How can Defence’s national support approach evolve from a strategic concept into a fundamental component of a whole-of-nation preparedness system?

There can be little doubt that Defence’s approach to national support directly impacts the way it will sustain future operations. The Australian Government said as much in the 2026 National Defence Strategy. The immediate question is where Defence should begin. In preceding articles, I have argued that the solution to this problem will not only be found in the creation of new arrangements for national support between Defence and its partners. Instead, the solution will come through a succession of different actions that show an acceptance that Australia’s ability to generate military power now depends on whether national capacities can be coordinated before crisis, protected during competition, prioritised under crisis conditions, and adapted and transformed during conflict. It will come in recognising that national support is not a narrow military readiness issue, or a subject confined to mobilisation planning in preparation for in extremis strategic conditions. National support speaks to the functioning of Defence writ large, and the way that it relates itself to all arms of national power.[1]

Unfortunately for planners and policy-makers, the establishment of an effective national support approach asks both groups to rethink how the defence organisation operates in peace and war. It force both to acknowledge the dependencies between Defence and broader Australian society beyond the socio-cultural norms and conversations that military institutions are usually comfortable with. It is bound up with the practicalities and specifics of issues like: organisational behaviour, governance and the routines that create logistics readiness; supply-chain security and the relationship between commercial logistics, the balance between investments in national security and economic prosperity; the vulnerability of munitions and military supply chains; the mobilisation of national logistics in support of military operations; the contemporary contestation of logistics space and the changing character of war; and finding the route towards industrial access for future military operations.

All of the abovementioned problems demand a shift to the assumptions that underpin planning and policy. Defence can no longer presume that national support, commercial logistics systems or the global industrial base will be available at a time and place of its choosing, whether that be in relatively benign environments or those experienced when strategic conditions deteriorate. If national support is to become more than an aspiration, the concept must now shape how Defence defines demand, designs capability, plans mobilisation, tests arrangements and works with the national support base. It must also clarify what government, industry, infrastructure operators, states and territories, commercial providers and other partners need to do before crisis occurs.

This article therefore looks to the implications of a new approach to national support for Defence and its partners. It consolidates the conceptual ideas and contexts described in previous articles into a case for action. Some of these actions may be underway, or are being fulfilled through agenda which takes a subtly different path to the same conclusion. Despite this, we cannot forget that national support is a meta-idea – a powerful narrative about preparedness that can shape the totality of national-level actions to prepare a nation and its military forces for competition, crisis and conflict. Consequently, it is important that all of its conceptual components and practical outcomes are mentioned here such that the ‘whole’ is seen to be much stronger than its ‘parts’.

Implications and Recommendations for Defence

For Defence, the implications arise from the full rationale for national support rather than another set of principles, nor a regime of actions locked within a new corporate agenda. Part 1 located national support within the generation of military power; Part 2 demonstrated the strategic risks to the national support base; and Part 3 connected Defence preparedness with national civil preparedness – and Part 4 gave the principles by which Defence turns concept into institutional practice. The task is not simply to engage more often with external partners or to describe national support in strategic policy. It is to mature national support as a standing defence preparedness and planning function that shapes force design, mobilisation planning, sustainment, reconstitution and the assessment of strategic risk.

First, and at the heart of the sustainability dilemma that national support presents, Defence should treat access to industrial capacity and logistics infrastructure as strategic questions in their own right. Strategic policy discourse internationally has already begun to move beyond viewing supply chain security, fuel availability, and munitions sustainment solely through the lens of scarcity. Increasingly, attention is being directed towards the competition for strategically significant logistics networks, critical infrastructure, industrial capabilities, and transportation systems that enable the generation, sustainment, and projection of military power. This competition demands more purposeful and coordinated national policy responses, even as National Defence is implemented and industrial policy priorities are being set.[2]

In the Australian context, it cannot be assumed that commercial contracts, market mechanisms, allied supply chains, or civilian infrastructure will automatically align with Defence, or even broader government, requirements during periods of crisis or conflict. Policy and planning must therefore focus on establishing, shaping, and protecting the conditions that secure access to production, maintenance and repair capacity, transportation networks, data systems, energy resources, and skilled labour. They must also address areas where competing civil and military demand could create unacceptable levels of friction, while developing national support arrangements that provide priority access, resilience, surge capacity, and substitution options before they are required. Ultimately, policy and planning must provide a disciplined framework for addressing the strategic problems that determine Defence’s access to the logistics networks, industrial capabilities, and national resources upon which military freedom of action depends.

Second, Defence should treat national support as part of how military power is generated, not merely how it is sustained after force design decisions have been made. This follows from Part 4’s argument that national support must be integrated into Defence policy and planning from the outset, and it is a core requirement of logistics preparedness. But it also means that national support is not just an issue for preparedness and mobilisation planning; it demands consideration in capability program processes that determine the form and factor of the force-in-being as well as the future force. The greater the analytic effort undertaken by Defence to understand national support base capability risks, and the better integrated the results of this analysis are into military capability programs, the more likely Defence will be able to identify where interest (and, inevitably, resources) is best spent, and where the nation’s own capabilities should be invested in accordingly.

It will be impossible for Defence to determine where capability risks lie without understanding what its national support requirements are. Defence therefore needs a clearer national support demand signal across infrastructure, workforce, industry, fuel, transport, digital systems, critical materiel, health, repair and reconstitution, and the governance systems that coordinate the, all. This signal should inform capability planning; preparedness analysis, measurement and reporting; and any preparatory planning for operations and mobilisation. If national support is left to implementation, Defence is likely to carry invalidated assumptions about the preparedness and capacity of the national base on which deterrence and operational endurance depend. Secondly, and more importantly, the signal should form the basis of the conversation between Defence and its national civil preparedness partners – after all, it is these partners that may be called upon to support an Australian military response with potentially little warning.

Third, Defence should lead more deliberate work on assured access and prioritisation as fundamental preparedness problems. These were the first two characteristics identified in Part 4 because they determine whether national resources can be made available when they are most needed and whether government can make well-informed choices under scarcity. Strategic crisis will expose intra-national competition for fuel, freight, labour, infrastructure, data, health capacity, industrial output and government attention. Civil sector requirements will compete for Defence’s national support requirements. Allied or coalition requirements could even compete with Australia’s national needs, exacerbating a logistics dilemma that is already difficult to solve.

Defence should therefore work with central agencies, states and territories, regulators, industry and critical infrastructure operators to review the legal, policy, commercial and coordination mechanisms through which access would be obtained and priorities set.  The objective is not Defence primacy in every circumstance, but a national support system that enables government to balance military and civil requirements before scarcity forces decisions about priorities to be improvised at speed. Moreover, this same system when placed in the context of allied or coalition requirements can help to preserve Australian self-reliance, and sovereignty in resource-based decision making at a government level.

Fourth, Defence could consider the prioritisation of resilience and adaptability measures as national support investments that strengthen deterrence, operational endurance and civil continuity at the same time. Resilience, selective redundancy, adaptability and scalability are central characteristics of any national support system because the national support base is itself a contested strategic space. Fuel assurance, transport interoperability, port and rail resilience, cyber and data hardening, specialist workforce development, selective stockholding, industrial repair capacity and resilient communications exemplify enablers that will be far from being peripheral in a crisis or conflict. They are also part of how Australia resists coercion, absorbs disruption and sustains military missions and tasks. Measures that generate peacetime national value as well as crisis utility are additionally likely to be the most sustainable and persuasive.

Fifth, effort should be taken to improve the level of literacy regarding national support planning in Defence. The five components of logistics preparedness introduced in Part 1, and applied throughout this paper, provide a practical framework for understanding national support as an integrated system rather than a collection of discrete activities. Moreover, they help to shape the artefacts and narratives needed to embed national support thinking within Defence. What should they show?

Policy and guidance should clearly articulate the purpose of national support, the assumptions that underpin it, and the circumstances under which national resources may need to be accessed, prioritised, or directed. Organisational arrangements should define authorities, accountabilities, and relationships across Defence, the Services, Groups, central agencies, industry, and other external partners. Plans should connect the stages of current levels of preparedness, heightened preparedness where readiness for the next stage is achieved, mobilisation, sustainment, and finally demobilisation, ensuring that national support considerations are embedded throughout the entirety of the force scaling process. Capability development policies and processes should include both Defence and national capacities required to absorb and sustain support at scale. Testing, exercising, and assessment should then be used to validate these arrangements under realistic conditions and identify areas requiring improvement.

Ultimately, improving literacy in national support planning is not simply a training and educational objective. It is about creating a commonly understood picture of what national support is, and how it can be implemented in practice. Most importantly, it leads the development of a shared understanding of how Defence, government, industry, and the broader national support base must work together to sustain military operations during crisis and conflict.

Finally, Defence should continue to evolve its approach to national support, and its preparedness and capability consequently, through relationships, rehearsal and behavioural change. Part 4 emphasised that testing, integration, social legitimacy and strategic communication are not ancillary tasks but are characteristics of a system that can perform as best as possible under pressure. Defence should therefore continue to build upon its enduring relationships with industry, infrastructure operators, governments and communities; establish information-sharing and planning mechanisms that make dependencies visible; and exercise mobilisation, access, prioritisation, infrastructure dependencies, supply contingencies – potentially governance systems – with civil and commercial partners. The decisive measure of success will be when Defence and the national support base can act together with speed, clarity and coherency when warning time is short and demand escalates.

Implications and Recommendations for National Support Partners

The same logic applies to Defence’s national support partners across government, industry, the community sector and the wider economy. Part 1 showed that military power depends on national resources, which means partners must understand how their capabilities contribute to defence outcomes. Part 2 showed that competition, coercion and conflict may pressure or disrupt those capabilities before Defence needs them most meaning that partners must be prepared for crisis or conflict. Part 3 established that national support links Defence preparedness with national civil preparedness by protecting civil continuity while enabling military power, requiring partners to be active participants in the conversations about what Defence may require for its own obligations to national strategy. Part 4 then provided the principles and basic standards against which partner contributions should be organised, tested and improved. In sum, and as we can learn from NATO’s emerging civil preparedness framework among numerous other examples, all of the nation support base has a stake in the preparedness and resilience results that are achieved by Australia.[3] This means that partners must treat their contribution to national support as a permanent preparedness responsibility rather than a contingent obligation.

First, partners should identify before crisis which of their capabilities, services, assets, workforce, information systems or networks may become strategically significant. Ports, transport corridors, fuel systems, health services, telecommunications, data centres, manufacturers, emergency management organisations, regulators and state and territory authorities may all form part of the national support base. This does not require organisations to subordinate their peacetime missions to Defence; in a military crisis each such organisation has an important role in ensuring Australia continues to function with its full vitality. However, it does require them to understand how continuity, surge capacity and their own decision-making may affect Defence preparedness and national resilience prior to, and during, a crisis or conflict.

Second, partners should apply the same logistics preparedness disciplines to their own roles in National Defence. At the jurisdictional level, policy and guidance should clarify responsibilities, thresholds and expectations. Institutions, industries and other groups that provide support to Defence might also seek to understand what their relationship to jurisdictions will be if a military crisis or conflict ever eventuates. Organisational arrangements should enable coordinated action and information-sharing across jurisdictions and sectors – and into and out of Defence. Jurisdictions and sectors should develop plans that address continuity, surge, substitution and support to Defence under pressure. Capability and workforce decisions should recognise that strategic demand may arise quickly and result in conflicts and tensions between military and civil needs. Especially important is that testing and assessment should always be applied to confirm that any arrangements developed within jurisdictions and standards are workable before they are relied upon. Logistics preparedness is therefore not just a Defence standard but part of a whole-of-nation discipline for the wider national support base.

Third, partners should work with Defence, central agencies and jurisdictions and one another to clarify access and prioritisation arrangements. For many organisations, the challenge in crisis will be not willingness to assist, but balancing Defence demand against regulatory obligations, commercial commitments, public-service responsibilities, shareholder expectations, workforce limits and civil continuity requirements. Early agreement on legal authorities, commercial frameworks, escalation pathways, data-sharing, risk ownership and decision responsibilities will reduce ambiguity and help government make coherent choices when demands compete. These arrangements could be supported by structurally significant approaches to legislation, or the organisation of national support and security work. This work must be informed by the operational, commercial and regulatory knowledge that only Defence’s partners can provide, whatever their form and function. Indeed, Defence’s partners will prove to be the locus for much of the practical expertise, authority and capacity needed to make access and prioritisation arrangements work, and policies and plans implementable at all.

Fourth, partners should enhance any applicable resilience and adaptability measures that strengthen their own continuity (business or not) and the wider national support system where viable. This task is implied through the concept of National Defence, but also through the full array of expectations that national institutions set within the broader national civil preparedness task. But it requires specific treatment. For example, infrastructure operators may look at options for redundancy, expansion, cyber hardening, backup power, restoration plans and protected data arrangements. Industry and service providers may require diversified supply, workforce depth, alternative domestic and international production pathways, replenishment capacity and stockholdings of strategically significant inputs. Governments and public institutions may require stronger contingency planning, interoperability and surge arrangements. These measures are not merely forms of risk management, or targeted investment requirements. They are meaningful ways that Defence’s national support partners can contribute to deterrence, and Australia’s resistance to coercion and conflict.

Finally, partners should treat engagement with Defence as an enduring logistics preparedness relationship and expect greater involvement in exercises, scenario-based planning and practical testing. Australia can learn from many other nations to this effect, especially in Europe where strategic tensions are high. Effective national support depends on trust, communication, mutual understanding and social legitimacy as well as formal agreements. This is why, for the first time, NATO has chosen to publish its ‘Baseline Requirements for Resilience’ for broad use – the whole of society cannot be expected to prepare if it is not provided the information that is necessary to do so.[4] Partners should therefore establish mechanisms for dialogue, information exchange and collaborative planning so that support arrangements can adapt quickly because the necessary relationships already exist. Exercising is not an additional burden; it is how friction is exposed, responsibilities are refined and confidence is built across the national system before disruption occurs.

Concluding the series

The strategic rationale for national support that I have presented over the last five articles is clear insofar much of what it promotes is often self-evident. Yet Australia – much like other likeminded nations – have always found it difficult to place national support-like agendas into place when resources and attention are torn between many different directions. Times have changed, however, and disciplined practice is now needed. A strong understanding about the links between military logistics and the national economy; defence and national civil preparedness; and access to resources and resilience must be the basis by which new practice is conducted. This is because coercion is increasingly applied through economic means; regional crises recur with greater frequency; protracted conflict has re-emerged as a feature of modern war; and the systems required to prepare and sustain Defence are deeply embedded in the national economy and society. In such an environment, Defence capability cannot sensibly be conceived as something generated principally inside Defence, and with peacetime performance in mind. It rests on a broader foundation of national power, resilience, capability and capacity that is accessible during war – and, more specifically, the relationship between the national support base and the military force that draws its strength from it.

Across these five articles, I have argued that National Defence becomes operationally meaningful only when Australia can effectively organise, protect, prioritise and adapt the national capabilities and capacities upon which military power depends. Part 1 proposed that effective military preparedness demands greater national civil preparedness, and that a national support approach creates the ways to sustain the military in crisis in conflict. Part 2 explained why that proposition has become urgent, as competition, coercion, grey-zone activity and possible military conflict expose the vulnerability of the national support base.

Part 3 then showed that national support is the practical link between Defence preparedness and national civil preparedness, conceptually linking Defence demand with the civil systems that sustain society. Afterwards, Part 4 defined the characteristics of an effective system: assured access, effective prioritisation, resilience, strategic balance between self-reliance and interdependence, adaptability and scalability, integration with Defence policy and planning, testing and rehearsal, social legitimacy and national benefit. Part 5 has translated those characteristics into institutional responsibilities, partner expectations and implementation priorities. Taken together, these parts point to the conclusion I have made many times before: national support is not peripheral to the 2026 National Defence Strategy. It is one of the principal ways by which National Defence will be able to be realised at all.

This conclusion carries immediate implications for the logistics preparedness of the ADF.[5] Defence must treat national support as a standing preparedness function, develop a coherent demand signal, embed national dependencies in force design and operational planning, strengthen access and prioritisation mechanisms, invest in resilience measures that provide both peacetime value and crisis utility, and test arrangements with civil and commercial partners. National support partners must likewise recognise that their continuity, infrastructure, workforce, services, supply chains and decision-making are becoming strategically significant and that they, too, have a role in ensuring that these factors are protected, scalable and ready. They should clarify roles, strengthen resilience, prepare for surge and substitution, and participate in planning and exercises that test how Defence and the nation will act together under stress.

The five components of logistics preparedness provide the practical discipline needed to move from concept to implementation. Policy and guidance must align national support with strategic risk and government priorities. Organisation must make authorities, accountabilities and relationships coherent across Defence and the wider national system. Plans and planning must translate strategic warning, mobilisation, sustainment, transition and reconstitution into executable arrangements. Capability and forces must include the Defence and national capacities required to absorb, generate and redirect support at scale. Testing and assessment must reveal whether assumptions survive friction, scarcity, competing demand and deliberate disruption. Without these disciplines, national support will remain a persuasive idea rather than a credible source of strategic advantage.

The behavioural dimension of logistics preparedness is equally important. National support depends on trust, communication, public confidence and a shared understanding of why some national resources may need to be protected, redirected or prioritised in crisis. These conditions create the social legitimacy needed for difficult choices and enable Defence, government, industry and the wider community to act together under pressure. A credible national support system must therefore combine practical mechanisms with social legitimacy: this legitimacy must be built before crisis, needs explained before they are contested, and national support-led engagements rehearsed before they are ultimately needed. While such engagement cannot substitute for an absence of policy or planning, a whole-of-nation conversation about the impact of a crisis or conflict is fundamental for building the national resilience upon which Defence truly depends.[6]

In laying out the strategic rationale for national support, this series has argued that logistics preparedness is central to Australia’s preparedness, deterrence and resilience. It is needed because the world is an increasingly dangerous place, and any weakness in the way Australia mobilises the resources of the nation for its defence will be exploited. But national support can also create opportunities for collective effort that may reap economic, industrial and societal benefits for the nation. It is a way in which Defence becomes more than a beneficiary of Australia’s budget, but a locus around a societal effort to ensure that Australia and its community is well prepared for whatever the future may bring.

Yet National Defence cannot be made real by policy language alone. It must be expressed through the practical capacity to absorb shock, sustain military effect, preserve civil continuity and deny an adversary the leverage created by fragile systems and untested assumptions. That capacity will not reside in Defence alone. It will depend on government, industry, infrastructure operators, states and territories and other jurisdictions, commercial providers and the wider community organising, investing and rehearsing before crisis. The final proposition is therefore a hard one: national support is not merely a Defence function, a logistics concern or a mobilisation task. It is the means by which national capacity becomes sustainable military power. It is the only means by which Australia can defend itself without being overly dependent on allies and partners. Without a new approach to national support, National Defence remains an aspiration. With it, Australia has a credible basis for deterrence, to resist coercion, endurance, adaptation and, ultimately, strategic advantage.

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[1] Department of Defence, 2026 National Defence Strategy, 2026

[2] Department of Defence, 2026 National Defence Strategy, 2026; Department of Defence, 2026 Defence Industry Development Strategy

[3] NATO, Resilience, civil preparedness and Article 3, 18 September 2026, https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/deterrence-and-defence/resilience-civil-preparedness-and-article-3 [Accessed 21 Sep 26]

[4] NATO, Prepare, protect, prevail: NATO publishes Baseline Requirements for Resilience, 17 September 2026, https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/articles/news/2026/09/17/prepare-protect-prevail-nato-publishes-baseline-requirements-for-resilience [Accessed 21 Sep 26]

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

[6] Mansted, K., Adaptive strategic narrative: preparing for mobilisation in a diverse, digital democracy, National Security College, Australian National University, Australia, 2020, p3 citied in Beaumont, DJ. ‘Logistics, national support and the failure to prepare – the ADF’s approach to strategic logistics 1987 – 1999’