Australia: The limits of pragmatism

Australia is today preparing its defence planning for an age of disruption as the threat of major war with China now dominates its defence concerns. Australia is reassessing the relationship between the two foundations of its defence effort: the alliance with the United States, which is critical for access to technology, but whose limits have also led Australia to seek defence ‘self-reliance’. Lacking the material size of many other countries in its region, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) has long embraced the use of technology as a comparative advantage. From the 1970s to the 1990s, this meant maintaining a force-level advantage over much weaker countries in Southeast Asia. After 2001, it meant adapting the ADF to integrate seamlessly with US forces for coalition operations. Now, however, Australia needs to leverage innovation for force-level change to meet a high-technology, great power threat. A major Defence Review in 2023 therefore recommended that defence planning be based on a ‘focused force’ developed through threat-based planning. That the government commissioned this review by external experts, rather than rely on the Department of Defence, points to long-standing weaknesses in the country’s ad hoc, pragmatic approach to defence planning.