Search

Crafting a Vision for the Future Australian Army The fall of Singapore opens the Battle for Australia … what the Battle of Britain required, the Battle for Australia demands. Prime Minister John Curtin, 1942 [1] Introduction By late 1941, Australia had deployed more than 22,000 soldiers across its northern approaches in preparation for a possible Japanese advance on the mainland. By February 1942, Singapore, Malaya and The Dutch East Indies were all under Emperor Hirohito’s control. New Guinea and the …

An Enduring Strategic Challenge On 24 May 2024, the Australian Government quietly designated Ansar Allah (also known as the Houthis) as a terrorist organisation. [1] The Australian terrorist designation was made long after the Houthis initiated attacks on Red Sea shipping in solidarity with Hamas following the 7 October 2023 attacks, and long after the Houthis became the de facto government for northern Yemen (circa 2014), emulating the governance models of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. …

Introduction The 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR) brought Australia’s strategic context into sharp focus. As a rising power, China is challenging the rules-based global order, and great power competition threatens Australia’s national interests. Australia faces the most challenging set of strategic circumstances since the Second World War, making the potential for short-warning large-scale combat operations (LSCO) in the Indo-Pacific a real possibility. [1] The 2024 National Defence Strategy (NDS) …

Introduction The Defence Strategic Review of 2023 (DSR) underlined the importance of the littoral environment in Australia’s future defence needs. [1] As part of this, the DSR outlined an operating concept for army fires as a form of mobile coastal artillery (what Alfred Thayer Mahan would have called a ‘fortress fleet’) designed, in part, to deny use of the littoral environment to hostile forces. [2] This concept tracks closely with the rationale for the marine littoral regiments outlined in the US Marine …

Introduction Studies have demonstrated human-machine teaming (HMT) to be an effective and strategic mechanism for combining the strengths of human skills and knowledge with the benefits of robotic, autonomous and artificial intelligence (RAS-AI) enabled capabilities. [1] In a military context, HMT provides a way for ‘humans to operate in tomorrow’s faster, more data-heavy and more autonomous battlefield.' [2] The advent of HMT has also paved the way for other forms of collaborative military operations, …

From Plato to NATO, the history of command in war consists essentially of an endless quest for certainty. [1] Warfare has both changed and remained surprisingly similar over the last century. The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan led the Western world to believe that conflicts in the 21 st century would be characterised by stabilisation, intervention and avoiding the human costs suffered during the two world wars and the Vietnam War. The Russo-Ukrainian War has shown this not to be the case, with …

The emphasis of studies intended to identify lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian War tends to fall into three categories: studies of procurement and capability innovation; [1] studies of threat with recommendations on adaptations to tactics, techniques and procedures; [2] and studies of platform effectiveness, especially of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs). [3] Far less has been written on what can be learned from the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) as regards force structure, or the employment of capabilities …

Introduction Quantum technologies are a suite of emerging technologies that exploit the fundamental laws of nature to offer unprecedented capabilities in sensing, imaging, communications and computing. They are diverse, complex, generally early in technical readiness, and they demand new ways of thinking about the employment and exploitation of technology. [1] Quantum technologies take advantage of the way matter and light behave at atomic and subatomic scales. ‘Quantum mechanical properties (like …

Discussions of strategy too often descend rapidly from framing and defining the ‘ends’ to single-minded discourse on ‘means’. Indeed, the focus is often almost exclusively on ‘means’ … with ‘means’ being synonymous with vehicles and equipment. [1] Chief of the Australian Army, 15 May 2024 Introduction In this article I find a conceptual gap in Defence strategic policy directing the Australian Defence Force (ADF) to conduct littoral manoeuvre in Australia’s northern approaches. [2] After an earlier career …

Introduction Throughout history, military commanders have sought to exploit technologically superior capabilities to achieve tactical advantage on the battlefield. Technology informs strategy and provides tools to deliver tactical advantage, and is widely recognised as a force multiplier on the battlefield. [1] However, technologically superior capabilities alone do not assure military success; rather it is ‘the integration of innovation into effective methods and means that gives a strategic or tactical …