at-u-s-bases-spark-espionage-concerns-cdef8187; Manolo Serapio Jr, ‘Marcos “Very Disturbed” as More Suspected Chinese Spies Surface’, Bloomberg, 31 January 2025, at: www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-31/marcos-very-disturbed-as-more-suspected-chinese-spies-surface; Lee Hae-rin, ‘11 Chinese Spying Attempts Detected on Airbases in Past Year: NIS’, The Korea Times, 30 April 2025, at: www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/society/20250430/11-chinese-spying-attempts-detected-on-airbases-in-past-year-nis.
[56] Daniel Fiott, ‘Enemy in the Crates: The Risks of Pre-Deployed Covert Payloads for European Defence’, Brussels School of Governance: Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy, 16 June 2025, at: https://csds.vub.be/publication/enemy-in-the-crates-the-risks-of-pre-deployed-covert-payloads-for-european-defence.
[57] Pre-deployment of such systems into Australian territory cannot be excluded, but would carry risk of discovery through customs and afterwards that make this a less plausible option. China also controls vast numbers of high-sea fishing trawlers through its ‘maritime militia’ (Jason Fang, ‘These Fishermen in the South China Sea Get Paid for Their Time on Water—Not to Fish’, ABC News, 24 April 2026, at: www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-24/south-china-sea-state-funded-fishing-boat-militia/106570054; Alison O’Neil and Daniel Shats, Silent Shadows: Tracking Disguised PRC Vessels in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea (Washington: Institute for the Study of War, 2026).) These vessels could be used for sea mining and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in areas with no overt People’s Liberation Army Navy presence. Precedents for such covert capabilities include the commerce raiders of both world wars, and Libya in 1984 also probably used a civilian freighter to deploy mines in the Red Sea that damaged several vessels (See Central Intelligence Agency, ‘Mining of the Red Sea’, 28 August 1984, at: www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85T00287R001301990001-0.pdf). Clearing Australia’s maritime approaches from such vessels would be another high-priority task in the initial stages of a conflict, although one that would fall more to RAN and RAF as well as the riverine and littoral capabilities in 1 Div.
[58] Jennifer Parker, ‘Reinvigorating Australia’s Naval Reserve’, The Interpreter, 3 February 2026, at: www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/reinvigorating-australia-s-naval-reserve.
[59] Richard Marles, ‘Investing in Australian-Made Radars to Support Army’s Long-Range Fires Capability’, media release, 12 February 2025, at: www.minister.defence.gov.au/media-releases/2025-02-12/investing-australian-made-radars-support-armys-long-range-fires-capability.
[60] Australian Army, Australian Army Contribution to the National Defence Strategy 2024 (Canberra: Australian Government, 2024), pp. 21–22.
[61] The US Army National Guard, for example, also operates Patriot units using part-time personnel.
[62] Andrew Metrick, Philip Sheers and Stacie Pettyjohn, Over the Brink: Escalation Management in a Protracted War (Washington: CNAS, 2024).
[63] Robert Dougherty, ‘ADF Decontaminates Heavy Vehicles During Hazards Testing’, Defence Connect, 22 June 2023, at: www.defenceconnect.com.au/land/12204-adf-decontaminate-heavy-vehicles-during-hazards-testing.
[64] Robert Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (New York: Cornell University Press, 1996).
[65] Dan Glass, ‘What Happens If GPS Fails?’, The Atlantic, 13 June 2016, at: www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/what-happens-if-gps-fails/486824.
[66] Scott D Sagan, Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 44–47.
[67] See summary of FAO data at: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/net-food-trade-as-a-share-of-domestic-supply.
[68] That Australia is itself heavily dependent for many agricultural inputs just reinforces this point.
[69] Piotr Arak, ‘Russia’s Shadow War: How the Kremlin Uses Sabotage to Wear Down Europe’, Atlantic Council (website), 20 November 2025, at: www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/russias-shadow-war-how-the-kremlin-uses-sabotage-to-wear-down-europe.
[70] Kirsty Needham, ‘Iran Link to Australian Synagogue Attack Uncovered via Funding Trail, Spy Agency Says’, Reuters, 27 August 2025, at: www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/iran-link-australian-synagogue-attack-uncovered-via-funding-trail-spy-agency-2025-08-27.
[71] Luke Cooper, ‘Shadow Drone War Against European NATO Countries Blamed by Many on Russia’, ABC News, 15 October 2025, at: www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-15/russias-shadow-drone-war-against-europe-nato-explained/105867182; Daniel Salisbury, ‘Drones Targeting European Nuclear Weapons Infrastructure’, IISSS, 12 December 2025, at: https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/online-analysis/2025/12/drones-targeting-european-nuclear-weapons-infrastructure.
[72] Johanna Urbancik, ‘Russian Spy Drones Over Germany Turn Into an Even Greater Threat’, EuroNews, 10 September 2025, at: www.euronews.com/2025/09/10/russian-spy-drones-over-germany-turn-into-an-even-greater-threat.
[73] Major General Matt Burr, ‘Maintaining Momentum: The 2nd (Australian) Division’s Response to the National Defence Strategy’, speech, Royal United Services Institute of New South Wales, 31 March 2026.
[74] See McCarthy, The Once and Future Army; and McCarthy, ‘The First Half Measures’, as well as other articles in the issue of the Army Journal in which this article appears.
[75] Nathan Gain, ‘L’armée de terre va se doter d’une troisième division’, Forces Operations Blog, 18 April 2026, at: www.forcesoperations.com/larmee-de-terre-va-se-doter-dune-troisieme-division.
[76] ‘France to Reintroduce Voluntary Military Service Amid Growing Threat of War with Russia’, ABC News, 28 November 2025, at: www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-28/france-to-restore-voluntary-military-service/106076506.
[77] See ‘Bundeswehr Plant Heimatschutzregiment im Großraum Berlin’, RBB24, 18 January 2025, at: www.rbb24.de/politik/beitrag/2025/01/berlin-brandenburg-bundeswehr-heimatschutz-division.html.
[78] Mundell, ‘The Long War’.