In today’s national security environment, experience alone is no longer enough. As technology, industry and strategic competition evolve at speed, Australia needs to do more than rely on established voices. It needs to actively amplify younger perspectives that can challenge long-held assumptions, identify practical gaps and bring frontline understanding of emerging change into national security debates.
Recognising this, ASPI’s 2026 Darwin Dialogue, held in April, introduced a new session titled ‘Young Guns: Ideas from Emerging Thinkers’. The session was designed to bring early-career professionals into a traditionally senior forum and test whether different perspectives would change the nature of the conversation.
They did.
While the broader Dialogue examined how Australia and its partners can build trusted and diversified critical minerals supply chains, the Young Guns session focused more directly on the assumptions, bottlenecks and trade-offs that could prevent Australia from delivering on its critical-minerals ambitions.
The session highlighted several often-unspoken challenges within the critical minerals sector. Speakers warned that the current broad definition of critical minerals risked diluting policy focus and investment, while also cautioning that Australia’s ambitions couldn’t rely on investment and processing alone, noting that ‘we should not delude ourselves into thinking that we have equivalent deposits to the Chinese’. Others pointed to growing workforce shortages, particularly among geoscientists and technical specialists, which are needed to support exploration, extraction and processing.
The session tackled overlooked ideas in strategic debates, providing practical, balanced and, most of all, meaningful and refreshing contributions to the more senior and experienced Dialogue members.
That matters because strategy alone does not build capability.
Australia is attempting to simultaneously expand sovereign industrial capability, scale critical minerals production, strengthen defence resilience and develop northern Australia, all while competing for a shrinking pool of engineers, geoscientists and technical specialists. Meanwhile, demand for education in mining occupations has collapsed. Between 2014 and 2018, mining engineering enrolments fell by 68 percent, while completions declined by 65 percent over the same period. Industry bodies now warn the sector faces both an ageing workforce and a constricting supply pipeline, contributing to critical skills shortages across Australia.
This reduction in young voices handicaps the type of innovative and diverse thought that drives advancement. It also constrains the development of the next generation of leaders who are set to shape the sector’s future.
Even when young professionals enter the industry, they are often required to bide their time within rigid hierarchical structures and outdated decision-making processes. They are expected to execute the ideas of others rather than meaningfully contribute to strategic decision-making themselves.
This underutilisation can be costly.
Early-career professionals are often working closest to these pressures long before they reach senior decision-makers. Analysts, operators, technologists and industry professionals can identify where policy assumptions no longer reflect the operating environment before those problems appear in formal assessments.
Who better to challenge established thinking than those most likely to be at ground zero?
NATO understood this in 2020 when it established the NATO 2030 Young Leaders Group to provide recommendations directly to secretary general Jens Stoltenberg on resilience, emerging technologies and future threats. Several priorities raised through the process, including resilience, technology competition and Indo-Pacific engagement, later became more prominent within NATO’s broader 2030 agenda and Strategic Concept discussions.
Young people aren’t always right, but they increase the likelihood that uncomfortable questions are raised early enough to matter. National security debates are increasingly defined by delivery. Institutions that only recognise problems once they reach senior decision-makers are often already behind those problems.
As Australia’s strategic environment becomes more technologically complex and economically interconnected, this ability to challenge assumptions early will become essential.
The Young Guns session added value because it forced the discussion back onto practical constraints and implementation pressures. The contributions were practical, grounded and at times uncomfortable. They challenged assumptions that had become widely accepted across government, industry and academia, strengthening the broader Dialogue.
Bringing younger voices into Australia’s national security discussions is not about representation or box-ticking. Stronger institutions are built by challenging assumptions before failure forces adaptation.