The Professional Revolution to Transform Army into an Integrated Enabler
2025 CA Essay Competition
Winner
Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis died in an asylum in 1865, a pariah in the European medical profession. Two decades earlier at Vienna’s General Hospital, Semmelweis had made a simple observation: the obstetric ward attended by doctors had a maternal mortality rate three times higher than the one attended by midwives. The difference? Doctors performed autopsies in addition to delivering babies, which Semmelweis hypothesised may have caused “cadaverous particles” to transfer from the morgue to the birthing bed. When Semmelweis introduced a chlorinated hand-wash basin outside the maternity ward, mortality rates plummeted. Yet his peers dismissed him. Many professional physicians were insulted by the suggestion that their hands were instruments of death. Semmelweis was ridiculed, ignored, and ultimately broken by a profession unwilling to confront its own shortcomings.[1]
The story seems absurd in hindsight – less than 200 years ago, medical professionals rejected outright the suggestion that they should wash their hands between dissecting corpses and delivering babies. But professions are not immune to self-deception. True professionalism requires the humility to seek perspectives beyond one’s own expertise and the agility to adapt when others bring new insight. The profession of arms is no different.
Symptoms and Diagnosis
“It was difficult for many surgeons at the height of their careers to face the fact that for the past fifteen or twenty years they might have been inadvertently killing patients by allowing wounds to become infected with tiny, invisible creatures.”
– Lindsey Fitzharris[2]
In the early 1800s, medicine was more trade than profession. What transformed medicine from butchery to one of the most respected professions in society was its willingness to integrate with other domains such as microbiology, chemistry and physics. Semmelweis may have been ignored, but later visionaries, such as English surgeon Joseph Lister, saw more success in bringing lasting change to medicine. Lister embraced germ theory, sterile practice, and new methods of anaesthesia, drawing on ideas outside what were, at the time, medicine’s traditional boundaries. That interdisciplinary integration, more than any single invention, marked medicine’s transition into a modern profession.
So it must be with the Australian Army.
In a 2024 address to the Australian National University’s National Security College, the Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Simon Stuart, emphasised the image of Army as a profession.[3] He noted, however, that being a profession was not a static state, but an ongoing commitment. Drawing from the work of prominent military theorists, the Chief of Army proposed that the profession of arms rested on three defining pillars: jurisdiction, expertise, and self-regulation.
This essay will argue that Army, by embracing integration as a mode of professional development, can serve as the connective tissue of the ADF’s Integrated Force. Like 19th-century medicine, Army must evolve the three pillars not in isolation, but through deliberate integration with other domains – particularly the other services of the Australian Defence Force (ADF). To maintain jurisdiction, Army must remain relevant to society. To build expertise, it must draw on advancements in fields such as artificial intelligence (AI). And to practise self-regulation credibly, it must hold itself accountable to performance as well as ethical standards.
This essay is divided into four parts. The following three sections will examine the three professional pillars, showing how a contributory mindset, agility in organisation and culture, and a willingness to question institutional orthodoxies can position Army not as the dominant service in the joint force, but as its key enabler. The fourth section will explore practical steps towards achieving this goal.
In the century ahead, the most effective Army will not be the one that guards its traditions most jealously, but the one that adapts, integrates, and leads by example.
Professional Mandate
“Authority is a relationship-based attribute:
it requires validation by those who submit to it
as well as by those who exert it.”– Professor Michael J D Roberts[4]
LTGEN Stuart’s concept of jurisdiction as one of the three pillars of the Army profession has its roots in the writings of LTGEN Sir John Hackett, among others. Although the word “jurisdiction” is not explicitly used, the concept is undeniably embedded in his discussions of military authority, responsibility, and service.
LTGEN Hackett frames the military's identity around service to society, rooted in trust, legitimacy, and the management of controlled violence. In a 1962 lecture delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, titled ‘Today and Tomorrow’, LTGEN Hackett stated that military authority was neither inherent nor permanent; it existed only insofar as the military continued to meet society’s evolving needs. It was in this lecture that LTGEN Hackett introduced the now-familiar concept of “unlimited liability”.[5]
This informs LTGEN Stuart’s interpretation of jurisdiction. In an April 2025 address to the Lowy Institute, he expanded on his definition of jurisdiction as “the unique service we provide to the society we serve”. Adding, critically, that “an army cannot define its own jurisdiction”[6] – it is instead generated, in healthy democracies at least, as a collaboration between the government, society and the military. This embodies LTGEN Hackett’s adaptive service to society: jurisdiction is not guaranteed; it is conditional upon Army’s willingness to evolve, collaborate, and subordinate internal tradition to external necessity.
This matters in the joint-force context. Retaining jurisdiction over the land domain cannot be achieved through mere size, history or tradition. It must be proven through a capacity to integrate, to contribute constructively in multi-domain operations, and to innovate faster than potential adversaries. Jurisdiction is not about dominance within the ADF – it is about utility to the nation. In this light, an Army that clings to parochial habits risks undermining its own jurisdiction.
Anatomy of Expertise
“The foundation was laid for that great revolution in Medicine which Hippocrates first effected,
and which, by detaching Medicine altogether from the science of theology,
emancipated it by degrees from the slavish trammels of superstition,
and elevated it in time to the dignity of a rational science.”– Sir William Hamilton[7]
Professional expertise is the bedrock of Army’s claim to be a profession. But the nature of that expertise is often misunderstood – especially within Army’s own ranks. It is tempting to define military expertise purely in terms of tactical prowess: marksmanship, small unit leadership, or combined arms manoeuvre. These are certainly important, but they are not sufficient.
Expertise, “acquired only by prolonged education and experience”, is a defining characteristic separating a professional from a layman, according to Samuel Huntington.[8] Applying this concept to the military, Huntington explains “the direction, operation, and control of a human organization whose primary function is the application of violence is the peculiar skill of the officer”.[9] Huntington’s application of the professional characterisation exclusively to the officer corps appears dated in today’s Army, where enlisted personnel operating high-tech equipment possess education and technical expertise to rival most officers of the 1950s, when The Soldier and the State was first published. The operation of specialised equipment and coordination with others for the considered application of violence in pursuit of prescribed goals is as much a form of expertise as the coordination of these actions.
In a volatile, complex, and technologically dynamic strategic environment, expertise must also include the capacity to adapt, innovate, and integrate. A doctor who first certified in the profession in 1985 could not still regard him or herself as a medical professional without staying up to date with advances in modern medicine. Although the human body remains the same organism it was 40 years ago – just as the nature of war is unchanging – technology, societal norms, political and legal evolution all drive change with which a professional must keep pace.
So it is for the Army professional, whose opponents are not static, and whose environments are not predictable. To remain relevant and effective, Army professionals must demonstrate agility – not only in the tactical sense, but intrinsic to the way they think and operate. Like the nature of war itself, the enduring value of agility in driving operational success remains constant.
Many of Napoleon Bonaparte’s early victories were characterised by a speed and flexibility that caught his opponents by surprise. French forces were able to divide into smaller elements and move through enemy territory with a small footprint, engaging in minor skirmishes individually, then combining into a larger force at the key time and location to achieve a decisive campaign victory. Napoleon used this method to envelop the Austrian army under General Mack at Ulm in 1805, without the Austrians realising they were surrounded until it was too late.[10] The Prussians, too, were confounded by the French ability to move divided and converge at decisive points at Jena and Auerstedt in 1806.[11] Almost 100 years before the invention of radio communications, the precise coordination of Napoleon’s forces over significant distances was unimaginable to the generals in greater Europe.
Napoleon’s opponents recognised the devastating power of his army’s ability to divide for long-distance moves and converge for major battles, but they could not emulate it. Carl von Clausewitz writes in On War, “nowadays, even if the army is to fight as a whole, columns need no longer be kept together so as to be able to join up before the action begins”.[12] Before becoming history’s renowned modern military theoretician, von Clausewitz fought at Jena and Auerstedt as aide-de-camp to Prince August of Prussia (both men were captured later that year during the capitulation of Prenzlau). But the Prussians could not simply start copying Napoleon’s tactics – moving divided and converging for the fight – because the whole system by which their forces were raised and organised was incompatible with such an approach. Prussian generals attempting to adopt a corps system akin to the French risked mass desertion from rank-and-file soldiers bound by semi-feudal obligation, under an officer corps drawn almost exclusively from the nobility and exhibiting wide disparities in operational competence.[13] The humiliating defeats of 1806 provided the impetus for a reorganisation of the Prussian military at a systemic level – a slow process beleaguered by many hurdles, including some manufactured by those who benefited from the old structure, and who could not unchain themselves from a devout attachment to past glories under Frederick the Great.[14] It was a completely transformed Prussian army that contributed to major victories against Napoleon in the battles of Leipzig (1813)[15] and Waterloo (1815)[16] – one that mirrored the French forces not just tactically, but organisationally.
The modern Australian Army embraces agility in theory. Doctrine praises decentralised command, and exercises test improvisation and initiative to some extent. Yet in structure and administrative processes, Army is still beholden to rigid hierarchies and systems that constrain freedom of action. Units and personnel are administratively exhausted long before they are tactically tested. Modern Australian soldiers build expertise in spite of Army’s administrative structures, rather than through them.
Army expertise is not unlike the European medical profession during its 19th century transformation. Robert Listen was one of the most famous and celebrated English surgeons of the 1840s. Standing over six feet tall, Listen was a physical, and reputational, giant of the era. His renown was built on speed with a knife and brute strength at a time – before anaesthetic – when surgery had to be swift and patients had to be held down.[17]
Joseph Lister was apprenticed into this surgical tradition when Liston was at the height of his fame. Most young surgeons at the time sought to be stronger and faster with a blade – to be the next Listen. But Lister, who had tinkered with a microscope since his teenage years, recognised that surgery could not advance without borrowing from adjacent disciplines – specifically chemistry and microbiology. Lister was drawn to research by French microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur (from whose method for eliminating bacteria in milk we derive the term “Pasteurise”).[18] By introducing antiseptic methods based on Pasteur’s germ theory, Lister halved surgical mortality rates within a generation. His genius was not technical skill (although by all accounts he was very skilled with surgical tools) – it was interdisciplinary agility.
Army’s understanding of expertise must extend beyond land-centric capabilities to include data, technology, logistics, behavioural science, cyber and space. We must recognise that many of the innovations that will shape future warfare will not emerge from within our own knowledge base – they will come from partnerships with other services, civilian agencies, and industries currently viewed as peripheral or entirely unrelated. This will require dismantling the organisational habits that favour doctrinal orthodoxy and reward compliance over curiosity. Army must become a learning organisation – not just in Professional Military Education (PME) or training establishments, but in every aspect of military life. Army experts must be more than just excellent soldiers – they must be effective collaborators and innovators. Expertise cannot be regarded as a static trait, but must instead be seen as a collective and ever-growing capability. One that is not defined solely by our ability to close with and destroy the enemy, but by our ability to evolve – structurally, conceptually and collaboratively – faster than our enemies.
Clinical Governance
“Educational reform … involved turning medical schools,
which had been mostly private proprietary enterprises run by physicians in their spare time,
into graded, sequential, university-affiliated programs, bolstered by up-to-date teaching hospitals,
libraries, pathology museums, and laboratories, and with a faculty
of scientifically trained lecturers and distinguished clinicians.”– Michael Bliss[19]
LTGEN Stuart’s third pillar of a profession – self-regulation[20] – is typically associated with ethics and standards of personal conduct. In the military context, this has long meant being accountable to laws of armed conflict, codes of conduct, and institutional values. There are pragmatic – as well as altruistic – reasons for doing so, which is why professional codes of conduct are typical of all professions. The Hippocratic Oath – attributed to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and still in use as a guide to conduct in the medical profession today – is one of the oldest examples of a professional ethical code.[21] This well-known ethical standard influences the decisions of billions of people to visit doctors every year and entrust them with personal details and invasive physical examinations.
Huntington points out that this ethical self-regulation, what he labels “responsibility”, is a fundamental factor separating professions from other trades. A positive and necessary contribution to the functioning of society is a fundamental characteristic of a profession. In The Soldier and the State, Huntington gives the example of the research chemist, who is a highly educated expert, but whose role falls short of being classed as a “profession” because he is a research chemist even “if he uses his skills in a manner harmful to society”.[22] A surgeon, on the other hand, who starts slicing into people for non-medical reasons is no longer acting as a surgeon. Likewise, the soldier who unlawfully inflicts violence for his own purposes outside of the rules of war ceases to be performing the role of a soldier and becomes a war criminal or terrorist.
But the concept of self-regulation must extend beyond the moral realm. It must also apply to how the institution regulates its own structures, systems, and habits. A true profession is not just self-policing in terms of wrongdoing – it is self-renewing. It adapts its practices in response to new challenges, disciplines itself to stay relevant, and reforms from within rather than waiting for external impetus.
Army, and the ADF more broadly, have systems and processes in place for ethical self-regulation. Although institutionally uncomfortable, the organisation’s capacity for investigation of ethical and legal failures has proven quite robust, as demonstrated by the recent Inspector-General of the ADF inquiry into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.[23] Structural reform of the truly transformational kind, however, seems to pose a greater challenge. The administrative weight borne by Army personnel increases steadily, with little regard for its cumulative impact on operational readiness or innovation. Computer systems are more often used to replicate pre-digital processes, such as forms and minutes, rather than to truly improve the efficiency or scope of administrative practices. In the barracks, management processes remain heavily centralised, even as doctrine extols decentralised command on the battlefield.
It is here that Army must redefine what self-regulation looks like in practice. It must become a mechanism not for preserving tradition, but for protecting purpose and focusing energy on the main effort, which is and always should be the defence of Australia and its national interests. In other words, Army must learn to regulate agility. This is not a contradiction. Just as a healthy immune system knows which foreign bodies to fight and which to integrate, a self-regulating Army must know which norms to defend and which to discard. The goal is not deregulation or chaos – it is minimalist regulation: enough to provide integrity, clarity, and safety, but never so much that it paralyses innovation.
This will require cultural shifts. Systems and mindsets must be reworked to value flexibility over formality, outcomes over process, and collaboration over control. Commanders and staff must be empowered to find their own solutions, supported by systems that enable rather than constrain. Unnecessary administrative friction must be weeded out of internal processes, from procurement to personnel to planning. This will require the courage to let go of deeply held assumptions and long-unchallenged conventions, in an Army that suffers no shortage of sacred cows. If “tradition” is the only justification for keeping a practice in place, then the question is not what it costs to lose, but what it costs to maintain.
To return to the medical profession during the 19th Century, medical self-regulation changed not just who could call themselves a doctor, but how medicine was practised. Licensing boards and medical associations emerged not just to weed out charlatans, but to ensure the profession could evolve with new scientific knowledge.[24] They shifted standards away from protecting turf and toward protecting patients. Similarly, Army must redefine self-regulation to serve not the protection of institutional norms, but the needs of the nation and the demands of integrated warfighting.
Prescriptions for Change
“They seem to forget that there is a cause for every ailment,
and that it may be in their power to remove it.”– Rebecca Lee Crumpler[25]
The preceding sections show that Army needs to transform into a more agile organisation to remain relevant as a profession. Recognising and justifying the need for organisational change is a necessary first step, but vague and lofty aspirations for transformation will not suffice. Here I will attempt to address, or at least raise, questions of how this transformation might be achieved practically. I will focus on three general fields: PME, administration, and procurement.
Transforming Through PME
PME is the natural place to start the discussion of organisational transformation – building Army’s institutional agility begins with the agile and adaptive minds of Army’s people. The merits of continuous professional development (CPD) are obvious to all who already engage in it, but less clear to those who do not. LTGEN Stuart has raised the lack of a professional assessment in Army’s operational readiness continuum.[26] This is a glaring omission in an organisation that assesses weapon handling and fitness biennially (and even dental health is assessed in a mandated annual check-up). Regular training activities and exercises certainly build experience and competence, but can be missed or avoided with minimal repercussions compared to the consequences of missing a physical assessment. And annual performance appraisals may provide some assessment of proficiency, but only the most grossly incompetent performance triggers serious consequences. For an organisation that counts Excellence among its core values, we are very tolerant of mediocrity.
The problem with implementing an annual professional competence assessment is it risks simply becoming another element of annual mandatory training. A full exploration of the epistemological and pedagogical failings of annual mandatory training practices will require a separate essay, but suffice to say here that it is not an approach likely to contribute to professional competence. Instead, Army should look to the most successful CPD programs employed in civilian professions. Colonel Richard Barrett outlines a compelling argument for the implementation of a CPD program in his 2020 essay The Profession of Arms Needs a CPD Program.[27] Crucial to the success of such a program – measured not only in its adoption but in its contribution to the intellectual development of personnel – will be flexibility and practitioner choice. Intellectual agility will not be built through a prescriptive box ticking exercise, but by fostering a culture that values knowledge and learning. Attempts to formalise CPD through Skinnerian[28] systems of punishment and reward will create the opposite of the desired outcome.[29] Instead, CPD should be loosely and openly integrated with the performance appraisal process. Supervisors discuss a member’s annual CPD goals early in the process – aided by organisational guidelines, reading lists and reference materials – and measure the member’s CPD performance against the attainment of these goals. The system should be broad enough to allow member choice and build intellectual curiosity, but structured enough to ensure CPD is not simply a tokenistic annual mandatory training platitude. For supervisors, managing subordinates’ PME goals while meeting their own is another standard by which their performance can be measured.
Administrative Transformation
The notion of training as one fights is a well-established military dictum.[30] While efforts are made to ensure training exercises are as realistic as possible, the inconsistency between how Army administers itself and how it expects to perform in combat is often overlooked. Current administrative practice has Army turn mission command principles[31] on their head in the barracks environment. While operational doctrine favours pushing decision making down the ranks, administrative practice typically pushes decision making up the ranks, often to dizzying heights for matters of trivial importance. The cognitive dissonance this approach engenders in leaders up and down the chain of command can only undermine battlefield performance. Regardless of what occurs in training activities where the risks are mostly simulated, junior leaders who have never been entrusted to make high-stakes decisions with real-world consequences cannot suddenly do so for the first time in combat, especially if their own senior leaders are also not habituated to trusting subordinates.
Addressing this issue is not simply a matter of changing the approval level of key administration, although this technical adjustment will be helpful. More important will be the cultural change required to accept mistakes – including ones that cost the organisation money – from well-intentioned junior leaders who make an erroneous administrative decision. A system that is accepting of mistakes and flexible in correcting them encourages decision making, whereas a system that punishes harshly even accidental transgressions forces subordinates to push decision authority ever higher in the interest of self-preservation.
Parallelling reform of administrative authorities should be reforms to how administration is initiated and processed. It is somewhat absurd that several decades after computers became commonplace in every ADF workplace, many administrative processes are still initiated by submitting a form. As digital representations of printed documents, online forms do not provide a marked efficiency benefit over the paper versions that preceded them more than 30 years ago. Computers provide opportunities for the implementation of significantly more efficient and individually tailored administrative practices. Current generative AI capabilities can even do away with forms entirely. It is well within the scope of a generative AI to simply take in a member’s plain language explanation of their administration needs and initiate all the necessary application processes without a person ever needing to fill in details on a digital form. In many cases, where a decision is strictly based on a rigid policy, the AI is also better suited than a human to instantly make a determination on an application, although entrusting this authority to a computer may be too much too soon for current Army leaders. Ultimately, those managing administrative practices need to start considering the art of the possible, rather than simply maintaining the systems that are already in place.
Procurement and Recruiting
Equipment procurement and personnel recruiting may seem to be very different fields, but in the Australian Army today they both suffer from the same two problems: they take too long and cost too much. The solution is similarly common to both fields: a change of approach from optimising to “satisficing”. The economist Herbert Simon introduced the concept of satisficing in his 1972 paper ‘Theories of Bounded Rationality’.[32] As opposed to optimising – finding the absolute best solution – satisficing is more efficient for situations in which time is limited, or when it is not entirely clear what the best solution will turn out to be.
In terms of procurement, satisficing means giving high priority to proven equipment that is good enough, economical and ready now, rather than engaging in lengthy and expensive trials and development activities that hold out the promise of potentially delivering a perfect equipment solution over a distant horizon, and the unspoken risk of going over time and over budget on a costly white elephant that never realises its developers’ lofty ambitions.[33] Accepting that we cannot know exactly what the character of the next major conflict will be means giving priority to quick, simple and efficient equipment procurement that is adaptable. And if Australia is forced into conflict with less than 10 years’ warning, as the NDS forecasts,[34] then any equipment that takes a decade to propose, trial, manufacture and introduce across the force is of little use.
Achieving agility in procurement will require a willingness to look past the multi-billion-dollar defence primes to smaller manufacturers and the broader commercial sector. Nowhere is this more important, and in greater need of reform, than in communications. It is absurd that one of the greatest challenges facing most modern militaries, including the ADF, is limitations in the compatibility and usability of communications systems. Soldiers spend weeks and months training to gain basic proficiency in communications tools with complicated operating systems and problematic compatibility flaws, all the while carrying in their pockets devices capable of communicating with anyone on the planet, which every operator instinctively understands how to use with no formal training. This is not to suggest that Army should replace its communications systems with mobile phones, obviously, only that the technology sector, not the defence primes, is where communications solutions will be found. And we must challenge the seeming convention that military communications devices cannot be user friendly.
The same solution to the equipment procurement problem can also be applied to procuring personnel. Army’s current approach to recruitment follows an optimising methodology – candidates are screened, checked and tested to ensure only the most suitable make it through. This process takes time, and still ultimately results in occasional poor hiring choices, because no screening process can be perfectly effective. Instead of fighting this reality, Army should accept it and change its approach to recruitment from “slow in, slow out” to “fast in, fast out”. Joining the Army should not be a long and difficult process, and nor should removing a new member who proves unsuitable. Instead, the approach should be quick to bring people in and quick to remove those identified as unfit by their immediate supervisors – such as the junior NCOs at recruit and initial employment training. If we accept that we will inevitably hire some people who do not share our values, and entrust our junior leaders (who have demonstrated through years of service that they do) to recognise these problem hires, then we can introduce efficiency to the recruitment process. This approach risks bringing in “bad apples”, but the current approach guarantees some of the best potential soldiers are lost to other employers while also not perfectly screening out all unsuitable candidates. Entrusting junior leaders at training establishments with the power to remove new soldiers who do not live up to Army’s standards is also an excellent way to engender mission command principles in administrative practices.
Prognosis
“I contend that our profession must be fundamental to our Army:
a ‘first principal’ that underpins and shapes all others.
We must consider it, understand it, invest in it. But above all we must believe in it.”– LTGEN Simon Stuart[35]
If Army is to fulfil its purpose as a profession within the ADF, it must evolve in step with the strategic environment, just as medicine continually transforms in response to scientific breakthroughs. Because our jurisdiction is conditional, our expertise must be adaptive and our regulation must be self-driven.
Jurisdiction refers to the Army’s claim over the land domain. But in an era of integrated, multi-domain operations, that claim cannot be taken for granted. Army’s continued relevance depends on its ability to support and enhance joint operations, not dominate them. Just as the early medical profession had to concede that patient care required input from other fields, Army must recognise land power as only one element of national military power. Our jurisdiction must be earned and continually re-earned through relevance, utility and adaptability within joint force operations.
Expertise gives the profession its authority. But in a complex, evolving battlespace, expertise must mean more than soldiering competence. It must include fluency in joint capabilities, comfort with emerging technologies, and openness to ideas developed outside Army’s historical remit. Tactical agility has never been solely about battlefield brilliance – it is deeply rooted in organisational structures. Army’s operational excellence will depend not just on how we fight, but on how we structure, train and empower personnel.
Self-regulation is the profession’s greatest privilege and its greatest burden. In a joint context, this means proactively discarding legacy habits, systems and cultural traits that no longer serve operational effectiveness. If our processes and preferences obstruct joint integration, it is our responsibility to change them. Just as medical boards redefined who could practise medicine based on evolving standards, Army must be willing to reform itself with a focus on serving the mission.
Integration in the ADF is not just a matter of aligning systems and units – it is a mindset that values contribution over control, and shared outcomes over single-service wins. Army, as the largest service, sets the tone for joint interactions. If Army approaches joint operations with inflexibility, parochialism, or excessive bureaucracy, it not only hampers joint success – it signals to our partner services that we are insincere about integration. But if Army leads with humility, flexibility, and a willingness to adjust internal practices to better serve the whole force, it becomes an enabler of integration. A profession confident in its identity does not need to defend every tradition or internal norm – it can adapt without losing its essence, which has always been about service, not self-preservation. This is the professional posture Army must adopt: not merely maintaining standards but evolving them in concert with the force it serves.
This is how medicine evolved into the respected profession it is today. The medical profession once defined itself by narrow expertise and insular culture, but the breakthroughs that propelled it forward – anaesthesia, germ theory, x-ray imaging – came from other disciplines, and from people who saw old problems in new ways. The doctors who embraced these insights – who redefined their expertise and restructured their practices – transformed medicine from trade to profession.
Army now stands at a similar inflection point. Our strategic environment demands agility, collaboration, and innovation. As the service with the most personnel and the smallest platforms, Army’s best way to contribute to the integrated force is to serve as an enabler of whole-force effects. We cannot wash our hands of our responsibility to the Australian society that provides our professional mandate – we must seek expertise outside our traditional fields of dominance, even if it means admitting past failures and accepting future risks. By re-examining our jurisdiction through a joint lens, expanding our definition of expertise, and exercising self-regulation that is reformist rather than defensive, Army can live up to its professional ideals.
Endnotes
[1] R Greene, Mastery, Viking Penguin, New York, pp 147-149.
[2] L Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine, Penguin Books, London, p 185.
[3] S Stuart, Challenges for the Australian Army Profession, address to ANU National Security College, Canberra, 25 November 2024.
www.army.gov.au/news-and-events/speeches-and-transcripts/2024-11-25/challenges-australian-army-profession (accessed 25 June 2025).
[4] M Roberts, ‘The Politics of Professionalization: MPs, Medical Men, and the 1858 Medical Act’, Medical History, Edition 53, 2009, pp 37-56.
[5] J Hackett, The Profession of Arms: Officer’s Call, The 1962 Lees Knowles Lectures given at Trinity College, Cambridge, US Army Center of Military History, Washington, DC, 1970, pp 35-42.
[6] S Stuart, Strengthening the Australian Army Profession, address to Lowy Institute, Sydney, 3 April 2025.
www.army.gov.au/news-and-events/speeches-and-transcripts/2025-04-03/strengthening-australian-army-profession (accessed 25 June 2025).
[7] Sir W Hamilton, The History of Medicine, Surgery, and Anatomy, from the Creation of the World, to the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century Volume 1, Henry Colburn and Richard Bently, London, 1831. Harpress reprint (2017) cited, Loc. 577-579 (Kindle Edition).
[8] S Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, 4th printing, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p 8.
[9] S Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, 4th printing, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p 11.
[10] D Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon – Volume 1, Scribner, New York, 1966, loc. 7373-7576 (Kindle edition).
[11] D Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon – Volume 1, Scribner, New York. 1966, loc. 8859-9236 (Kindle edition).
[12] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by M Howard and P Paret, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1976, p 315.
[13] G Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1980, pp 187-190.
[14] G Rothenberg, The Ary of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1980, pp 190-194.
[15] D Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon – Volume 1, Scribner, New York, 1966, loc. 16293-16735 (Kindle Edition).
[16] D Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon – Volume 1, Scribner, New York, 1966, loc. 18929-19420 (Kindle Edition).
[17] L Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine, Penguin Random House, UK, 2017, p 10.
[18] L Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine, Penguin Random House, UK, 2017, pp 155-159.
[19] M Bliss, The Making of Modern Medicine: Turning Points in the Treatment of Disease, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2011, p 37.
[20] S Stuart, Challenges for the Australian Army Profession, address to ANU National Security College, Canberra, 25 November 2024.
www.army.gov.au/news-and-events/speeches-and-transcripts/2024-11-25/challenges-australian-army-profession (accessed 25 June 2025).
[21] P McNeill and S Dowton, ‘Declarations made by graduating medical students in Australia and New Zealand’, Medical Journal of Australia, Vol. 176, Issue 3, 2002, pp 123-125. www.mja.com.au/journal/2002/176/3/declarations-made-graduating-medical-students-australia-and-new-zealand (Accessed 26 June 2025).
[22] S Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, 4th printing, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p 9.
[23] IGADF, Afghanistan Inquiry, Department of Defence, Canberra, 2020 afghanistaninquiry.defence.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-11/IGADF-Afghanistan-Inquiry-Public-Release-Version.pdf, accessed 23 Jun. 2025].
[24] M Roberts, ‘The Politics of Professionalization: MPs, Medical Men, and the 1858 Medical Act’, Medical History, Edition 53, 2009, pp 37-56.
[25] R Crumpler, A Book of Medical Discourses, in Two Parts: Pioneering Perspectives on Healthcare and Medicine in the 19th Century, Cashman, Keating and Co., Boston, 1883, Good Press reprinting (2022) cited, p 3.
[26] S Stuart, Challenges for the Australian Army Profession, address to ANU National Security College, Canberra, 25 November 2024.
www.army.gov.au/news-and-events/speeches-and-transcripts/2024-11-25/challenges-australian-army-profession (accessed 25 June 2025).
[27] COL R Barrett, ‘The Professions of Arms Needs a CPD Program’, The Forge, Australian Defence Force, 23 June 2020
theforge.defence.gov.au/publications/professions-arms-needs-cpd-program, accessed 27 June 2025.
[28] Skinnerian: According to the teachings of B.F. Skinner, the “father of behaviourism” and creator of the Theory of Operant Conditioning – the use of punishments and rewards to influence behaviour, as outlined in BF Skinner, Science and Human Behavior, Simon and Schuster, 1953.
[29] A Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and Other Bribes, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1993, pp 221-223.
[30] Department of Defence, ADF-P-0 Command, Australian Defence Doctrine Publication, 2023, p 29 theforge.defence.gov.au/command/command, accessed 30 June 2025.
[31] Department of Defence, ADF-P-0 Command, Australian Defence Doctrine Publication, 2023, pp 27-37 theforge.defence.gov.au/command/command, accessed 27 June 2025.
[32] H Simon, ‘Theories of Bounded Rationality’, in CB McGuire and R Radner (eds), Decision and Organisations, North Holland Publishing Company, Netherlands, 1972, pp 168-170.
[33] References to specific (and well known) examples have been deliberately omitted to avoid triggering the standard reflexive self-defence mechanisms that typify these problematic procurement initiatives.
[34] Department of Defence, National Defence Strategy, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, 2024, pp 5-6.
[35] S Stuart, The Human Face of Battle and the State of the Army Profession, Chief of Army Symposium Keynote Speech, Melbourne, 12 September 2024.
www.army.gov.au/news-and-events/speeches-and-transcripts/2024-09-12/chief-army-symposium-keynote-speech-human-face-battle-state-army-profession (accessed 25 June 2025).