Owning Time

Tempo in Army’s Contribution to Australian Defence Strategy

Introduction

Over the last decade, time has become central to the concerns of the Western strategic community. Many policymakers worry that time is no longer on their side in the face of relative decline and the threat from powerful revisionist states. Others highlight the pace of technological and strategic change which, according to one former Chairman of the United States (US) Joint Chiefs of Staff, has ‘accelerated the speed of war, making conflict today faster and more complex than at any point in history’.^[1] Building on these and other changes, Australia’s 2020 Defence Strategic Update (DSU), 2023 National Defence: Defence Strategic Review (DSR) and 2024 National Defence Strategy (NDS) identify the loss of warning time, which ‘has major repercussions for Australia’s management of strategic risk. It necessitates an urgent call to action’.^[2]

The Australian Army has helped to lead the incorporation of the temporal domain into Australian military thinking, defining itself as an ‘Army in Motion’ in response to an environment of ‘Accelerated Warfare’. Specifically, Army has affirmed that ‘future advantage will lie with the side who can 'own the time' and best prepare the environment’.^[3] Army’s ‘description of “how we respond” is established as ‘owning the speed of initiative to outpace, out-manoeuvre and out-think conventional and unconventional threats’.^[4] That is, advantage is primarily gained through acting faster and consuming less time. This approach mirrors the view of other Western armed forces such as that of the US, where a preference for speed is central to military thinking.^[5] The demand for rapid action has strong merit; however, it carries three risks. 

First, this approach is primarily reactive. It seeks to respond to contemporary security dynamics through more efficient practices, rather than seeing the temporal domain as one which has its own dynamics to use for Australian benefit. Second, the emphasis on speed reduces the acceptable range of tactical, operational and strategic actions to a narrow and predictable set of choices, impeding Australia’s strategic initiative and allowing others to plan against us. Third, as many in Army and across Defence have already experienced, there is only so much extra pace that can be achieved within an organisation or on a battlefield. Each additional increase is more difficult and costly. Pushing to move ever faster risks burning through talent and exhausting resources, all in an era of competition, well below the threshold and intense demands of a future major war. 

In this article I argue that to ‘own the time’, the Australian Army will have to learn how to operate across the full temporal domain: speeding up when necessary, at other times slowing down, as well as being able to delay and shape how others think and act in time. The current era of ‘archipelagic deterrence’ for Australia presents a very different temporal challenge to that experienced in the past.^[6] During the ‘Defence of Australia’ era (1970s to 2000), the challenge was one of ‘warning time’, recognising that any major threat was decades away, and needing to maintain the core force and expansion base to respond. During the War on Terror (2001–2015), Army needed a rapid response capacity, and so it emphasised battlefield manoeuvre in operations across the Middle East. In the new era of archipelagic deterrence, Army will need a mix of these temporal patterns, demonstrating a capacity for rapid responses to incursions and threats, as well as endurance and resilience for what may be a multi-decade deterrence effort. It will need to be able to clearly demonstrate to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), or any other potential adversary, that it will be too difficult, too costly and ultimately too time-consuming to meaningfully threaten Australia and its interests. This paper shows how this effort can be assisted through the concept of tempo. 

The idea of tempo is found throughout Army and Australian Defence Force (ADF) doctrine, yet it has either fallen into disfavour or been treated as synonymous with ‘speed’. In the 1993 version of Army’s Fundamentals of Land Warfare, tempo was ‘the speed at which an operation can be mounted’. In 2002 it became the ‘rhythm or rate of activity relative to the enemy’. By the 2014 version (now entitled Fundamentals of Land Power) tempo was reduced to a subset of the concept of ‘intensity’ alongside the ‘degree of violence and technological sophistication employed’.^[7] Despite Army in Motion being conceptually grounded in the idea that time is important, there are only two brief references to tempo in the 2019 edition, and zero in 2020.^[8] 

Tempo, the Italian word for time, is typically used by English speakers to describe the speed of a piece of music and the way musicians play it. Three themes are highlighted here as the structure for this article’s analysis. First, tempo requires an adaptiveness to change, as performers learn how to recognise and become comfortable with variations in timing. Second, tempo involves congruence, where performers develop the ability to modulate the timing and pace of actions to fit the environment and needs of the song. Finally, tempo is about control, with elite performers able to shape the timing and pace of the music to achieve a desired effect on the audience. 

These three notions of tempo—change, congruence and control—can all help Army build on the work of recent years, such as Accelerated Warfare, Army in Motion and the 2024 NDS. To develop this argument, the paper is divided into three sections. First, I discuss what it means to live in an accelerated world and suggest ways to better handle change in the pace and flow of events. Second, I explore the congruent nature of tempo. In this section I argue that the most important temporal orientation involves acting relative to advantages against a specific adversary and within particular environments rather than universally pursuing speed. Finally, I discuss tempo as the capacity to impose control. In building on the analysis of the first two sections, I argue that, in the era of archipelagic deterrence, Army should explore ways to both ‘buy’ and ‘deploy’ time in support of Australia’s defence.^[9] 

Tempo as Change: Australia in an Accelerated World

While many describe today’s environment as an ‘accelerated world’, scholars have struggled to agree what is meant by this statement.^[10] One useful framework comes from the German philosopher Hermann Lübbe who argues that acceleration undermines our ability to use historical experience to explain the present. Within the ‘contraction of the present … the past is defined as that which no longer holds/is no longer valid, while the future denotes that which does not yet hold/is not yet valid. The present, then, is the time span for which … the horizons of experience and expectation coincide’.^[11] In other words, we feel rushed because we lack a historical framework within which to embed current actions. Without such a framework, we have to work harder to understand what is going on, how events are linked, and what we should do in response. The idea of tempo as change highlights that, to operate successfully in an accelerated era, we need to improve our capacity to make sense of the new pattern of events.

We have all experienced a version of this shift in daily life. It can feel overwhelming the first time we cook a complex new recipe, learn to drive a car, or go skydiving. Events occur too fast to properly respond, and trying to compensate by acting quickly can be a path to error. With experience and instruction, however, the pace of these events becomes easier to handle and our capacity to respond with greater speed and effectiveness significantly improves. A rich scholarly literature on psychology shows that humans can somewhat compensate for reduced decision-making time by employing cognitive strategies—heuristics—that help in making judgements under pressure.^[12] When these heuristics are based on institutionalised guidance, such as Army’s training and doctrine practised over many years, they can be a powerful tool for enabling rapid yet coherent action.

A feeling of acceleration—that is, a struggle to align the past with the present and project change forward—is normal in periods of strategic upheaval. In 1959 the American strategist Bernard Brodie complained that atomic weapons had introduced an ‘utterly unprecedented rate of change’ which was ‘much too fast to be fully comprehended even by the most agile and fully informed minds among us’.^[13] Once robust intellectual frameworks had been developed for the Cold War, however, the sense of dislocation seemed to moderate. Indeed, some today look back wistfully on the Cold War as a more stable and less confusing era. How can Army and Australian officials seek to regain a sense of temporal control in the current moment? I suggest three steps: prioritisation, expertise and education.

First, handling change requires prioritisation. By saying ‘no’ to less important tasks and responsibilities, we can allocate time to that which matters. The 2020 DSU provides a model for prioritisation of strategic effort by specifying: ‘The Government has decided that defence planning will focus on Australia’s immediate region… That immediate region is Australia’s area of most direct strategic interest.’^[14] Followed in a disciplined way, this spatial framework helps to lift attention and thus the intellectual burden of Australia’s decision-makers from large areas of the world, freeing up time to understand and decide issues related to the immediate region. With deeper knowledge of this region, trends within it become easier to understand and in turn seem less temporally accelerated. 

Along with geography, Australia needs greater clarity about what should be Defence’s primary concerns. The 2023 DSR usefully highlights that while there are many national security implications from climate change, Army’s capacity, training, morale and coherence have been damaged by the heavy reliance on the ADF, and especially Army, to respond to disasters. Therefore, the DSR urges that ‘Defence must be the force of last resort for domestic aid’.^[15] By better valuing Army’s time and saying no to the many ‘urgent’ tasks, we make space for great focus on the truly ‘important’ tasks and improve our capacity to undertake them appropriately. As a 2021 report on strategic thinking within Defence and the ADF noted:

One significant view from respondents is that senior leaders and their staff have insufficient time to think deeply about any particular issue … in the past decade, the Canberra ‘battle rhythm’ has sped up … [this] tends to make people good tactical or bureaucratic operators but suboptimal strategists who are poor at anticipating and adapting to different strategic problem sets.^[16]

A second way we can improve our feeling of control as part of tempo is through expertise. While breadth is often valued in peacetime, the pressures of competition demand depth. Those with more expertise have the experience and knowledge to identify what is truly important and to mitigate feelings of being rushed at someone else’s pace. Today the ADF, like many Western armed forces, emphasises themes of adaptation and innovation, with short postings and rotation cycles that aim to build generalised capacity against an ever-wider variety of scenarios. Similarly, across the Australian Public Service there has been a ‘historic undervaluing of subject matter expertise’ in the name of generalists who can be easily and quickly moved around.^[17] Today’s emphasis on flexibility and adaptation risks overwhelming the system as every issue is held to be a possible threat, and every program and armament a potentially necessary future resource. The very act of trying to cover all contingencies eliminates time for thinking about how to focus on what truly matters. 

Longer rotation cycles for Army would allow those responsible for ‘shaping’ operations to better understand and engage with key regional interlocutors in the South Pacific and South-East Asia. Career streams should reflect areas of specialisation, with rewards for those who develop area and language expertise over many years. In a similar vein, there is a need for expertise in strategic concepts and institutional history. Many in the Department of Defence recognise that the organisation lacks corporate memory, and steps are now underway to address this for some areas. Writing in 2015, the journalist Laura Tingle noted: 

Without memory, there is no context or continuity for the making of new decisions. We have little choice but to take these decisions at face value, as the inevitable outcome of current circumstance. The perils of this are manifest.^[18] 

Third, a comfort with change is built upon education. While tactical-level training can provide a reliable guide to behaviour, it is much harder to shape behaviour at the operational and strategic levels due to the inherent uniqueness of the problem sets. The ADF’s Professional Military Education should be re-examined along three lines. First, how can the mainstream curriculum (at institutions such as the Australian Defence Force Academy and the Australian Command and Staff College) be aligned with the primary concerns of contemporary Defence policy, such as operating in littoral environments to Australia’s north? Second, at the Defence Strategic Studies Course level, how can potential ‘strategists’ be better identified and given the space and time to develop their own intellectual breadth and innovations? Strategists are not formed in a classroom. Third and finally, Army should continue its work to encourage a research community within Australia’s university sector, bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines who work on issues related to Australian security. Regular engagement, opportunities and incentives to grow this community (such as PhD scholarships) will help encourage more civilian attention to creating the intellectual frameworks necessary to help understand and, in turn, reduce the feeling of acceleration felt by Army, ADF and government leaders. The first part of a renewed concept of tempo therefore involves strengthening the Army’s comfort with change. In the next section, we explore how it can better understand what creates advantages in time.

Tempo as Congruence 

Tempo should always be relative to the environment and the adversary. As part of handling change, people inevitably make judgements about the optimal pace given their particular circumstances. To return to the musician metaphor, for example, good performers don’t play a piece of music the same way every time. They align how they play to fit the environment within which they are currently performing. 

While dreams of rapid action have long fuelled military ambitions, speed became a core ideal of Western armed forces in the late 20^th and early 21^st century. One of the leading voices for this view was John Boyd, the US Air Force strategist whose ideas such as OODA loops (observe–orient–decide–act) and advocacy of manoeuvre warfare have significantly influenced Western military thought.^[19] At the tactical level, more speed is often the best approach. It helps retain the initiative, may introduce friction into an adversary’s system, and can be efficient, needing fewer resources to achieve objectives against underprepared adversaries. Even in non-conflict situations, the pace of response to events such as natural disasters has been shown to have long-term benefits in recovery and political stability. As one US Civil War general quipped, ‘get there firstest with the mostest’.^[20] While valuing physical pace, Boyd argued that the real benefit of speed was the mental confusion and friction that can be inflicted on an adversary, impeding the operation of their system.^[21] When commanders and leaders feel overwhelmed by events, friction is at work, harming their capacity to respond. 

While pace might seem like a sure-fire approach tactically, its operational and strategic results are decidedly mixed. Paul Brister has recently surveyed the role of speed in the Napoleonic Wars, the First World War, the Second World War, and the US’s record after 1945. He observed: ‘History suggests tactical speed is most useful in conflicts with minimalist aims that have little impact on the international status quo.’ Therefore, he argued, ‘we must be less enthralled by the concept of speed, especially at the operational and strategic levels of conflict’.^[22] Similarly, Professor Thomas A Hughes of the US Air Force has argued: ‘Recent history demonstrates the value of rapidity in both combat and war, but it also teaches patience and perseverance.’^[23] In many cases over the 20^th and early 21^st century, the pursuit of absolute speed rebounded, causing militaries to race, prioritising tactical means untied to strategic ends, or becoming stuck in extended attritional conflicts for which they were unprepared.

Adversaries can also recognise and develop counters to an opponent’s preference for speed. In a 2001 critique of the emerging ‘cult of the quick’, Hughes warned that ‘in making speed a mandated weapon in its repertoire, the Pentagon makes patience an asymmetric threat in the quivers of those who would wait out an impulsive America’.^[24] And so it proved. Both state and non-state groups successfully challenged the US in the early 21^st century through slow and steady means. Think Russia’s cyber-intrusions, China’s economic subterfuge and island building, and the Taliban’s relentless insurgency. These ‘cumulative strategies’ space out action over time, seeking ‘the less perceptible minute accumulation of little items piling one on top of the other until at some unknown point the mass of accumulated actions may be large enough to be critical’.^[25] Nor are conflicts temporally static. Pascal Vennesson has shown that the US’s firm preference for speed was advantageous in its invasion of Iraq in 2003; however, those same preferences meant that adaptation to the necessary tempo for countering an insurgency was extremely difficult.^[26] Having a preferred tempo regardless of context is not good strategy.

The core of tempo as congruence is that temporal advantage depends on identifying and acting at the right tempo relative to the specific environment and adversary. It then requires the capacity to move between tempos to seize these opportunities. Each type of environment has its own distinct temporal rhythm. For instance, research on urban warfare suggests that it is often punctuated by regular pauses in the form of temporary ceasefires.^[27] Just as a slothful response to a humanitarian disaster is inexcusable, so too rapid action which lacks patience may be counterproductive in complex circumstance such as peacekeeping or counterinsurgency operations. In a major war, rushing too quickly to find a decisive point may lead to over-extension, waste, and improper diagnosis of the state of the conflict and the capacity of the adversaries. Boyd is today praised as an acolyte of ever more speed, but as those who sat through his 14-hour (or longer) briefings would recall, he insisted speed must be relative: 

I don’t care whether you go slow or fast. People say no, we’re going to drive fast—no, no. As long as you—I don’t care if you’re slow, if you can slow him down even slower. It’s all relative.^[28]

Thus far, this article has focused on supporting Army’s adaptation to an accelerated world through the notions of change, helping us to manage a sped-up world, and through congruence, recognising the relative and situational nature of the temporal domain. Mastering these two facets of tempo enables an understanding, akin to that of a musician, of how time affects performance. Now, in the final act, we can explore how to use our knowledge of tempo to achieve advantage.

Tempo as Control

This section posits two ideas. First it proposes that, under the Strategy of Denial’ framework in the 2024 NDS,, Army should lead efforts to ‘buy time’ before and during any potential conflict. Second, it argues that Australian leaders will need to develop the skills to ‘deploy time’ by using timing frames to influence the perceptions and judgements of others. In this effort, Army has an important role in support.

Buying Time

As the 2020 DSU noted, Australia is running out of time:

Previous Defence planning has assumed a ten-year strategic warning time for a major conventional attack against Australia. This is no longer an appropriate basis for Defence planning.^[29] 

To respond to this changed threat environment, the DSU identified the need for a new deterrence strategy. In the 2023 DSR, a deterrence by denial strategy was endorsed. Denial, as the leading deterrence scholar Patrick Morgan observes: 

involves threats, active and passive, designed to make a potential attack appear unlikely to succeed so as to convince the potential attacker to abandon it; plus the use of force to make a real attack unsuccessful causing the attacker to abandon it.^[30]

There are three reasons why Australia needs to ‘buy’ as much time as possible in order to successfully undertake a deterrence by strategy of denial. 

Before any conflict begins, Australia needs as much time as possible to continue its military modernisation. As the DSR acknowledged, the ADF is not currently ‘fit for purpose’ for contemporary threats.^[31] So too, many countries in Australia’s region are slowly modernising their armed forces, as well as strengthening their economic and governance capacity. This steady development across the Indo-Pacific is a net security benefit to Australia. The more Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam and other countries can defend themselves, the greater the deterrence of external great powers threatening South-East Asia. Building relationships that will enable these modernised and more capable militaries to trust each other and improve cooperation will also take time and continuity. As Army in Motion states, ‘A persistent, engaged network of people creates trust, legitimacy and understanding in Australia’s geographic areas of interest’.^[32] 

During a conflict, Australia needs to convince its adversary that any military success will be too costly in resources and time. In 1941–1942 after the Australian mainland was attacked, the Australian Army’s objective was not to defeat Japan but to make Tokyo’s weakly-held desire to knock Australia out of the war too time-consuming and difficult to be pursued.^[33] Any threat of invasion was eliminated by 1943 once the US, the United Kingdom and other regional partners were able to draw Japanese attention away from the Australian continent. 

In the contemporary strategic environment, as in the Second World War, Australia will likely be a peripheral objective for any major power adversary, especially in conditions of major regional conflict. This means the amount of resources an adversary may devote and the amount of time for which it is willing to sustain operations against Australia will be low compared to other theatres of conflict, although this calculation may be slowly rising as the US makes northern Australia a more integral hub in its Indo-Pacific force posture. Canberra must demonstrate to the PRC that any military operation against Australia will take so long, and be so slow and hard to progress, that it is not worth beginning. We need to figure out how to signal that even a substantive military strike against Australia’s people will not force Canberra to try to exit the war, or cause a divorce in its alliance with the US. 

Finally and relatedly, Australia will need to buy time to enable its ally the US to contribute forces to support Australian security. In a major regional conflict which sees missile strikes and Chinese naval attacks against Australia, the US may simply not have sufficient resources or capacity to aid Canberra’s defence during the early months of the conflict. This is not to question the commitment of Washington DC to the ANZUS alliance. Instead it is simply a recognition that, temporally, allied assistance for the first few months of a conflict may be very limited, potentially only to US forces already in Australia, and those might well be tasked for operations much further north. 

The 2024 NDS strategy of denial establishes a very useful framework for Australia and Army to use in seeking to buy time before and during a conflict. Unlike deterrence by alternative punishment models, which require sequential strategic choices (demonstrating a clear link from unwanted adversary actions to a specific and painful response), denial can be developed through cumulative strategic approaches. So long as such operational methods are clearly thought through and communicated, there is benefit from not only preparing for plausible regional contingencies but also demonstrating the size, extent and preparedness of Australian defensive capabilities across its northern approaches. So too, efforts to support the military modernisation among Australia’s neighbours will help reinforce the military challenge for any adversary, especially one seeking rapid decisive results in a secondary theatre. 

In situations of competition, Army should provide decision-makers with as much time to make informed decisions as possible through its contribution to defence diplomacy and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. By gathering information, shaping regional attitudes, and using forward presence to deter grey-zone style harassment, Army can meaningfully contribute to mitigating the risk of sudden crises requiring an immediate national response. In conflict scenarios, Army will have a significant role in contributing to the integrated air and missile defence system proposed in the NSD, such as through counter-drone and land-based anti-ship strike. It will also have responsibility for impeding land operations by an adversary, whether grey-zone style incursions or major landing operations. By demonstrating the commitment and capacity to act proactively to deny an adversary their objectives, it will help strengthen deterrence and provide time for military modernisation, diplomacy and alliance support to be achieved. 

Deterrence is a new challenge in Australian strategic history. Aside from a few ad hoc contributions in the 1950s and 1960s, it was not part of Australian military practice in the 20^th century. Especially within a framework of strategic denial, deterrence requires a very different mindset to the Boyd-inspired manoeuvre and rapid deployments in which Army excelled during the War on Terror. In the mid-1960s, the scholar Thomas Schelling observed that deterrence represented a fundamental shift in the tempo of activity from many other forms of military action. Where more traditional military actions to defeat or compel others involve ‘initiating an action’, he argued that deterrence ‘involves setting the stage—by announcement, by rigging the trip-wire, by incurring the obligation—and waiting’ (emphasis in original).^[34]

Within this paradigm, Army will still need the capability to undertake rapid responses that deliver significant firepower to achieve specific military objectives. However, Army will also need to foster a culture which embraces doggedness in defence, champions the hardening and resilience of Australian military infrastructure, and supports acquisition and logistics platforms which are built to enable long-term survivability and sustainability rather than launch quick global force projection. As the late strategist Colin Gray recognised, land forces can be the most important military forces for deterrence. This is because they are much more clearly fixed in place, visible in footprint, and more ‘politically entangled’ with the honour and determination of a nation and its sovereign territory than the other technology-heavy services.^[35] Basing soldiers in Australia’s northern approaches, or in select forward presence roles into the region, demonstrates an Australian deterrence commitment in a way few other military capabilities can achieve, whatever their additional strike power.^[36] To help ‘buy time’ for Australia, Army, far more than the other services, will need to publicly embrace its role as the bulwark defender of Australia, and a symbol of the nation’s commitment to this solemn task.

Deploying Time

As noted in the first section of this article, whether an era feels confusing or accelerated depends upon the ideas we use to make sense of it. We can deliberately create timing frames to help us navigate new eras and to achieve political or strategic advantage. Political leaders regularly use this insight to support their authority by wrapping their policies in the cloak of the ‘founder’s intent’ or claiming to be on the ‘right side of history’. International politics is often a contest of these timing frames. In 1991, US President George HW Bush declared the start of a ‘new world order’, as demonstrated by the First Gulf War and supported by popular notions of an ‘end of history’. Today, China’s President Xi Jinping emphasises the ‘trend toward a multi-polar world’ while scholars debate ‘power transition’ theories.^[37] These claims all assert a specific direction and way of understanding the current era—a frame of reference which, if accepted by others, will benefit their state. 

Australian leaders should seek to develop timing frames to aid national security. In the 2010s, Australian leaders promoted a geographic frame, the ‘Indo-Pacific’, the widespread adoption of which has suited our national interests. Now it is time to act temporally. 

For example, one very useful timing frame for purposes of deterrence will be efforts to publicly demonstrate the resilience of Australians. This would show a nation determined to protect itself—a nation which can withstand repeated efforts at punishment, whether the threat is financial sanctions, derives from grey-zone incursions, or constitutes a military threat from long-range missiles. Discussions that currently occur within the government and within Army concerning mobilisation should be moved into the public domain as soon as possible to support this aim. Such discourse will not only help to persuade an adversary that Australians would resist aggression; it may also help the public to better swallow the burden of resilience, including additional taxation and expectations of higher levels of civic duty. To support this effort, Army should look for lessons in resilience from overseas. For example, Israel consistently projects an image of firm resilience, and the strong social dynamics demonstrated in Scandinavian countries underpin a strong national resolve to counter threats from larger, more powerful countries. The relationship between the armed forces and the citizen base will need to be carefully examined and potentially rethought for this new strategic era. 

Army will also need to consider how its public messaging, such as published doctrine and guidance and the speeches of its leadership, contribute to signalling Australia’s resilience and determination to achieve ‘deterrence by denial’. The focus during the War on Terror on an identity of an armed force capable of mobility, speed and lethality is still useful, but will need to be complemented with messages that demonstrate the size, resilience and determination of the Australian Army to defend Australia. Aggressors who believe they can achieve a quick victory—such as Russia in February 2022 against Ukraine—may be tempted to launch an attack.^[38] In the uncertain contemporary strategic environment, Army needs to make clear that it is both able and willing to repel threats across Australia’s northern approaches, and to do so in ways that may drag an adversary into a conflict spanning months if not years. That message will, in concert with the necessary growth of capability and alliance coordination that is currently underway, reinforce that any adversary seeking to threaten Australia and its interests will ultimately be denied its objective.

Conclusion

Protecting Australia and its national interests is a challenge of both space and time. Therefore, Australian security strategy must evolve a richer sense of tempo if it is to achieve its goals. During the post-Cold War era, characterised by global struggles, it was appropriate to focus on speed and manoeuvre when confronting non-state actors and remote battlefields. Temporally, the new era of archipelagic deterrence is very different for Australia. A strategy of denial framework requires a much wider use of tempo to help decision-makers adjust to the challenges of strategic competition, and to use the temporal domain to their full advantage. As defined in this paper, tempo offers three guiding concepts: change—developing approaches that help slow down events and make them more manageable; congruence—recognising the importance of relative rather than absolute speed in our actions; and control—seeking ways to use the temporal domain for advantage, such as buying or deploying time.

As Australia prepares for what may be a multi-decade era of strategic uncertainty, a broad and deep sense of how we act in—and across—time must be part of our defence thinking. Works of recent years such as Accelerated Warfare, Army in Motion and the 2024 NDS provide a rich foundation for such analysis. By restoring the concept of tempo into conceptual decision-making frameworks, and broadening the focus of effort from rapid action to the ability to operate across the entire temporal spectrum, Australia will be better placed to ensure its long-term security. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Carr is a Senior Lecturer in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University. His research focuses on Strategy and Australian Defence Policy. He has published widely in outlets such as Survival, Journal of Strategic Studies, Australian Foreign Affairs, International Theory, The Washington Quarterly, Asia Policy, and Comparative Strategy. He has a sole-authored book with Melbourne University Press and has edited books with Oxford University Press and Georgetown University Press. 

Endnotes