By David Beaumont, PhD.

Logistics now receives greater strategic attention, but it still for debate as to whether that recognition has changed the assumptions behind military preparedness. Industrial capacity, supply-chain resilience and the ability to sustain military forces receive explicit attention in strategic policy and plans. These issues are shaping the conversation about military power. This is a marked change from the concern I expressed in ‘Burning incense at a new altar’, written as I closed Logistics In War for 2017, and in my first post the following year ‘Hoping and planning for the best: understanding war about logistics’: that limited professional attention to logistics and an emphasis on the ‘human’ aspects of war obscured military power’s material foundations. Revisiting that argument in late 2026, it’s fair to assert that both articles were shaped by a military nonchalance to logistics matters that rarely impacted the military operations underway at the time. Now, logistics is described as a major strategic issue in which the generation and sustainment of military power depends on how defence forces relate to the nation’s resources, institutions and productive capacity.

It’s an overstatement to suggest that a strategic ‘switch’ as been ‘flicked’ and suddenly mobilisation lessons from the Second World War should be pride of place in our thinking. The reality is more complicated, largely because the world doesn’t operate in the same way it did nearly a century ago. Modern military logistics has been shaped by globalisation and the distribution of production, technology, and a variety of contingent issues that constitute the ‘spirit of the age’.  The connection between security, economics and industrial power has certainly become harder to overlook since 2018. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle east speak to the potential for large-scale conflict, a type of war that is defined by logistics consumption and industrial output as much as it is by its strategy. But has the conversation about the role of logistics in war moved on as much as we like to say?

The need to examine the support system as a whole is not new. Nearly ten years ago, we were arguing that technology, weapon systems, defence industry and finding a balance between contract and organic logistics were no substitutes for that examination. Similar discussions had taken place nearly twenty years earlier during the ‘revolution of military logistics’ that accompanied the ‘revolution of military affairs’ in the 1990s. These debates remain instructive and would be unsurprising topics in a contemporary military logistics course curriculum. Historical experience illustrates why. As described in 2018, the contrast between the substantial pre-campaign build-up for Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and the support difficulties during Operation Iraqi Freedom’s advance at An Najaf in 2003 illustrates the consequences of different logistics assumptions—consequences the Russian Army also encountered in eastern Ukraine in 2022. The enduring lesson is that neither stockpiles, distribution nor a theoretical concept drawn from experience offers a universal answer to what the future holds. We must continue to examine whether the system can meet the demands placed on it, rather than whether its design appears efficient in peacetime.

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a catalyst to bring logistics matters into sharper focus. The war did not make logistics important for the first time; it exposed the gap between acknowledging its importance and preparing for its demands. In ‘Military solvency and signs of a system that might not work’, written in August 2025, I argued that Ukraine had forced a reassessment of logistics systems shaped by decades of peacetime efficiency and rationalisation. It was an article well in line with that which I had written in 2017 and 2018. The question was no longer simply how to support a smaller expeditionary force quickly and economically, but whether militaries and their nations could sustain protracted, high-intensity war while supply and maintenance were themselves contested. Industrial capacity, replenishment and the endurance of the wider support system became central to understanding military power, rather than background assumptions.

These demands also sharpened the question of how Defence draws on the nation that supports it. In my 2022 Defence Strategic Review submission, ‘Initiating a new national support approach – mobilising national logistics in the support of military operations’, I argued for a renewed civil-military approach with preparedness at its core. National support is not simply outsourcing under another name, nor a promise that commercial capacity will compensate for military shortfalls when needed. It concerns the habitual relationship through which Defence gains access to the economic, industrial and societal resources required to prepare for and sustain military activity. The policy setting has since shifted: the 2024 National Defence Strategy established National Defence as a whole-of-government and whole-of-nation approach, while the 2026 strategy adds greater emphasis on self-reliance, acquisition and sustainment, industrial resilience, diversified international partnerships and national civil preparedness. These developments give the submission’s concern greater visibility in policy; they do not, by themselves, demonstrate that the supporting arrangements are ready.

My research published in July 2025 returned to the historical foundations of these concerns, giving me a stronger Australian basis for examining strategic logistics. In ‘Logistics, national support and failure to prepare’, I introduced my doctoral research into the ADF’s approach to strategic logistics before Operation Warden in 1999. That inquiry connects the practical difficulties of sustaining an operation with the longer history of preparing the national support base. It also cautions against treating today’s renewed interest in national support as the discovery of an entirely new problem. The distinction between recognising a problem and developing the capacity to address it also underpinned my November 2025 presentation to NATO’s Logistics Committee, ‘Beyond preparedness: logistics and resilience amid new strategic realities’. I argued that readiness for the opening crisis was insufficient without resilience for what followed, particularly when international production and supply dependencies were under increasing strain. The change in our understanding was therefore not a new relationship between logistics and strategy, but a greater willingness to confront problems we all knew existed but were unresolved and intractable.

Preparedness cannot be reduced to the readiness of the uniformed force. Industry, infrastructure, workforce capacity and commercial systems must also be considered, along with the competing demands placed on them. National support connects Defence preparedness with national civil preparedness because both depend on many of the same institutions and systems—not merely because a whole-of-nation approach is desirable. Military requirements must therefore be made visible and related to civil responsibilities before a crisis forces that relationship to be improvised. My recent series, The Strategic Rationale for National Support, develops this argument: Part I places national resources, industrial capacity and logistics at the foundation of military power; Part II examines the pressures of competition, crisis and conflict; and Part III explores the practical connection between Defence and national civil preparedness.

The next step is to distinguish a national support concept from a functioning system. In Part IV, I question whether familiar assertions that Defence, government, industry and the community must work together are sufficient to make that cooperation effective under pressure. Part V concluded he series by focussing on organisational practice; governance, routines, dependencies and the way Defence relates to other arms of national power, not merely mobilisation arrangements activated at the last safe moment. This complements my earlier argument in ‘From industry access to strategic advantage’. The issue is not only whether industrial and logistics capacity exists, but whether it remains accessible when strategic conditions deteriorate. National support is therefore more than a response to scarcity. It is a means of understanding how national capacity becomes usable military power, why that conversion cannot be assumed, and why logistics matters now more than ever.

This article is not intended as a self-indulgent reflection on articles and arguments written in the past. Instead, it is a prompt as to some of the most significant military logistics issues of our time to encourage the logistics professional community to act. What should the logistics community do now? As always, the first step is in the making of the assumptions behind preparedness explicit. Logisticians should help Defence, civil agencies and industry establish a shared understanding of the resources, responsibilities and dependencies on which national support rests. Who is responsible? What capacity is genuinely available? What competing civil demands must be considered, and where is the vital access that we depend upon in a crisis uncertain? These questions belong in routine planning and discussion, not on hold until activated in a crisis. The aim is not to promise certainty, but to distinguish knowledge from assumption and identify gaps requiring attention.

I’ve long argued that the solutions to our problems come from professional inquiry across the levels of logistics. Our education, writing and forums should connect tactical and operational sustainment experience with industry, civil-sector administration and national civil preparedness, rather than focus narrowly on specialist procedures, technology or technocracy. Greater attention to strategic and national support problems should broaden our interest, not displace attention to the practical demands of sustaining forces during operations. We should test our concepts against evidence, record lessons with their limitations, and assign responsibility for improvements and their review. There’s nothing new about these needs, but logisticians should be encouraged that their voice matters now more than in recent history. Exercises and discussions can reveal how national support arrangements meet operational needs, and where mutual constraints remain, without assuming that military requirements outweigh civil needs. The aim is to translate broad concerns into informed questions and explain logistics in accessible language, helping those outside the profession shape their judgement grounded in the less grandiose – but exceptionally important – elements of the art of war.

Logisticians can help guide Western militaries through the coming decades of strategic risk by connecting ambition with the material and institutional conditions that make it credible. A profession spanning the armed services, government and industry, often without direct control over essential resources, needs judgement, negotiation and an ability to explain complex issues without resorting to the science. Articulating that logistics matters to strategic choices has to be at the core of professional debate. These are the themes of ‘The strategic logistician and professional possibility’, in which I described that cross-boundary role, ‘Do Defence logisticians need a new professional narrative?’ and ‘Beyond preparedness: logistics and resilience amid new strategic realities’. We cannot predict every crisis, but it is important that the community helps decision-makers assess supportable commitments, recognise dependencies and weigh resilience versus cost-effective efficiency. The role of logisticians is not just to sustain today’s force, but to inform the choices shaping tomorrow’s force and its national support base.

So the themes identified a decade ago, and in the time since, matter. The relationship between strategy, tactics and logistics; professional education; and logistics modernisation and ADF preparedness, matter. But the question is no longer simply why logistics is overlooked, but how logisticians and those involved in supporting and sustaining military forces now act. Opportunities exist with greater attention, but this attention shouldn’t be confused for real preparedness, investment programs for delivered capacity, or commercial availability for assured access. Hoping and planning for the best was never an adequate way to think about logistics. Military logisticians must now lead the development of the new approaches that go beyond concepts and ideas to create the conditions that ensure strategic commitments are matched by the capability and capacity necessary to sustain them.