MAJ Anne-Maree Hunt

This study analyses children’s drawings and narratives from a national “Our Australian Soldier” art competition to understand how Australian youth perceive the modern soldier, and to assess how these perceptions align with the Army’s envisioned identity for 2030.

CHAP Jessica Grant

The thesis investigates how the military profession morally and conceptually relates to the medical, legal, and religious professions, and argues for a clearer understanding of how these traditions coexist within armed forces and shape the unique moral character of the Army.

LTCOL Tennille Marsh

How effective have legal frameworks for command accountability been in achieving professional self regulation for commanders of the Australian Defence Force for the preparation and conduct of the full spectrum of military operations?

Renewed focus on the concept of command accountability for western militaries in the past 5 years, driven by revelations surrounding war crimes and abuse allegations, has spurred questions around holding commanders and leaders to account for their command failures. The ADF must ensure that its command accountability legal framework is suitable for both peacetime and potential armed conflict. The extant literature and research is insufficient to answer these questions in the Australian context and this thesis will explore the effectiveness of Australian legal frameworks for command accountability.

LTCOL Samantha Hodges

Understanding and Enhancing Suicidality Surveillance in the Australian Army; a mixed methods analysis

Seeks to enhance the Australian Army’s suicidality surveillance, which was heavily scrutinised by the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide. Surveillance refers to the systematic data collection and analysis that allows for effectives design, implementation and evaluation of prevention policy and programs.

LTCOL Yong Yi

Empirical Validation of SDCC for Machine Learning Model's Transferability

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems often perform well only in the specific settings they are trained on. Unlike humans – who can adapt across different conditions like day or night, urban or natural – AI models can struggle when the context changes. This creates a challenge: how can we be confident the model will perform well during its deployment?  Set Difference Combinatorial Coverage (SDCC) is a way to measure how different two datasets are. SDCC can predict how well a Machine Learning (ML) model will perform without needing to test it. This research aims to validate SDCC using larger, more complex datasets – helping to anticipate performance, manage deployment risk, and guide improvement of models (through targeted additional training, known as transfer learning).

LTCOL Benjamin Gray

Aristotelian Battle Ethics: An examination of the utility of Aristotelian Virtue Ethics for the Australian Army at the tactical level of war

The research consists of an examination of the utility of Aristotelian Virtue Ethics as a framework for command, planning and decision-making at the tactical level of war via a synthesis of virtue ethics and key doctrinal warfighting concepts to overcome moral and intellectual friction. The objective is to provide combatants with intellectual and ethical skills to ensure they are prepared to overcome the dangers and complexity of future tactical battlefields.

LTCOL David Cave

Honoured Partners: The British Relationship with Governments-in-exile During the Second World War

Examines how Britain supported its European allies during the Second World War, and identifies lessons for contemporary strategists and planners. What emerges from the analysis is a greater understanding of the complexities of managing alliances in wartime, the many dilemmas faced by junior alliance partners, and the potential benefits and hazards of employing military and diplomatic power to achieve influence.