Testing, Repairing, Moving: Northern Australia Is Where Sustainment Becomes Strategy

11/15/2026
By Robbin Laird

Two pieces appeared in The Strategist in the first week of November, from two authors in the same ASPI program and under the same “North of 26° South” banner. Raelene Lockhorst wrote about moving a combined US-Australian force north. John Coyne wrote about testing and repairing the equipment that force will use.

Read together, they make one argument: northern Australia will be judged less by what is bought for it than by how fast combat power can be regenerated there.

That is a sustainment question, and it is the one I keep returning to in the work on regenerative airpower in this context.

The rotation has matured. The logistics have not caught up

Lockhorst starts from a milestone. The 15th Marine Rotational Force-Darwin finished six months of training on 23 October, and it was the first rotation in the program’s 14-year history to be certified as a Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force. That means command, ground combat, aviation and logistics operating as one package for crisis response. The 16th rotation arrives in early 2027, so the force is growing before the support behind it has been tested.

Her point is that interoperability, as it has been practiced, has been measured on the exercise side of the ledger. The harder test comes after the exercise. She would have the relationship “measured by how effectively forces can deploy, sustain and regenerate combat power.” That is a different scorecard from the number of events, the size of the formations or the complexity of the scenario.

The evidence she gives is unglamorous, which is why it persuades. Under the Combined Logistics Sustainment and Maintenance Enterprise, U.S. Army equipment is held at Bandiana in Victoria. A 2023 report put the stock at about 330 vehicles and trailers and 130 containers. When some of it was driven to Darwin for Exercise Operose in 2024, the road distance was about 3,800 kilometers, and a convoy could need around ten days. In the 2024 rapid deployment exercise, LAV-25 armored vehicles were flown into Adelaide and then moved north by commercial rail, which is efficient for heavy equipment but still leaves thousands of kilometers and depends on rail availability, terminals and onward transport.

Pre-positioned equipment is only a capability if it can be reached and moved. The distance between where Australia’s industrial and sustainment capacity sits, in the south and southeast, and where the demand sits, in the north, is the operational problem. A northern posture that depends on a small number of transport links also depends on none of them failing at the wrong moment. Peacetime throughput says very little about crisis redundancy.

The Osprey in Darwin is a sustainment decision, not only a posture decision

Lockhorst presents, without formally recommending it, the idea of keeping U.S. MV-22B Ospreys in Darwin between rotations. As reported in 2025, the purpose is to raise aircraft availability for training, lower transport costs, remove import-related administration and reduce the effort of rebuilding capability for each rotation.

From the standpoint of the work I have been doing on the Osprey’s next phase, this is the right framing. An aircraft left in theater is a bet that the surrounding enterprise can keep it flying: maintenance, fuel, trained people and reliable distribution. Lockhorst says as much, noting that the long-term value depends on those four things. A resident fleet turns the sustainment ecosystem from an assumption into something that has to exist, and it exposes quickly where it does not.

That is also where the idea connects to the way the Marines and the ADF have been co-inventing their force designs. A rotation that arrives, trains and leaves is a visit. A force that leaves behind equipment, repair capacity and a distribution network is a foundation, and the rotations that follow can build on it instead of starting over.

She also points to the logistics hubs Defence is exploring at Alice Springs and in central Queensland, and makes a sensible stipulation: design them to meet Australia’s own theatre logistics needs and accommodate allied requirements where they align with national priorities. Hubs built first for an ally’s convenience would be hubs that the Australian force cannot fully rely on.

Coyne: the same north, one step later in the chain

If Lockhorst asks how fast equipment gets to the north, Coyne asks what happens to it once it is there, and whether the money spent on capability buys any industrial capacity to keep it working through a prolonged crisis.

His worked example is LAND 156, the counter-drone program, where the government has committed up to A$7 billion over the next decade. At Cultana in South Australia, soldiers assessed 20 counter-drone systems and chose eight. That is a serious evaluation, and it also shows where the weight of testing currently sits. Queensland is supporting a new weapons testing facility near Thargomindah, about three million acres and due to be operating in 2028, alongside the Cloncurry Flight Test Range. Western Australia has its own testing infrastructure and an interest in autonomous systems. Coyne accepts that competition among the states can stimulate innovation, but argues that Defence’s choices should follow national capability needs and not rivalry between state agencies.

His case for the Northern Territory is that it offers what the others cannot combine: large training areas, vast distances, tropical conditions and proximity to the operational bases at Darwin and Tindal. Praetorian Aeronautics tested its Arrow interceptor and Hadrian battle-management system at Beatrice Hill near Darwin in October. Coyne is careful to say that this was developmental testing and not proof of operational effectiveness, which is exactly the distinction a sustainment-minded reader should keep in view.

What distinguishes the argument is the measure he proposes. The success of a northern hub is not the number of companies that open offices in Darwin or the value of construction contracts. It is how quickly equipment can be tested, repaired, adapted and returned to service, and whether Australian industry can expand output when demand rises above peacetime levels.

His recommendations follow from that: recurring test cycles in which companies work beside military users, fix weaknesses and return; sustained procurement demand, because testing alone does not build a scalable industry; a territory-federal investment framework covering industrial land, energy, transport, communications and workforce; and procurement certainty to justify permanent facilities, with a premium on the ability to surge. He is explicit that the aim is not to manufacture everything in Darwin. It is to put the critical testing, repair and adaptation in the north, supported by suppliers across the country.

He also answers the obvious objections. Established ranges have instruments, experienced staff and economies of scale. Northern infrastructure is costly, workforces are thin, and not every capability needs tropical conditions. His reply is that the north should be a complementary proving ground, not a second Woomera.

What the two pieces say together

Put the two articles side by side and the northern problem has three stages, each with its own failure mode.

Moving. Equipment sits in the south, and the roads and railways that carry it north are few. Lockhorst measures this in days and kilometers.

Fixing. Once equipment is in the north, the test of the system is how quickly a failure is diagnosed, repaired and returned. Coyne measures this in time to return to service.

Producing. If demand surges, someone has to make more, and make it to a design that has been adapted to the conditions where it is used. Coyne’s surge criterion measures this.

In each stage the same thing is true.

The scarce resource is not the platform.

It is the enterprise around the platform, and the enterprise is what lets a smaller force sustain tempo against a larger one.

This is the intelligent mass argument seen from the rear: mass that is cheap to build but slow to repair, or quick to deploy but impossible to resupply, is a smaller force than it appears on a briefing slide.

The kill web depends on a regeneration web underneath it, and Australia’s north is where that dependence is most exposed.

Questions for the next phase

A few issues the two authors leave open, and which deserve pressing.

First, redundancy. Lockhorst warns that the north depends on a small number of transport links. Coyne’s hub would add repair and production capacity, but a repair capacity that can only be reached by one road is a single point of failure. Dispersal and redundancy need to be designed into the northern enterprise from the start, as the posture debate over the Gulf bases has shown elsewhere.

Second, the relationship between testing and procurement. Coyne is clear that testing without sustained demand does not build industry. The risk is that the range is built, the trials are run and the contracts go to the south, leaving the north with a test range and nothing else. A test range that does not become a sustainment ecosystem is just another range.

Third, the Western Australian parallel. Henderson is being built as the western pole of naval shipbuilding and sustainment. Darwin is being proposed as the northern pole of testing and repair. Australia may well need both, but only if they are designed as parts of one national network, with the same logic: the measure is regeneration, not capital spending. This is the same national-network argument Coyne makes about states competing for test facilities, applied to shipyards.

Fourth, the allied dimension. Lockhorst’s hubs are for Australia’s needs first. That is correct, and it also means the combined force will be only as resilient as the Australian logistics enterprise it plugs into. Co-invention has to extend to the repair depot and the supply chain, not only to the exercise.

Why this belongs in Partners Corner

For readers of Defense.info, the two ASPI pieces carry a lesson that applies well beyond Australia. Allied force design is shifting from asking what to buy to asking what can be kept in the fight. Capability has to be tested where it will be used, repaired close to where it fails, and produced at a rate that survives contact with a real demand curve. The north of Australia happens to make that argument unusually visible, because the distances are so large and the margins so thin.

Both pieces are worth reading in full on The Strategist.

Sources