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During the latter months of 2019 and the new year of 2020, Australia experienced catastrophic and widespread bushfires. As the situation worsened, the federal government unexpectedly called out the Australian Defence Force (ADF) Reserves to bolster an already significant deployment of ADF regular forces to contribute to a massive interagency and volunteer community response. This deployment was the largest ever peacetime domestic ADF operation in response to a natural disaster. The ADF responding to …

Army MakerSpace   About MakerSpace Makerspace is an Army initiative providing a place for learning-by-making and education in innovative approaches, creative thinking, and agile methodologies. All Army personnel are invited to join their local community of makers to gain a professional toolbox of problem-solving techniques to tackle Army’s current and emerging challenges. Makerspace is part of The Battle Lab within Army G7/Forces Command and contributes to realising a Future Ready workforce Locations The …

  One of the three pillars of the Australian Army profession is its jurisdiction, [1] a concept which defines the space in which expert military knowledge is applied. It is easy to think of this space as having only operational area or legal boundaries, but the current organisational construct adds a cultural jurisdiction where the Army’s authority to act is also tied to a discrete military identity. The Army has become a deeply nested organisation within the Defence enterprise; the fulltime Army …

The ADF and Littoral Manoeuvre Introduction We have seen that deterrence, even nuclear deterrence, doesn’t always work. [1] Thomas Schelling, Nobel Laureate For many years Australians, uneasily peering northward, had comforted themselves with the contemplation of the great arc of islands which stretches from the Pacific by way of the island mass of New Guinea and beneath the centrepiece of the Philippines, through the East Indian archipelago to the Indian Ocean. These islands, particularly in the …

The Military Methods of Guerrillas, Warlords, and Militias   Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press , 2021, 464 pp RRP: $US29.95 ISBN 9780691207513 Written By : Stephen Biddle Reviewed By : Andrew Maher   For the past decade, international relations have been challenged by problems posed by states and non-state actors functioning in unusual ways. Certain non-state actors, such as Islamic State or Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), have instituted forms of governance, generated methods to control …

The Importance of Resources to Capability Development 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 (LCD) over the last two years, in helping the Chief of Army (CA) to manage the capability provided by the Australian Army. The  first post introduced the series and outlined the Australian Defence Force’s (ADF) fundamental inputs to capability (FIC). [1]  It highlighted how the 2024 National Defence Strategy (NDS 24) …

Today sees the release of a new Occasional Paper, Littoral Operations for the Australian Army—Theory and Principles . The paper presents a comprehensive conceptual re‑evaluation of how the Australian Army can operate in the littoral: an environment where land, sea, air, space and cyber domains intertwine. It argues that Australia’s strategic circumstances and the accelerating evolution of long‑range, high‑precision weapons necessitates a fundamental shift in thinking. The Army must no longer view itself as …

Theory and Principles Introduction Fighting at, from and over the sea is one of the most challenging tasks a military force can undertake. It requires naval, land, air, space and, increasingly, cyber operations to work in concert. Such forces need to operate in one of the harshest environments on the planet, where the natural forces of sea and weather can prove as dangerous as any adversary. Logistics presents an entirely different set of problems than that of a purely terrestrial environment. Finally, the …

Following the military defeat of Islamic State (IS, ISIS, or Daesh ), very little has been publicly written of Australia’s experience and lessons from this campaign, termed Operation OKRA. In Occasional Paper 32 , Operation Okra Operational Analysis , author, Dr Andrew Maher, takes aim at this gap and in so doing, seeks to help policymakers and practitioners understand proxy conflict that emerges in the broader context of strategic competition. Some might take exception to the portrayal of Operation OKRA …

The Story of Wartime Kyiv   Bloomsbury Publishing , 2024, ISBN 9781639733873, 288 pp, (AUD) $35.99 (hardback) AUTHOR: Illia Ponomarenko REVIEWED BY: John Nash Many books have been written about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Illia Ponomarenko is a well-known and well-regarded Ukrainian journalist who has covered Ukraine’s conflict with Russia for many years, including before the full-scale invasion. I Will Show You How it Was is a very personal account of the build up to invasion, and as the …