Threat Strategy and Concepts The career management agency is engaged with Officers and senior non-commissioned officers (NCOs) about their placement for Career Management Cycle 2026. Some will find themselves coming to Land Capability Division within Army Headquarters for the first time. I was in the same position as you, two years ago. The aim of this series of posts on the Land Power Forum is to pass on what I have learned about the role of Land Capability Division over the last 12 months, in helping the …

  Introduction As the world lurches from one crisis to another, lessons learned from past crises are easily forgotten. In this vein, we can draw useful insights from Operation COVID-19 Assist (OCA) for future domestic operations and for their wider relevance to issues concerning operational readiness. Indeed, the shifting strategic climate referenced in the Defence Strategic Review (DSR) begs the question whether the Australian Defence Force (ADF) should be involved in a domestic emergency on the scale of …

The advent of widely available Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Meta AI, represents the most significant advance in AI to date. This new technology presents new risks too. Well-known examples include bias, hallucination, theft of intellectual property (IP), and lack of transparency. [1] These dangers certainly raise questions over the suitability of using LLMs in the military.  To date, security experts have mainly focused on the risks of this new AI technology through the lens of …

Assessing Civilian Employer/Manager Support for Employees’ Part-time Military Service Over the past decade, there has been an increasing recognition of the importance of the Australian Army Reserves for Defence capability and greater utilisation of individual reservists and reserve units for major conflict deployments and humanitarian operations. However, as foreshadowed in the Australian Defence Strategic Review recommendation for “[a] comprehensive strategic review of the ADF Reserves…” there are …

The armour wheels in a perfectly executed turn worthy of a mounted squadron as mortar bombs and 155 shells blast a nearby hill and a Tiger races in for the kill. It’s Chong Ju, the Australian Army’s annual blast fest when Puckapunyal Range reverberates to the sound of explosions. Indeed, it is a blast, literally to the ears and figuratively to one’s pride as the nation’s land force demonstrates what it was designed to do to a military, media and defence stakeholder audience. Every year the exercise is …

Emerging Threats and Opportunities (ETOs) is a regular blog series on the Land Power Forum that collects together blogs, podcasts and articles of interest with the goal of creating discussion on the topic of land power. Lessons From ASPI Strategist , a piece from December last year that explores the idea that the US may have learnt a lesson of minimising engagement in the Middle East over the past two decades, and thus, considers what a reduced engagement posture might look like. Coming from Richard Haass, …

‘The military that is able to figure it out and… that can weave together the old and new, not just old and new technology but old and new thinking, they will be the ones that win.’ ( Peter Singer ) Inevitable hardening of  military robotics  suggests that development of war munitions won’t be immune to the impact of  mechatronic warfare . Like the almost indestructible  killer robot  immortalised in the popular science-fiction franchise  Terminator , near-future military robots portend to be tenacious and …

Emerging Threats and Opportunities (ETOs) is a regular blog series on the Land Power Forum that collects together blogs, podcasts and articles of interest with the goal of creating discussion on the topic of land power. Understanding the emerging threats and opportunities presented by the operating environment is an important aspect to organisational adaptation. Akin to the Boyd cycle, or OODA loop, continuous observation of the environment can help the organisation orientate-decide-act, and do so in a …

Emerging Threats and Opportunities (ETOs) is a regular blog series on the Land Power Forum that collects together blogs, podcasts and articles of interest with the goal of creating discussion on the topic of land power. Lessons From the Modern War Institute , and continuing with the trend from last week, a summary of the tactical lessons from the Battle of Marawi, articulated by Lieutenant General Pamonag of the Filipino Army. This is a long talk (approximately 90 minutes in total), which explores a host …

In Occasional Paper 16, Resetting the Australian Army , Dr Albert Palazzo identifies the key aspects of the Defence Strategic Review and their importance to Army, highlighting that the overall message is positive for the land force. Using a number of historical reviews to illustrate how Army has responded to government directed defence policy re-assessments in the past, Palazzo points to a trajectory for contemporary capability renewal. … Occasional Paper release - Resetting the Australian …