Why should Australia organise national resources for defence before a crisis occurs, and what must be true for that approach to succeed?

Australia’s strategic circumstances have changed in ways that require the nation, and its military, to rethink preparedness, resilience and the generation of military power. This challenge is not unique to Australia. Across the world, coercion, crisis and conflict are forcing defence forces and ministries to revise plans, assess new technologies, acquire new equipment, and commit to reform and increased funding. Yet some areas of policy and planning have moved more slowly than the strategic environment around them. Logistics is one of those areas. After two decades of steadily increasing strategic pressure, the acute crises of the past five or six years have brought logistics problems into a position where it would be negligent not to act. These problems matter because they directly affect how quickly nations can unlock their potential to raise, prepare, sustain, fight and reconstitute military forces.

Government policy has demonstrably shifted to address this strategically demanding environment and its strong logistics implications. The 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS26), continuing themes from the 2024 National Defence Strategy (NDS24) and the 2022–23 Defence Strategic Review (DSR), reminds Australians that the nation has entered a more dangerous and unpredictable era. This era is characterised by intensifying strategic competition, the erosion of thresholds against coercion and the use of force, rapid technological change, and a heightened risk that military crises beyond Australia’s immediate geography will have direct consequences for Australian security and prosperity.[1] In response, the Australian Government has adopted the strategic concept of National Defence: a coordinated, whole-of-government and whole-of-nation approach that brings all arms of national power to bear in protecting Australia’s sovereignty and security. The concept sits alongside national security, but is more specifically concerned with national preparedness and resilience in the face of military threats, coercion, crisis and conflict.

National Defence signals to government agencies and the wider Australian community that they, too, have a role in defending the nation and its interests. For Defence planners, however, its implications are more transformational. Defence remains the only arm of government that generates and employs military power, and it must therefore play a leading role in any approach to National Defence. At the same time, the concept makes clear that the Australian Defence Force (ADF) will only be sufficiently prepared and capable if it is developed with whole-of-nation capacities, constraints and risks in mind. This provides the context for Defence’s Integrated Investment Plan and the delivery of the future force: a force designed to deter or respond to military threats, and supported by the broader resources of government, industry and the nation.

An apocryphal view of National Defence

National Defence can also be understood through a different lens—one that focuses less on long-term capability ambitions and more on the strategic logistics output generated by Australia’s policy settings. In line with approaches to whole-of-nation defence used internationally, including within alliance frameworks, National Defence could be at its most effective creating conditions of a logistics nature rather than as a traditional military strategy.  If National Defence is about building the total national capability and capacity available for a well-prepared defence effort, one in which civil-military coordination unlocks the nation’s economic and societal strengths for a military purpose, the association seems clear:

Strategic logistics is the art and science of harnessing the economic and societal strengths of a nation for national defence.

In a specific sense, strategic logistics is the process for planning for, coordinating and allocating the manpower, materiel, infrastructure and services required for military war production and civil sector needs. It is especially concerned with the preparedness of the combat force. Strategic level logistics is central to raising, training, mobilising, deploying, sustaining, reconstituting and demobilising a military force.[2]

There is, of course, more to National Defence than the transformation of national economic power to military effect through logistics processes. Even so, it is through the lens of strategic logistics that we can see National Defence at its most purposeful, its outcomes most strategically significant, and its consequences measurable. We can see that National Defence becomes logistically significant in how it creates a narrative around the national resources needed in war, and those that are beyond what the ADF organically possesses so that it is prepared and can sustain its operations. In a purely military context, it is through strategic logistics that the concept truly matters, creating the military forces that can scale and the conditions for their sustainment over indeterminable periods of time.

Australian strategic history is replete with government-led attempts to construct a whole-of-nation approach to underpin the preparedness and operational sustainability. During the 1980’s, a national defensive self-reliance strategic approach led to mobilisation planning, exercises that tested how the ADF might sustain its operations in regional Australia and encouraged civil-military engagement. In the 1990’s, cuts to Defence logistics capabilities coupled with commercialisation meant compensatory logistics approaches had to be developed under the banner of a ‘national support agenda’. The next decade brought with it numerous industry policy reforms as government explored ways to improve defence acquisition and sustainment. And despite an easy-to-sustain series of Middle east operations, the growing use of contactors in operations and a stagnancy in terms of real investment in military logistics capabilities made deeper civil-military logistics integration unavoidable.

This time, however, the stakes do seem higher. If the new National Defence Strategy is to be believed, a new civil-military approach to support, logistics or not, is not just compensatory but about defence solvency. Accordingly, and perhaps at some cost to current approaches to defence planning, the ways in which military power must now be prepared, projected and sustained must change. Even if military force is brought to bear in isolation of other arms of national power, it is patently clear that it would be impossible to resource Australia’s defence force to the extent that it will meet every potentiality that the nation may face. And so, the Australian Defence Force (ADF), like those of other Western militaries, must make choices at a crossroads where new pressures force a ‘revaluation of assumptions about how they prepare for, and subsequently sustain, operations during a conflict.’[3]

Building a new approach to national support

As I have said elsewhere, ‘[p]reparing effectively for such scenarios starts with education and awareness, and strengthening resilience is achieved by implementing systems that mobilise national resources effectively during conflict.’[4] Most commentators would agree that the contemporary strategic environment requires Defence to recognise that military preparedness and military endurance are increasingly dependent upon sources of support that sit beyond Defence’s direct control: the social, political, economic and institutional capabilities that and national industry, logistics networks, critical infrastructure, energy and fuel systems, data and communications networks, workforce, health systems, strategic supply chains and the broader civic and governmental arrangements through which those systems are coordinated.

Since the Defence Strategic Review energised defence preparedness as an issue, Defence has characterised the support it requires as ‘national support’. National support is a young term, but not a new one, having characterised the ADF’s approach to strategic logistics in the late 1990’s:

National support refers to the integrated application of the resources of the nation for its defence; it is the provision and coordinated use of national resources to enable Defence to prepare, sustain, and, when necessary, mobilise military responses in crisis and conflict.[5]

From the point-of-view of military doctrine, the genealogy of national support is one of the administrative division of logistics between military and non-military components. Yet national support is more than an administrative or logistical adjunct to strategic or defence policy. Instead, it is the connective tissue between military ambition and national capacity, between deterrence in theory and deterrence in practice, and between the idea of National Defence and how Defence can respond, fight, endure, recover and adapt. In historical terms, this reflects a broader understanding of strategic logistics as the process by which a nation harnesses manpower, materiel, infrastructure, institutions and services to prepare, deploy, sustain and reconstitute military forces. National support is thus best understood as one of the main means through which the strategy that Government policy defines becomes executable.

In considering national support, it is important to acknowledge the differences between national capability and national capacity. National capability refers to those existing arrangements, organisations and systems that can contribute directly to the defence effort. National capacity, conversely, refers to the deeper potential of the nation—its industrial base, infrastructure, institutions, skills, knowledge, the confidence of the community, and broader economic strength—from which future capability is created, expanded or redirected. This distinction matters because an effective national support system must do more than identify what can be drawn upon immediately. It must also strengthen the totality of Australia’s national capacity from which future support can be generated in periods of sustained pressure, strategic surprise or protracted conflict.

Preparedness, however, cannot be achieved by managing national stocks, workforce, infrastructure or logistics throughput alone. It depends on the underlying systems, processes, authorities and behaviours that shape how a military responds to the unforeseen. It is from understanding and acting with these issues in mind that militaries, and nations, gain the ability to adapt; to resource what is needed, when and where. In fact, it is increasingly evident that these systems themselves that are the means that nations will employ to compete through the full spectrum of conflict – if they aren’t the reasons for nations to compete in the first place.

A strategic rationale for national support

I have long argued that Defence needs a new approach to national support – an approach that will be as essential to building the future force as it is to preparing the current force for the contemporary strategic environment. With the release of NDS26 now behind us, it is now time to flesh out what this approach should look like through a strategic rationale intended to inform and educate. In the articles which follow, I will use the five components of logistics preparedness to assess what a credible national support approach requires: policy and guidance; organisation; plans and planning; capability and forces; and testing and assessment.[6] Together, these components show that logistics performance in crisis is rarely improvised. It is usually the result of earlier choices about strategic direction, authority, force design, preparedness assumptions, workforce depth, stockholding and the realistic testing of support arrangements. They therefore provide a practical framework for understanding the contemporary strategic rationale for national support.

The articles that follow develop this argument in sequence. In my next article, I will explain why Australia’s deteriorating strategic environment makes national support a preparedness issue, not simply a sustainment concern.  In then articulating why Defence needs a new approach to national support in a fuller way than this introductory article, I will examine why Defence must organise, access and prioritise national resources before crisis rather than rely on improvised support under pressure. I will then move on to examine the attributes such a system must possess, including assured access, prioritisation, resilience, adaptability, integration and legitimacy. Finally, in summing up this strategic rationale, I’ll turn to practical implications and recommendations for Defence and its national support partners before concluding by restating why national support is not only an essential feature of National Defence, but the means through which National Defence becomes strategically meaningful.

Thankyou for reading this first article of a longer series. Your subscribing to ‘The Paper War’ and sharing of its articles is greatly appreciated.

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[1] Department of Defence, 2026 National Defence Strategy, Commonwealth of Australia, 2026, p 6

[2] The Australian Defence Force does not have a specific definition for strategic logistics, or logistics at the ‘strategic level’ in Defence. A working definition was produced in 2000, and cited in Beaumont, DJ. ‘Logistics, national support and the failure to prepare – the ADF’s approach to strategic logistics 1987 – 1999’, Thesis, Australian National University, 2024, glossary

[3] Beaumont, D., ‘Military solvency and sings of a system that might not work’ from The Paper War, Military solvency and signs of a system that might not work – why militaries must reimagine how they support and sustain forces in a future war – The Paper War: Logistics… and everything but the fighting. [Accessed 14 Jun 26]

[4] Beaumont, D., ‘Preparedness planning at a strategic juncture’ from The Paper War, Preparedness planning at a strategic juncture: four considerations for preparing the national support base for conflict – The Paper War: Logistics… and everything but the fighting. [Accessed 17 Jun 26]

[5] Beaumont, DJ. ‘Logistics, national support and the failure to prepare – the ADF’s approach to strategic logistics 1987 – 1999’, glossary

[6] Beaumont, DJ. ‘Logistics, national support and the failure to prepare – the ADF’s approach to strategic logistics 1987 – 1999’, glossary