We may be living in an increasingly dangerous world, as Australia’s 16 April National Defence Strategy reaffirmed, but at least there is now more rigour and regularity in designing defence policy.
In releasing the first National Defence Strategy (NDS) in 2024, the government set in place a process to renew the strategy and its accompanying spending plan, the Integrated Investment Program (IIP), every two years rather than relying on irregular Defence White Papers.
This new process allows intelligence updates, technological developments and lessons from contemporary conflicts to inform a single, authoritative strategy that’s issued at regular and suitably short intervals. In a department that often drowns in too many directives and too much guidance, the NDS is a welcome lifeboat for everyone involved in national defence to board.
The NDS process seeks to regularly explain to Australians how the Australian Defence Force is postured and why various structural and capability decisions are made. Most importantly, it seeks to explain why the bang the government is seeking is worth the taxpayers’ buck. This makes the biennial NDS process a vital component in continually shoring up Defence’s social contract with a public focused on a range of other economic and social issues.
There are a number of other benefits in applying this kind of rigour and regularity to Defence strategy development. The two-year cycle enshrines reassessments of defence strategy as a whole, rather than ad hoc adjustments to parts of it that may have previously required attention between White Papers. The gap between the first Defence White Paper, released in 1976, and the second, released in 1987, was 11 years. Gaps since have varied from three to seven years. Deteriorating strategic circumstances call for quicker strategy reviews, and the current two-year cycle seems about right. Any shorter and the strategy could give capability developers and defence industry whiplash. Any longer and Defence could lose pace with changes in the environment, technological developments and lessons from current conflicts.
Releasing the NDS with the IIP shows the thread of logic linking the ends and ways, described in the NDS, to the means, described in the IIP. This gives clear marching orders to the new Defence Delivery Group due to stand up in July, on its way to becoming an independent Defence Delivery Agency in July next year. Having a dedicated, permanent team within Defence continually working on the government’s next strategy builds knowledge and familiarity with the art and science of strategy development. That knowledge and focus was often lost between White Papers where teams of internal or external writers often had to start from scratch.
Another benefit of the government’s Defence strategy development process has only become evident with the release of this second strategy. NDS 2026 has demonstrated how changes in the strategic environment and lessons from contemporary conflicts are feeding into strategy development and the IIP in a coherent and structured way. Take, for example, the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran, where the increasing value of drones, especially cheap and numerous ones, is plain to see. These conflicts have also reinforced a critical need for large stocks of guided weapons and explosive ordnance, again in significant numbers. This new strategy has assessed the need for these capabilities in an Australian context and doubles down on both. Similarly, national resilience was a key feature of the first strategy. If Covid-19 didn’t drive home the requirement for our nation to enhance our ability to ride out global supply-chain shocks, the current conflict in the Strait of Hormuz certainly has. Again, this iteration of the NDS has further elevated the need for greater national resilience.
A good process for strategy development goes a long way to producing good strategy. The rigour and regularity the government has applied to producing an NDS and IIP on a two-yearly cycle is providing a thread of logic between the ends, ways and means of national defence. The process allows for regular re-scans of our strategic environment and the incorporation of new technology and contemporary lessons from current battlefields. This current two-year process appears to have hit a sweet spot.