Executive Summary
For more than 80 years, Australia has relied upon its isolation and peaceful relations to protect its interests. But technology proliferation and a multipolar environment have created conditions that encourage revisionist governments to use military force in pursuit of territory and influence. The Australian Defence Force (ADF) therefore needs to be able to defend the homeland again.
In its most recent defense strategy, the Australian Department of Defence (ADoD) argued that it would pursue a strategy of denial to deter aggression. However, the ADF lacks the size or capabilities to implement this strategy under realistic budget and personnel constraints. Potential aggressors will likely deploy larger forces than the ADF and view denial as out of reach for Canberra.
Outright denial may not be feasible, but the ADF could deter aggression through a strategy of cost imposition that would threaten an attacker with the prospect of unacceptable losses or delay. This approach is especially advantageous for Australia, which is unlikely to be an essential or existential interest for an aggressor. An attack on Australia will likely seek to coerce Australia regarding economic or security policy or keep ADF forces occupied during military actions against other countries in the region. If an aggressor believes that operations against Australia would lead to unacceptably high losses or protraction, they could pursue other paths to their objective without reputational risk.
The challenge with a cost-imposition strategy is understanding which avenues of attack the aggressor is considering and what costs will be unacceptable. Canberra will need a campaign that uses signaling and operations to help policymakers estimate enemy leaders’ risk tolerance while in parallel establishing a defensive posture that can guard the country’s northern approaches.
The current ADF is not well-suited to implement either of these tasks. While it can effectively protect Australia from attacks in limited geographic areas, the ADF’s relatively small number of multimission ships, aircraft, and ground formations cannot address all the most likely avenues of attack. The ADF also has too few crewed multimission ships and aircraft to posture or adapt in novel or unexpected ways that could elicit responses that reveal adversary leaders’ risk tolerances.
This study used a series of tabletop exercises (TTXs) to develop operational concepts that could deter conflict and defend Australia within the ADF’s fiscal and personnel limits. These concepts relied predominantly on uncrewed systems organized into hedge forces that conduct distant anti-submarine warfare, offensive counter-air operations, and anti-surface warfare to prevent threats from approaching Australian territory during conflict. Crewed ships and aircraft that are the bulk of today’s ADF would focus on peacetime responses and acting as a last line of defense in war.
To support these concepts, teams in the TTXs developed a posture that organized the ADF into pickets, pouncers, and protectors as shown in figure ES.1. Uncrewed pickets detect and respond to threats; a mix of crewed and uncrewed pouncers delay or stop threats; and crewed protectors surge to augment pouncers or defend high-priority locations such as cities or military installations.
This study translates the concepts and posture developed during TTXs into a new force design that could sustain a deterrence campaign, summarized in figure ES.2. This design is affordable, assuming that the ADoD can redistribute the AUD 12.8 billion it earmarked for uncrewed systems between 2025 and 2035 to a new combination of crewed and uncrewed systems.
The force design only proposes modest changes in crewed units. Fiscal and industrial base constraints preclude growing crewed forces substantially while economic concerns prevent eliminating larger programs, such as in shipbuilding, that provide sizable employment. As shown in figure ES.2, the force design eliminates the Large Optionally Crewed Surface Vessel and adds short-range ground-based air defenses and aerial refueling aircraft.
The proposed force design makes almost all of its changes to the uncrewed system portfolio, primarily because they offer the scale and adaptability to address the ADF’s need for a distributed force that can defend the northern approaches while mounting a deterrence campaign against likely opponents.
Australia needs a new, more realistic defense strategy and a rebalanced force design to implement it. The strategy of cost imposition proposed by this study would seek to deter aggression by increasing enemy losses in a conflict and raising the likelihood of protraction. Facing the prospect of an embarrassing inability to quickly bring Australia to heel, adversary leaders may forgo military action and choose other avenues to pursue their interests against Canberra.
In addition to being affordable within the ADoD’s existing spending plans, the changes recommended by the force design are implementable largely through domestic manufacturing and assembly. Although the ADoD may initially need to purchase some uncrewed systems from suppliers in allied countries like the United States, it can quickly pivot to building them in Australia. In addition to promoting economic development, this approach would allow the ADF to draw on a common allied industrial base and supply chain.
Of course, this study’s proposed force design is probably not the exact right answer. Systems will require rigorous assessment and testing, and some concepts may prove too challenging to execute in practice. The concepts and programmatic recommendations of this report are intended to give force planners an idea of the challenges and opportunities in building the future force and the possibilities within the ADF’s likely fiscal and personnel limitations. While the ADF’s challenges are substantial, it can still field an effective force during the next decade. But to realize this vision, the Australian government will need to act now while budgets enable the ADF to embrace the potential in uncrewed systems and other new technologies.