Simultaneous shifts in the character of warfare and in the international system are heightening Australia’s risk of strategic surprise. Changes in one domain could unexpectedly coalesce with changes in another, rendering the country suddenly more vulnerable.

Australia’s resilience to such shocks lies in greater self-reliance, says Hugh Jeffrey, the deputy secretary for strategy, policy, and industry at the Department of Defence.

For the time being, the military-technical revolution seen in Iran and especially Ukraine was severely hindering attackers’ ability to make gains, Jeffrey said at 2026 ASPI Defence Conference in June. To some extent, this ameliorates the danger of strategic surprise.

Yet it cannot be relied on to last. New technological and doctrinal advances may deliver new upsets, as happened near the end of World War I.

Jeffrey said that the international system was currently in a state of interregnum – ‘a period between orders’ – with the United States no longer the global hegemon but with no other state having replaced it. According to Jeffrey, this means ‘there’s going to be a struggle … and that struggle will be between states as they vie with each other to shape the structures of the new order to follow.’

While not downplaying the value of middle power cooperation, Jeffrey was clear that this struggle was overwhelmingly the purview of great powers. Other countries such as Australia, had limited influence over the struggle. ‘We can’t prevent it. We can’t end it. But what we want to be able to do is navigate it.’ From there, Jeffrey posed a follow-up question: ‘How do we contribute to a broader balance of power that precludes the use of force as a tool?’

His answer was ‘self-reliance’, a concept that underpins the government’s National Defence Strategy. Under this approach, Australia seeks to strengthen its own military capability while still using its relationship with the US and other partners to achieve, maintain and maximise that capability.

The deputy secretary said that military-technological developments might help in maintaining a balance of power favourable to Australia. He noted that ‘war is more prevalent as a tool of statecraft than at any time since the end of the Second World War.’ Yet he also noted that modern technologies such as drones, AI and widespread, real-time satellite surveillance had minimised the strategic gains achieved through military action.

Jeffrey hoped that this development would lead states ‘to draw the conclusion that force is a risk’: useful as a deterrent but ‘not a viable tool for territorial conquest’.

While this is an encouraging takeaway, similar ideas have arisen before. A few decades before WWI, banker and railway magnate Ivan Bloch famously argued that enhancements in artillery, small arms and railways (among others) would lead to entrenchment and stalemate. This would make it ‘unlikely a war on the European continent would break out’.

One broke out anyway. And while Bloch was right about the loss of battlefield mobility, at least on the Western Front, an artillery-led revolution in combined arms restored it 1918. After the war, an intending aggressor could again see potential gains from military action.

Jeffrey was not arguing that modern technology would render warfare irrational, as Bloch optimistically proposed, but rather that recent developments favoured the defender. An aggressor might therefore think twice before pursuing expansionist goals via military means.

This development enhances Australia’s relative deterrent effect as a middle power against great powers. However, history tells us to expect surprise. What one state may view as irrational, may be seen by another as perfectly worthwhile.

Today, immobility has returned in battlefields of Ukraine under skies infested with drones. And US and Israeli attacks on Iran have been unable to fully suppress the threat of strike missiles, including cheap and abundant ones driven by propellers.

But we could be two days, two months or 20 years away from another military revolution that again shifts our strategic calculations. We don’t know when, how or where warfare will evolve, but unless humanity has finally bucked an age-old trend, it is not a question of ‘if’.

Jeffrey outlined an approach for a world in flux. Australia cannot control the storm or the seas, but it can at least build a good raft from which to advocate its interests to great powers.

His approach recognises the inevitability of strategic surprise and seeks to pragmatically prepare Australia to face it as never before in its history. The world is at a crossroads in more ways than one. The only certainty about the future – be it in warfare or statecraft – seems to be uncertainty. Hugh Jeffrey emphasised that Defence was clear-eyed about this and was seeking novel ways to meet it. Australia wasn’t preparing for any one scenario; it is preparing for the unknown.