Owning Time: Tempo in Army's Contribution to Australian Defence Strategy

Over the last decade, time has become central to the concerns of the Western strategic community. Many policymakers worry that time is no longer on their side in the face of relative decline and the threat from powerful revisionist states.

This article explores how the Australian army can learn how to operate across the full temporal domain: speeding up when necessary, at other times slowing down, as well as being able to delay and shape how others think and act in time. It develops three notions of tempo—change, congruence and control—to help Army build on the work of recent years, such as Accelerated Warfare, Army in Motion and the 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR).