The Speed of Relevance: The Whole of Nation Defence
This podcast discusses Robbin Laird’s latest book on Australian defence.
The title of the new book, Fight Tonight Force: Combat Readiness at the Speed of Relevance, is deliberately provocative. 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.
The 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.
The book is based on the Sir Richard Williams September 2025 seminar and is expanded with additional interviews and additional articles expanding the discussion.