We rarely speak about the roles Australian business executives might play in a major conflict, and even less about how to prepare them for those positions. That’s probably because our defence and strategic discussions tend to focus on the bigger, more important issues of budget allocation, personnel readiness and capability development.

But history suggests that when the nation is truly tested, it is not only soldiers and diplomats who play a leading role, but also miners, logisticians, financiers, and innovators—people who can scale up manufacturing production, marshal supply chains and deliver on wartime needs. We need to make sure that today’s business leaders are ready to do the same.

Few have embodied this point better than Essington Lewis, a man whom former prime minister Robert Menzies described as ‘one of the great industrialists in the history of this country’. Lewis was the managing director of BHP and went on to lead both the Commonwealth Munitions Board and the Department of Aircraft Production in World War II. In those roles, he drove a program of national rearmament and industrial mobilisation to support domestic and allied wartime needs. Importantly, Lewis was also a standing member of the influential Defence Committee and made frequent input during war cabinet deliberations, alongside Australia’s military chiefs.

Aside from his business acumen and geopolitical nous—having travelled to Japan in the 1930s and deduced that the expansion of strategic industries represented a material threat to Australian security—Lewis was also a man comfortable with challenging the status quo. In a 1936 letter to Harold Darling, then chairman of BHP, he candidly reflected that ‘the federal government at present is leaderless, brainless and gutless’. He recognised, earlier than most, that more needed to be done to prepare the country for a future war.

Today we face a strategic moment akin to that period. The Indo-Pacific is again being shaped by an aggressive and malign Asian power, unprecedented defence spending is fuelling a regional arms race, and trade is being governed by a risk-informed economic security agenda. The possibility of conflict is becoming less remote. But unlike in Lewis’ era, when many of his counterparts had served in World War I, very few of today’s business leaders have had any exposure to combat or the inner functioning of Australia’s military ecosystem.

Recognising this, it’s worth asking whom the government could engage from the private sector if, or when, war is declared. Specifically, who would be Australia’s next Essington Lewis? As I mused about a possible shortlist, including the likes of Andrew Forrest (Fortescue Metals Group), Mike Cannon-Brooks (Atlassian), Matt Comyn (Commonwealth Bank), Leah Weckert (Coles Group) and Mark Mazurek (Linfox Logistics)—each with a valuable skillset to offer in a conflict scenario despite the international scope of their business interests—I soon realised that identifying potential candidates was but a small part of a bigger puzzle. To my mind, the vital question is: how do we prepare these individuals, ahead of time, for their all-important task?

One option would be to implement a scheme for chief executives, based on the highly successful Australian Defence Force Parliamentary Program. As part of a placement within unit level and strategic command positions, prospective business contributors could be provided with indispensable exposure to the Australian Defence Force and national security community. They could engage the relevant stakeholders, encounter the challenges being experienced within the force and use the opportunity to reflect on their role in support of national defence.

This preparation process should also include participation in a real-time exercise series that would test a range of possible scenarios and threats, and expose both corporate secondees and departmental officials to one another. Along those lines, a wargaming program would also provide an opportunity to confirm the composition, legal powers and integration of wartime production boards, logistics authorities or resilience taskforces within existing governmental processes and structures—embodying the chief of army’s Fight Tonight mantra.

I am not the first to ask these questions nor highlight the importance of executive-level public-private collaboration to Australia’s wartime success. But the list of contributors on this topic—including Mike Pezzullo and Geoffrey Blainey—is unfortunately short. Just last year, Senator James Patterson delivered the Menzies Institute ANZAC Oration and remarked that ‘it should not take a global conflict to realise… [the role] of private sector talent to bolster the war effort’. In 2021, the then governor of Western Australia and former minister of defence, Kim Beazley, said in a John Curtin Anniversary Lecture that ‘having an Essington Lewis around is not enough’.

Beazley’s comments remain sage. This is because Australia’s ability to manage conflict, endure disruption, and recover from shock will depend as much on a community of business leaders as it does on military commanders. Essington Lewis understood this better than most: national defence is a national responsibility.

And as we navigate this period of increasing strategic uncertainty, Australia should identify, engage and train the next cohort of wartime officials from the private sector as part of a broader, contemporary conversation about the function of a country at war.