Australian Defence Transformation: A 2025 Overview
The title of my new book, Fight Tonight Force: Combat Readiness at the Speed of Relevance, is based on the title of the September 2025 of the Sir Richard Williams seminar. The title was deliberately chosen. It signals a fundamental break from the comfortable assumptions that have shaped democratic defence policy for decades.
The phrase “fight tonight” has traditionally meant little more than unit-level readiness metrics: Can this squadron fly, can this battalion deploy?
But in the strategic environment now crystallizing across the Indo-Pacific and in Ukraine, “fight tonight” must describe something far more demanding: a system capable of fighting tonight, still fighting next week, and becoming more lethal a month into a campaign than it was on day one.
This book argues that transformation in contemporary defence is no longer a matter of gradual modernization or platform replacement. It is a collision between accelerating threat evolution, brittle legacy institutions, and societies that have not yet internalized what long-duration strategic competition actually requires.
Australia, as a middle power with outsized geographic exposure and a hollowed-out industrial base, serves as the central test case for whether liberal democracies can redesign how they generate combat power, industrial capacity, and cognitive resilience under continuous pressure—not episodic war.
From Preparedness to Continuous Adaptation
The traditional preparedness paradigm is strategically obsolete. For generations, Western militaries built force structure, stockpiled munitions, planned for “the big one,” and assumed long recovery periods between conflicts. This model privileges those who can sustain initial intensity over those who can evolve during conflict. Contemporary warfare, as demonstrated in Ukraine and emerging in Indo-Pacific crisis dynamics, inverts this logic entirely.
Success now belongs to those who can reconfigure, rearm, and relearn faster than their adversaries, often in timeframes measured in weeks or months rather than years. Ukraine’s transformation from a conventionally structured force facing annihilation in February 2022 to a military pioneering the integration of commercial drones, AI-enabled targeting, and distributed operations by late 2023 illustrates the tempo of adaptation required. Russian forces, despite numerical superiority and industrial depth, have repeatedly struggled when Ukraine introduces new operational concepts or technologies faster than Moscow can develop institutional responses.
The pressure this creates on force design is profound. Military organizations can no longer be exquisite, static structures optimized for a single operational concept. They must function as evolving ensembles—platforms, payloads, command and control, sustainment, and industrial back-ends stitched together in kill webs that can be repatched as elements degrade or are destroyed. The Australian Defence Force, with its relatively small professional cadre and vast geographic responsibilities, confronts this challenge with particular intensity.
How do you maintain a force capable of high-end warfighting with peer adversaries while simultaneously building the institutional capacity to learn and adapt at the speed of conflict itself?
The answer lies in what I call “spiral warfighting” or a concept where capability insertion and operational learning cycles compress into the conflict rather than preceding it. This demands procurement cultures, doctrine cycles, and personnel systems designed for continuous iteration rather than predictability. It means accepting “good enough now” solutions rather than awaiting perfect future architectures. Most challengingly, it requires political systems to fund and authorize capabilities whose value lies in adaptability and resilience, qualities notoriously difficult to measure in peacetime.
The Industrial Mobilization Imperative
If spiral warfighting describes the operational dimension of transformation, industrial mobilization represents its strategic foundation. One of the book’s central arguments is that industrial capacity, not simply force design, has become the decisive variable in contemporary conflict. Decades of peacetime optimization for cost and efficiency have produced what I term an “efficiency trap”: systems that work brilliantly in stable conditions but fail catastrophically under disruption, sanctions, or high-tempo attrition.
Three case studies are highlighted in the book that illuminate different responses to this pressure. William Knudsen’s orchestration of U.S. industrial mobilization in World War II represents the model democracies must rediscover—early government-backed industrial coordination, standardization over perfection, and willingness to retool commercial capacity at scale before crisis fully matures. Knudsen understood that time, not money, was the constraint, and used government authority to create the conditions for massive industrial scaling before Pearl Harbor forced the issue.
Essington Lewis, who attempted similar preparations for Australia in the late 1930s, embodies the cost of political hesitancy. Despite ample warning and some capability development, Australian political leadership failed to convert money into time, leaving the nation rich in funds but poor in usable capacity when war arrived. Lewis had the industrial vision but lacked the political mandate to act decisively during the window of opportunity.
Ukraine represents the contemporary proof point. Beginning in 2014, Ukraine began mobilizing its defence industry eight years before Russia’s full-scale invasion. It built a dense ecosystem of small and medium enterprises in drones and electronics, cultivated a culture of “wartime speed” innovation, and integrated civilian technical talent into military problem-solving from the start. When invasion came, Ukraine possessed not just stockpiles but industrial resilience or the capacity to design, test, field, and scale new capabilities within the conflict itself.
All three cases converge on a brutal truth: money cannot buy lost time when it comes to industrial depth. Nations that invest early in sovereign or allied-embedded manufacturing, munitions replenishment capacity, and the skills to repurpose civilian industry under stress will sustain and evolve their forces in conflict. Those that trust to markets, foreign suppliers, and peacetime “value for money” risk discovering they possess exquisite platforms with empty magazines, fragile supply chains, and no realistic pathway to surge production.
For Australia, this analysis carries particular weight. The nation’s defence industrial base was systematically dismantled over decades of outsourcing and preference for foreign primes. Guided weapons, ammunition, and even basic repair capacities were offshored in pursuit of efficiency. The result is a capable professional force dangerously dependent on supply lines stretching across oceans in a region where those same oceans will be contested spaces in any serious conflict.
The book documents how this vulnerability manifests across multiple domains. Australian F-35s and F/A-18 Super Hornets depend on foreign-manufactured precision munitions with delivery timelines measured in years, not months. Naval vessels rely on complex maintenance ecosystems concentrated in facilities vulnerable to long-range strike. Even basic items like small-caliber ammunition require imports from partners who may face their own consumption crises.
Yet the analysis also reveals pathways forward. Australia’s announcement of guided weapons manufacturing, partnerships with defense firms to establish local production capacity, and investments in ammunition facilities represent recognition that industrial sovereignty is strategic sovereignty. The challenge lies in scaling these initiatives from demonstration projects to genuine surge capacity, and doing so before regional tensions foreclose the option of patient development. The book emphasizes that partial solutions, manufacturing some components while importing others, creates dependencies that adversaries can exploit through selective interdiction or supplier pressure.
Enterprise Logistics and Embedded Capacity
The industrial argument extends necessarily into logistics and sustainment. I treat these not as downstream support functions but as the main arena where transformation will succeed or fail. The book advocates a fundamental shift from nationally siloed, line-of-communication-centric logistics to what I describe as “enterprise-level” and “embedded” logistics or integrated, multinational networks aligning production, stockpiles, distribution, and operational employment.
The V-22 Osprey deployments to northern Australia, and broader U.S.-Australian posture arrangements, serve as forcing functions. They compel both nations to confront questions about shared parts pools, joint maintenance, colocated depots, and the politics of prioritization under scarcity.
But embedded logistics pushes further, envisaging allied investment in shared industrial capacity on Australian soil, ammunition lines, missile components, unmanned systems, owned by multiple partners and designed from inception as common enterprise assets rather than national reserves.
Three pressures drive this transformation. Geographically, Australia’s distance from major suppliers and the vastness of the Indo-Pacific mean traditional resupply from North America or Europe is too slow and too vulnerable to interdiction. Politically, democracies cannot assume allies will always have surplus capacity or freedom to prioritize foreign resupply during their own crises. Operationally, high-tempo missile and drone warfare will burn through stocks at rates outpacing current replenishment by orders of magnitude.
Building logistics and industrial structures that are inherently coalition-based, geographically diversified, and adaptable means accepting peacetime inefficiency for wartime resilience. It means political leaders explaining to electorates why sovereign ammunition production matters even when foreign purchases are cheaper. It means alliance partners negotiating shared ownership models that preserve operational flexibility while building genuine interdependence. These are not technical problems but political and strategic choices that democracies have largely deferred.
Cognitive Warfare and the AI Challenge
A distinctive contribution of the book is linking military and industrial transformation to cognitive and societal dynamics. I treat the AI revolution not merely as a new enabler of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and autonomous systems, but as a source of strategic vulnerability what John Blackburn describes as cognitive atrophy and “cognitive debt.”
Two reinforcing cycles create pressure. At the individual level, routine delegation of thought to AI systems produces short-term productivity gains but long-term erosion of critical faculties. Officer corps, policy elites, and populations become less able to think independently when AI is contested, degraded, or weaponized. At the national level, dependence on foreign AI platforms replicates patterns seen in pharmaceuticals and energy: democracies become consumers of others’ cognitive infrastructure, with limited sovereign capacity to shape, secure, or contest the AI environment.
The transformation imperative here is conceptual as much as technical. An “augmented intelligence” model focuses on a situation where AI remains a tool inside human-led teams, deliberately used to enhance rather than replace human judgment. This bridge strategy preserves cognitive skills and democratic agency long enough for societies to make informed choices about deeper human-AI integration from positions of strength rather than desperation.
A military treating AI as collaborator and training personnel to interrogate, cross-check, and iterate machine outputs maintains the adaptive edge needed for contested information environments. A society allowing AI to hollow out its reasoning capacity struggles to mobilize, sustain consent, or navigate escalation when adversaries attack its information ecosystem. The pressure is not just to field AI-enabled systems faster, but to redesign education, training, and doctrine so humans remain central and capable in AI-saturated conflict.
Whole-of-Society Defence Without Militarization
Liberal democracies have spent three decades treating defence as a bounded sector, insulated from civilian life and largely funded, staffed, and legitimized as an expeditionary problem set. The return of major-power coercion, grey-zone operations, and long-range precision strike collapses that separation. Yet importing authoritarian mobilization models would destroy the values democracies seek to defend.
The book outlines necessary transformations: rebuilding domestic manufacturing and repair capacity for critical munitions and components, even when economically inefficient in peacetime; treating energy grids, ports, data centers, and logistics corridors as defended assets with redundancy and recovery designed in; educating populations about cyber, information, and kinetic disruption while building mechanisms for civilian contribution, volunteer reserves, civil defence roles, surge training, short of permanent militarization.
This requires reforming procurement and force-development systems to shorten cycles, deepening operational interoperability with allies while retaining sufficient sovereign capacity to act when alliances are constrained, and persuading electorates to support investments whose payoff is measured in resilience rather than visible peacetime benefit.
The pressure is cultural and political. Strategic communities must articulate why this rebalancing is compatible with liberal values—indeed, essential to preserving them. This is not a call for permanent wartime footing but for a different peacetime: one where societies are structurally ready for sustained pressure, with clear roles, expectations, and pathways for rapid scaling.
Australia as Laboratory
Throughout, Australia functions as a laboratory for these dynamics. Its small population, hollowed industrial base, concentrated coastal infrastructure, and deep economic entanglement with China collide with alliance commitments and geographic exposure. This tension illustrates the specific pressures on middle powers attempting genuine strategic independence without abandoning alliance frameworks.
Australia is pushed simultaneously to become more capable, air and missile defence, collaborative combat aircraft like Ghost Bat, expanded long-range strike, robust dispersed basing, and more independent, rebuilding munitions, guided weapons, energy security, and AI capacity while redesigning alliance mechanisms so operational integration doesn’t equal strategic subordination.
The emerging model is one of “deliberate incrementalism”: building real sovereign capabilities step by step, industrial, informational, doctrinal, while using those capabilities to reshape alliance habits away from client-patron patterns toward mutual dependence on shared infrastructure. Australian Defence Force leaders, in my extensive interviews, oscillate between confidence in current “tier one” operational performance and concern about whether long-range force-design schemes will materialize at scale and tempo implied by public rhetoric.
The Speed of Relevance
The subtitle, “Combat Readiness at the Speed of Relevance,” captures the book’s central challenge. Relevance in strategic competition is not static. What matters operationally, industrially, and cognitively shifts continuously as adversaries adapt, technologies evolve, and political conditions change. A military ready to fight last year’s war is irrelevant. A defence industry tooled for last decade’s threat is irrelevant. A society cognitively dependent on contested systems is vulnerable.
Speed of relevance means building forces, industries, and institutions capable of evolving faster than threats crystallize. It means accepting uncertainty and inefficiency as the price of adaptability. It means political systems capable of making hard choices about sovereignty, industrial policy, and resource allocation before crisis forces those choices under duress.
Liberal democracies can adapt, but only if they stop treating transformation as an abstract, long-range design exercise and start treating it as an immediate, integrated problem of ready forces, ready industry, and ready minds. The dynamics I trace, industrial, logistic, cognitive, societal, are not additive; they are multiplicative, and delay in one domain erodes progress in others.
The fight tonight force is therefore not only a military construct. It is a test of whether democratic societies can relearn how to marshal time, industry, and intellect under sustained authoritarian pressure without becoming what they resist. Australia’s journey through this transformation, with all its constraints and innovations, offers insights for every democracy navigating the collision between liberal values and illiberal coercion in the twenty-first century.
Fight Tonight Force does not offer a master plan or comprehensive roadmap. Such documents, I argue, are artifacts of the preparedness era we must leave behind. Instead, the book provides a framework for thinking about transformation as continuous process rather than destination, a set of principles, case studies, and hard questions designed to help defense leaders, policymakers, and informed citizens navigate the collision between what our institutions were built to do and what our strategic environment now demands.
The book’s recommendations cluster around several imperatives. First, accept that uncertainty and inefficiency are features, not bugs, of adaptable systems. Second, invest in time through early industrial positioning, even when peacetime economics argue against it. Third, design forces and logistics for continuous evolution rather than static optimization. Fourth, preserve human cognitive agency while integrating AI as augmentation rather than replacement. Fifth, build alliance mechanisms that create genuine mutual dependence rather than asymmetric relationships disguised as partnerships.
Above all, the book insists on intellectual honesty about the scale of change required. Incremental adjustments to existing structures will not suffice. Rebranding current programs as transformation will not create the capabilities needed. The strategic environment has moved; the question is whether democratic institutions can move with it, or whether they will discover their irrelevance through strategic failure.
The question is not whether transformation is necessary: the strategic environment has already answered that. The question is whether democracies possess the political will, institutional adaptability, and societal resilience to transform at the speed relevance now demands.
This book makes the case that they can, if they begin now and sustain the effort across electoral cycles, budget pressures, and the inevitable resistance from institutions designed for a world that no longer exists.
The window for choosing adaptation over reaction is closing rapidly, but it has not yet closed.
That window, and what we choose to do with it, is what Fight Tonight Force ultimately examines.