Land Power in the Littoral Age: Rethinking the Australian Army’s Strategic Purpose
A recent essay published on The Cove, the Australian Army’s professional development platform, poses a question that Australia’s defence establishment has circled around for several years without fully answering: what, precisely, is the Army for in an era when strategic attention has shifted decisively to the maritime and air domains?
Captain Nathan Freeman’s piece argues that the 2026 National Defence Strategy demands a coherent theory of the Army’s enduring purpose, and proposes one centred on the Army as Australia’s persistent littoral land force. It is a useful and timely contribution but it also opens a wider conversation about how land power fits into an integrated force design built around denial, resilience, and sustained competition across the Indo-Pacific.
That conversation matters well beyond Canberra. Australia’s strategic geography, a continent-sized landmass wrapped by archipelagic approaches, dependent on a handful of vulnerable ports, airbases, and logistics corridors in its north, is not a peculiarity to be managed around. It is the strategic problem itself. Any theory of the Army that does not start from that geography will drift, as institutions do when they lack a clear account of why they exist.
The Institutional Problem: Theory Before Structure
Carl Builder’s argument, cited in Freeman’s essay, is worth taking seriously on its own terms: military services that lack a coherent theory of themselves tend to pursue platforms, budgets, and bureaucratic turf without a governing logic that connects those pursuits to national strategy. This is not a uniquely Australian affliction. Services everywhere gravitate toward what is fundable and modern rather than what is strategically necessary, absent a clear theory holding them to account.
For the Australian Army, this risk has been particularly acute over the past decade. The Army has been asked to be, simultaneously, an expeditionary contributor to coalition operations in the Middle East, a domestic disaster-response force during bushfires and floods, a partner-capacity-building instrument across the Pacific, and increasingly a contributor to an integrated joint force oriented toward denial in the northern approaches. Each of these roles is legitimate.
None of them, on its own, constitutes a theory. A theory has to explain what is enduring beneath all of these tasks, and what the Army must therefore prioritise when resources are finite and threats are proliferating.
Freeman’s proposed formulation — the Army as persistent littoral land force, generating land power to deny coercion, secure the northern approaches, enable joint operations, and sustain national resilience — is a reasonable synthesis of where Army doctrine and the 2026 NDS already point. The more interesting question is what this theory implies operationally, and where its limits lie.
Land Power’s Enduring Function in a Precision-Strike Era
It has become fashionable, in commentary on Ukraine and the Middle East, to treat land forces as a legacy category being progressively displaced by drones, long-range fires, and autonomous systems. The essay’s use of Colin Gray’s argument cuts against this fashion in a way that deserves emphasis: precision strike can shape the battlefield, but it cannot occupy a port, hold a logistics node, or administer a population. Political outcomes in war are ultimately secured by control of territory, infrastructure, and people and only land forces provide that control on a persistent basis.
This is not an argument for nostalgia about mass armoured formations. It is an argument about function.
In the Indo-Pacific specifically, the objects that matter most strategically, northern ports, airfields, fuel farms, communications nodes, undersea cable landing points, are physical and fixed. They can be defended by long-range fires and denied to an adversary by maritime and air power, but they can only be secured, sustained, and operated by forces that can remain on the ground. This is the connective tissue between the Army and the rest of the joint force: without secured land infrastructure, neither RAAF strike aircraft nor RAN vessels have anywhere to operate from, refuel, rearm, or communicate through.
The Army’s foundational role is not glamorous, but it is structural.
From Kill Chain to Kill Web: Where the Army Fits
This is where the Army’s role connects to a broader shift already underway across allied militaries, the move from linear kill chains toward distributed kill webs. A kill chain assumes a single sensor, a single shooter, and a single, fairly predictable sequence connecting them. A kill web assumes redundancy: many sensors, many potential shooters, and a resilient command architecture that can route around degradation.
Land forces are an underappreciated node in that web. Army units dispersed across northern Australia and forward-postured in the archipelago are not simply infantry formations waiting for contact; they are sensors, communications relays, and increasingly, with long-range fires and integrated air and missile defence systems shooters in their own right. A ground-based radar or a dispersed long-range fires battery contributes to the joint targeting picture in the same way a maritime patrol aircraft does. The Army’s littoral pivot, in other words, is not just about manoeuvre; it is about the Army becoming a genuine participant in the kill web rather than a supporting actor waiting in reserve.
This has direct implications for force design. If the Army’s contribution to denial runs through distributed sensing, integrated air and missile defence, and long-range land-based fires, then investment priorities should follow: resilient communications and networking, protected mobility for dispersed small units, and command systems capable of degraded operation rather than concentration in large, high-signature formations that would be vulnerable to precisely the precision-strike threats the essay identifies from Ukraine.
Intelligent Mass Versus Exquisite Scarcity
Here a tension worth naming explicitly emerges, one that recurs across every service grappling with the lessons of Ukraine. Modern militaries face a persistent choice between what might be called intelligent mass and exquisite scarcity: a force built around larger numbers of lower-cost, distributed, attritable capability, versus a smaller number of exquisite, expensive platforms that cannot be easily replaced once lost.
The Ukraine war has been unambiguous about the answer at the operational level: mass, sustainment, and the capacity to absorb losses and regenerate have proven more decisive than exquisite but scarce systems that cannot be replaced under wartime production constraints.
For the Australian Army, this has a clear implication. An Army theory built around persistent presence, distributed operations, and sustained campaigning is, in effect, a bet on intelligent mass, dispersed, networked, survivable land forces, rather than concentrated exquisite formations.
This is consistent with the littoral force design Freeman describes, but it should be made explicit as a force-design principle, because it will shape procurement choices that are currently being litigated: uncrewed ground systems, dispersed fires batteries, protected but not necessarily heavily armoured mobility, and redundant communications architectures, rather than a small number of heavy, high-value platforms whose loss would be strategically significant.
Sustainment as the Silent Determinant
The essay’s emphasis on logistics and sustainment deserves to be foregrounded rather than treated as a supporting point. Every serious study of the Ukraine war reaches the same conclusion: industrial capacity, ammunition stockpiles, repair and maintenance systems, and the ability to sustain forces over months and years not the initial quality of frontline units determined outcomes.
Australia’s geography compounds this problem rather than easing it. The distances involved in sustaining forces across northern Australia and into the archipelago are larger, and the industrial base to replace consumed stocks is thinner, than almost any comparable ally faces.
This suggests that the Army’s theory of itself cannot be separated from a theory of national industrial mobilisation. An Army optimised for persistent littoral operations without a sovereign or allied-shared capacity to sustain munitions, fuel, and equipment through a protracted contingency is a theory without an economic foundation. The 2026 NDS’s emphasis on sovereign industrial capability is therefore not an adjacent policy concern; it is a precondition for the Army’s proposed strategic role to be executable rather than aspirational.
Domestic Operations: Complement, Not Distraction
Freeman is right to insist that domestic resilience tasks, disaster response, infrastructure protection, support during pandemics — should not be understood as competing with warfighting readiness, but as drawing on the same underlying competencies: logistics, command and control, engineering, mobility, and distributed operations under pressure. The risk is not that the Army does this work; the risk is allowing it to become the Army’s self-understanding, displacing the warfighting core from which that domestic utility is actually derived.
This distinction matters for resourcing debates. Domestic tasks are visible, politically popular, and easy to justify to a public that experiences them directly. Warfighting readiness for contingencies that may never occur is much harder to sustain politically and budgetarily. A clear theory of the Army, one that explicitly subordinates domestic tasks to the warfighting core that makes them possible, provides institutional cover against the slow erosion of readiness in favour of tasks that are easier to justify in peacetime.
Regional Engagement as Integrated Deterrence
The essay’s treatment of regional partnerships deserves reinforcement rather than qualification. In an environment where strategic competition plays out substantially below the threshold of declared conflict, an army’s ability to build relationships, train alongside partner forces, and sustain a credible presence across the Pacific and Southeast Asia is not separable from deterrence . It is a form of deterrence.
Persistent engagement complicates an adversary’s planning, builds access and basing options that would otherwise not exist in a crisis, and reinforces the legitimacy that underpins collective resilience. An Army theory that treats this as peacetime housekeeping, rather than as integral to the denial mission, would be missing one of the more distinctive contributions land forces make relative to platforms.
The Limits of a Littoral Theory
It is worth being candid about what a littoral-focused theory does not resolve.
First, it does not by itself settle the question of scale: how large a persistent littoral force needs to be to matter strategically, given Australia’s small population base and competing claims on the workforce from other national priorities. A theory can specify function without specifying mass, and the mass question will ultimately be decided by budget and recruitment realities more than doctrine.
Second, a theory centred on the northern approaches risks understating the Army’s contribution to higher-end continental defence should deterrence fail entirely and adversary forces threaten to project power against the Australian mainland itself, a contingency the 2026 NDS treats as unlikely but not impossible.
Third, littoral operations across archipelagic Southeast Asia depend heavily on the consent and cooperation of regional states. An Army theory built around forward presence in other nations’ territory is only as robust as the diplomatic relationships that make such presence possible, and those relationships can shift for reasons entirely outside Defence’s control.
None of these limitations invalidate the theory Freeman proposes. They do suggest that a theory of the Army’s purpose is necessary but not sufficient. It must be paired with realistic assumptions about force size, a fallback posture for continental contingencies, and sustained diplomatic investment in the partnerships upon which forward littoral presence depends.
A theory that ignores these constraints risks becoming exactly the kind of aspirational statement that Builder warned against: coherent on paper, but disconnected from the resourcing and political realities that will actually determine whether the Army can perform the role assigned to it.
Conclusion: A Theory With Consequences
The value of Freeman’s essay lies less in the specific wording of his proposed theory than in forcing the question of what that theory should determine. A theory that is merely descriptive restating what the Army already does accomplishes little.
A theory with teeth should drive hard choices: toward distributed, networked land forces integrated into the joint kill web rather than concentrated legacy formations; toward intelligent mass rather than exquisite scarcity in land systems; toward sustainment and industrial depth as a first-order investment rather than an afterthought; and toward regional engagement understood as deterrence rather than diplomacy.
Australia’s strategic geography does not offer the luxury of an army that can be many things equally well. The 2026 National Defence Strategy has, in effect, forced a choice about what the Army must be excellent at, even if that means being less prepared for tasks outside that core.
A persistent littoral land force, integrated into the wider kill web, sustained by resilient logistics and sovereign industrial capacity, and forward-postured through partnership across the region, is a coherent answer to that choice.
Whether the institution has the discipline to hold to it, resisting both the pull of legacy force structures and the pull of politically convenient domestic tasking, will determine whether this remains a theory on paper or becomes the organising logic of Australian land power.
See the following:
https://cove.army.gov.au/article/suggested-theory-australian-army