The Red Cross Ledger

Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS) arrives with the weight of a world in crisis behind it. It acknowledges eroding thresholds for the use of force, warns of coercion not seen since the Second World War, and paints a picture of a strategic environment fracturing along fault lines that may not hold for much longer. It is, by any reading, a document written in a moment of genuine alarm.

Which makes it all the more striking that the response it prescribes is so strikingly ordinary.

For all its sober diagnosis, the 2026 NDS ultimately offers a strategy built for a world that no longer exists, one of predictable timelines, stable supply chains, and the quiet assumption that Australia has a decade or more to get its house in order. And it turns out I am far from alone in thinking so.

What the Experts Are Saying

The document has landed in a busy week for defence commentary, and the consensus among Australia’s leading strategic thinkers is telling: the NDS is an evolution, not the leap that the moment demands.

At the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Mike Hughes, director of the Defence Strategy program, framed it charitably but carefully, calling the strategy “an evolution, not a revolution” and noting that ADF transformation “is a long-term endeavour that won’t be achieved in a two-year cycle.” His ASPI colleague Richard Gray was more pointed, observing that while policy continuity is generally a virtue, “there’s relatively little new money, despite the NDS’s recognition that the security environment is deteriorating.” That gap between the severity of the threat acknowledged and the resources committed to it, is a thread that runs through almost every serious analysis of this document.

Retired Major General Mick Ryan, writing for the Lowy Institute, gave the document partial credit. The 2026 NDS, he noted, does meaningfully broaden the concept of national defence to include civil preparedness, fuel security, and economic security, lessons absorbed belatedly from Ukraine and the Middle East. But on the finances, he was blunt: the spending increases are “relatively modest compared to the scale of the security challenges now faced by Australia,” and “paying for AUKUS and paying for the ADF is very difficult with a budget of less than 3% of GDP.”

That 3% figure has itself become a flashpoint. Defence Minister Richard Marles announced it at the National Press Club as the headline achievement of the strategy, but the number is calculated using NATO’s methodology, which incorporates military pensions and other non-combat expenditures that Australia has historically excluded. Michael Shoebridge of Strategic Analysis Australia called it “shameless” creative accounting that “simply pretends we are spending more” on the ADF. Opposition defence spokesman James Paterson was similarly withering, arguing that “accounting tricks do not make our country safer.” By the traditional Australian measure, ASPI estimates current spending sits closer to 2.03% of GDP.

Writing for Modern Diplomacy, analyst Sana Khan identified what she calls “the most striking omission” in the entire document: the lack of serious engagement with the changing nature of the US alliance. As Washington moves toward a more transactional approach to its partnerships, the NDS continues to frame the relationship “in traditional terms of shared interests, without fully addressing the implications of a more unpredictable and self-interested American posture.” That, she argues, is a significant strategic blind spot, and it is hard to disagree.


The Gap Between Diagnosis and Prescription

The NDS doesn’t mince words about the threat environment. It describes Australia as entering “a more dangerous and unpredictable era… where thresholds against the use of force are being eroded,” and warns that coercive pressure will reach levels “not seen since the Second World War.” These are not hedged bureaucratic formulations. They are statements of genuine strategic alarm.

But the response to that alarm? Continued transformation. Reform of delivery functions. Prioritising capability acquisition. Strengthening partnerships.

This is the language of departmental modernisation, the kind of thing you’d find in a mid-tier corporate restructure, not a national defence posture recalibration in an era of strategic shock. The diagnosis and the prescription are operating in entirely different registers, and that mismatch runs through the document like a fault line.

The Strategy Assumes What It Cannot Afford to Assume

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the NDS is its relationship with time. Again and again, the document frames its priorities in ten-year horizons: investment “over the decade to 2035–36,” initiatives designed to deliver capability through the 2030s, structural reforms that will take years to bed down.

The problem is that the threats the strategy identifies do not operate on decade-long timelines. Unsafe Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) intercepts, cyber disruption, nuclear expansion, and economic coercion are not distant horizon risks, they are present-tense realities. ASPI’s Courtney Stewart put it well, noting that “the pace of change to achieve ADF military requirements will remain the critical challenge of implementing this strategy.” A strategy that assumes stable conditions for the next five to seven years is a gamble, and the NDS never really reckons with what happens if that gamble doesn’t pay off.

Self-Reliance or Strategic Outsourcing?

One of the NDS’s central ambitions is to build a more self-reliant Australian defence capability. It is a theme the document returns to repeatedly, and it’s the right instinct for a country that has historically depended heavily on great-power protection.

The trouble is that the strategy simultaneously deepens almost every dimension of Australia’s dependence on the United States. AUKUS integration expands. U.S. force posture on Australian soil grows. Intelligence and logistics dependencies are reinforced. The document even concedes that “any effective balance of military power… will require the continued presence and role of the United States.”

Ryan at the Lowy Institute noticed the same tension: the NDS makes “an explicit acknowledgment that the United States may be less available as a security guarantor, and that Australia must develop greater self-reliance, a shift in tone from 2024 that sits in some tension with Marles’ full-throated endorsement of the alliance.” ASPI’s Stewart adds nuance here, arguing that self-reliance “does not mean autonomy”, the US alliance remains the indispensable foundation. That may be true. But it also means that the self-reliance framing in the document is doing more rhetorical work than strategic work.

 

The Ukraine Lesson, Unlearned

The NDS cites the conflict in Ukraine as a defining data point for contemporary warfare. It notes, correctly, that “there are significant risks associated with an overreliance on small numbers of advanced capabilities.” Ukraine has shown the world what attrition looks like at scale, the grinding consumption of ammunition, the importance of industrial surge capacity, the premium placed on mass and resilience over precision and elegance.

And then the strategy proceeds to invest in boutique platforms, exquisite long-range strike systems, and decade-long submarine pathways.

Ryan acknowledges the NDS’s investment in autonomous systems as “welcome,” noting that Australia’s increased focus on drones and counter-drone capabilities does reflect genuine learning from the battlefield. ASPI’s Malcolm Davis agrees, calling the Ghost Bat and Ghost Shark investments “a good move” for boosting mass at reduced cost. But Ryan’s larger observation stands: the Ukraine references demonstrate the government has “finally… started thinking about the lessons from the conflict. While it is never too late, it has been very slow.” Cited and absorbed are two different things.

One gap that Ryan specifically flags: cognitive warfare. The AI-enabled information operations that have shaped both the Ukraine and Middle East conflicts receive only a passing gesture in the NDS, “strategic communications”, when they arguably represent one of the most significant shifts in how modern conflict is actually waged. Perhaps the appointment of the new Chief of Army, with her background in this domain is telling.

Mobilisation as Footnote

If there is one area where the gap between stated threat and proposed response is most glaring, it’s mobilisation. The NDS gestures toward “national civil preparedness” and “national resilience,” but these remain conceptual placeholders, phrases without frameworks behind them.

Defence expert Jennifer Parker made the point forcefully, noting that under the current funding profile Australia would “be relying on the United States to do it for us” when it comes to defending its maritime supply chains, an acute vulnerability for an island nation with the world’s third largest exclusive economic zone. The Middle East conflict has already disrupted Australia’s fuel, fertiliser, and plastics supply. The petrol pump, as Parker observes, is a visible reminder of exactly what’s at stake.

There is no reserve expansion plan, no industrial surge doctrine, no national stockpile strategy, no serious civil-military integration framework. For a document that warns of coercion at Second World War scale, the absence of anything resembling a mobilisation footing is difficult to explain.

For most of the Cold War, Australia maintained a clear, practical doctrine for national preparedness, captured in the old civil defence Australian Civil Defence Manual – Volume 1: Civil Defence in Australia, known as the “Red Book” (it had a red cover), a blunt, unambiguous manual that told governments, councils and citizens exactly how the nation would mobilise, shelter, disperse, communicate and survive in a crisis.

Today, nothing like it exists. The Red Book has been replaced by a patchwork of “resilience” frameworks, glossy strategies and high‑level guidance that avoid the hard questions of mobilisation, national endurance and civil preparedness. In an era the NDS itself describes as “more dangerous and unpredictable” with coercion rising and norms eroding, the absence of a modern equivalent to the Red Book is not just an administrative gap, it is a strategic failure. Australia has allowed the concept of civil defence to atrophy entirely, leaving the nation without a coherent plan for how society would function under sustained pressure, disruption or conflict.

A Culture Closed to Challenge

Perhaps the most troubling element of the NDS’s release was not in the document itself, but in how it was defended. At the National Press Club, Defence Minister Marles reportedly dismissed the contributions of think tanks, retired officers, and former public servants as essentially worthless.

Ryan’s response at the Lowy Institute was measured but cutting: “No other Western capital governs its defence establishment this way. The quality of strategy depends in part on the quality of challenge it receives. A culture that treats outside expertise as a nuisance rather than a resource is one that will repeat avoidable mistakes.”

This matters beyond the politics of the moment. A strategy developed within a narrow Canberra circle, insulated from operational experience and outside scrutiny, is a strategy that cannot self-correct. The 2026 NDS reflects exactly that insulation, in its assumptions, its timelines, and its mismatch between the urgency it describes and the incrementalism it delivers.

Culture is a big issue. Yet it is never considered in these glossy publications. When you have regular infantry battalions lucky to have two manned rifle companies, brigade manoeuvre elements relying on outsourced logistics and transport companies to move troops into the field for training exercises, the problem is clearly visible.

The reality is that wars are fought violently, often hand to hand. The situation in Ukraine is comparable to many WW1 battlegrounds with trench warfare, and the old role of the infantry code, ‘to seek out and close with the enemy, to kill or capture him, to seize ground and repel attack, by day or night, regardless of season, weather or terrain’ is as relevant as ever. We had to know this. Verbatim. A failure to recite this ad nauseam at any stage during the day saw harsh punishment. I am sure it may still be the case, but is there an actual national will to do so now?

The so called ‘culture wars’ are real, and like it or not, we are witnessing a decline in national will, caused directly by the very government who wrote this paper. It is all well and good to publish glossy documents, do some press statements then swarm social media, but aspiration and reality are two different things. Who exactly will fill the front-line units, we know that the ADF are recruiting from overseas now to compete with attrition rates.

Recent events involving the arrest of Ben Roberts-Smith will not help. The veteran community, as well as what seems like most Australians are appalled at this, as well as the handling of it by the government and law enforcement agencies. Hardly a poster call for recruitment in current times.

A Strategy for Slow-Burn Competition in a Fast-Moving Crisis

The 2026 National Defence Strategy is not a dishonest document. Its diagnosis of the strategic environment is largely correct. The investments in autonomous systems, long-range strike, and maritime capability are real, if modest. The broadening of the national defence concept to include civil preparedness and fuel security is a genuine improvement on the 2024 iteration.

Australia is poor at defence procurement, innovation and delivery. AUKUS, which I believe is flawed, is unlikely to ever happen. Australia missed the boat, pun intended.

But as Modern Diplomacy’s Khan concludes, “defence strategy is about anticipating future threats, not codifying past thinking.” By failing to fully grapple with geopolitical fragmentation, the shifting US alliance, and the actual lessons of contemporary warfare, the 2026 NDS risks leaving Australia “prepared for yesterday’s wars rather than tomorrow’s challenges.”

It is a strategy for slow-burn competition, not fast-moving crisis. For predictable timelines, not strategic shock. For peacetime Defence, not national defence.

The gap between what the NDS says about the world and what it proposes to do about it is the most important thing to understand about Australian strategic policy right now. Closing that gap, not just acknowledging it, is the work that actually needs to be done.