Australia’s most advanced military capabilities are fundamentally tethered to the resilience of its most basic civilian supply chains.
For decades, Australia’s national prosperity and security have been built on the foundations of a stable, globalised world. As an island continent, it has leveraged its geographic position to become a major trading nation, exporting vast natural resources and importing the complex manufactured goods that underpin a modern economy. This model, based on the security of sea lanes and the efficiency of just-in-time global supply chains, has delivered unparalleled wealth.
But as the world has grown more unstable, the very architecture of Australia’s economic success has become its most significant strategic vulnerability. The nation’s reliance on external supply chains, once a calculated economic risk, is now a critical national security threat, particularly for the Australian Defence Force.
More than 99 percent of Australia’s international trade by volume is carried by sea, funnelled through a series of contested chokepoints in the Indo-Pacific. Any disruption to these sea lines of communication, whether from conflict, coercion, or even climate-related disasters, would have immediate and catastrophic effects on the Australian economy and its ability to function.
Australia’s geographic location has historically been a military advantage. But as supply chains have globalised, that geography has presented vulnerabilities that are woven into the fabric of our most critical sectors.
The most systemic supply-chain risk Australia faces is its liquid fuel supply. Australia depends on imports for more than 90 percent of its crude oil and refined products, with a just-in-time supply model that leaves only a few weeks of stock on hand. Diesel is the economy’s lifeblood, indispensable for heavy transport, agriculture, mining and emergency services. A disruption to fuel imports would paralyse the distribution of food, medicine and all other essential goods. This would affect all areas of society, hampering our ability to defend ourselves and effectively bring the national economy to a standstill. There is a bitter irony that it takes diesel to move diesel around the continent.
Medical and health supplies are also highly vulnerable to supply-chain disruptions. The pandemic exposed Australia’s reliance on global supply chains for its health security. The nation imports 90 percent of its medicines and has almost no capacity to manufacture the active pharmaceutical ingredients required for most essential drugs. Shortages of basic items, such as personal protective equipment during the pandemic and intravenous fluids in recent months, have reminded us that we are at the end of a very long and fragile supply chain. This distance will be felt far more acutely in times of global crisis.
The ADF’s ability to sustain operations is similarly contingent on a global network of suppliers, particularly for precision-guided munitions and explosive ordnance. In a major conflict, these supply chains and resources would be heavily contested, and multinational prime contractors may be required to prioritise their home nations at Australia’s expense.
The ADF also relies heavily on secure access to critical minerals essential for defence technology, including rare earths for magnets, tungsten for heat resistance, titanium for aerospace parts, and antimony for military alloys and night vision equipment. While Australia is rich in mineral resources, its limited processing capabilities and its reliance on exporting raw ore restrict its ability to produce the Defence-grade components needed by the ADF in times of conflict, when supply chains will be even more vulnerable than usual.
The operational consequences of these dependencies are stark and cut across all domains of the ADF. They reveal that military power is not merely a function of advanced platforms, but of the mundane logistics that sustain the nation that supports them. The F-35A Lightning, for all its sophistication, cannot fly if a lack of diesel immobilises the truck carrying its jet fuel. A nuclear-powered submarine is rendered ineffective if it cannot be stocked with food for its crew to survive, a task reliant on a functioning national grocery supply chain. The army cannot mobilise if the civilian logistics networks required to move its forces and supplies to points of embarkation have collapsed.
Put simply, an adversary doesn’t need to attack the Australian mainland; it just needs to interrupt supply chains and then wait.
In the face of these vulnerabilities, building independent domestic capability is the only credible path to a more resilient ADF. This is not a call for protectionism or a retreat from global trade, which remains vital to Australia’s prosperity. Rather, it is a strategic rebalancing that recognises the need for self-reliance in areas critical to the nation’s functioning and defence during a crisis. It is a shift from a purely efficiency-driven just-in-time model, to a security-focused just-in-case posture.
In future confrontations, Australia’s capacity to endure will not be determined solely by the advanced capabilities of its military, but by its ability to fuel its trucks, stock its hospitals and sustain supply from its farms and factories. The urgent task for military policymakers is to recognise that sovereign industrial capability is the essential bedrock of national resilience, not a discretionary ideal. Without the domestic capacity to sustain itself, Australia risks becoming a brittle nation, dangerously exposed in an increasingly uncertain world.