Every major war of the past four years has delivered the same brutal lesson: countries engaged in prolonged conflict are constrained by manpower long before they run out of ammunition, aircraft, or equipment. Israel and Ukraine, despite fighting very different wars with very different militaries, have both encountered the same reality. A small, elite professional force cannot sustain a long, high-intensity war on its own. It requires a large pool of trained, ready reserves behind it. If those reserves do not exist in sufficient numbers and with the right capabilities before a conflict begins, no amount of emergency legislation, bonus payments, or rushed mobilisations can create them once the fighting is underway.

Australia should be paying very close attention. The Australian Defence Force’s Army Reserve, in its current form, is not a serious “expansion base” for a major conflict. It is a boutique, under-equipped, administratively neglected part-time force that has been shrinking in relevance for decades even as the strategic environment around Australia has deteriorated sharply.

If Australia is genuinely preparing, as successive Defence Strategic Reviews[1] claim, for the possibility of major conflict in our region this decade, then a dramatic, urgent expansion of the Army Reserve, in size, in capability, and in our capacity to actually mobilise it, is no longer optional. It is one of the cheapest and most important insurance policies the nation can buy.

Israel: what happens when the reserve is the strategy, and it breaks anyway

Israel is often held up as the model reserve system: a small standing army backed by a vast, trained citizen reserve that can be called up within hours. For decades this was true, and it worked. Since October 2023, however, that model has been pushed to what its own chief of staff describes as the point of collapse.

The current Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, has warned the Israeli cabinet that without an urgent injection of troops, the IDF faces a manpower shortfall of 12,000 to 15,000 personnel[2], and that reservists are now being pushed into their sixth and seventh mobilisation rotations, serving 80 to 100 days a year[3] rather than the few weeks that used to be typical. Zamir’s blunt warning to the government was that without a solution, “the IDF will collapse in on itself[4].”

The damage is not just administrative. Sustained over-mobilisation is corroding the force from within: sharp drops in the proportion of officers and NCOs who want to stay in uniform, spikes in requests for early discharge among career staff, and, most tellingly, a documented rise in outright refusals and insubordination as troops kept in prolonged combat without adequate rest lose confidence in the legitimacy of orders from the rear. Israel has had to grant an amnesty to thousands of reservists[5] who had effectively gone absent, simply because it could not afford to prosecute its way out of a manpower crisis it could not otherwise solve.

The lesson here is not that reserves don’t work. It is that even the world’s most reserve-dependent, combat-experienced military can be broken by asking too much, of too few, for too long, without the depth in the system to rotate the load. Israel built a large reserve; what it lacked was enough ‘depth’ in that reserve, and enough political tolerance for the burden-sharing needed to sustain it, once a war ran past the weeks it was designed for.

Ukraine: what happens when mobilisation isn’t trusted, planned, or shared fairly

Ukraine’s experience delivers a different but equally important warning. Ukraine did not lack manpower on paper, it had a large population and, in 2022, genuine mass enthusiasm to fight. What it lacked was a mobilisation system built for a long war: clear rules on who serves, credible limits on how long they serve, a functioning rotation and demobilisation pathway, and public trust that the burden was being shared fairly across society.

Four years on, brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are reported to be manned at only 40–60%[6] of authorised strength on paper, and as low as 20–30% on the actual front line, according to soldiers’ own accounts. Desertion and unauthorised absence[7] have become endemic, driven less by cowardice than by exhaustion and the absence of any clear route home for men who volunteered in 2022 and have not been rotated out since.

Violent confrontations between draft-office officials and men resisting conscription have risen sharply year on year, and trust in the fairness of the system has collapsed alongside it, a March 2025 survey[8] found a majority of Ukrainians now express understanding, rather than condemnation, for those evading the draft.

Ukraine’s crisis is a warning about legitimacy as much as logistics. A mobilisation system built and explained in a hurry, mid-crisis, without a credible plan for who serves, for how long, and what happens next, generates resentment and evasion faster than it generates soldiers. By the time the war forced Ukraine to confront these questions, it was already too late to build the institutions, culture and public buy-in that make mobilisation work. Australia has the rare luxury of asking these questions now, while there is no war at our door, a luxury Ukraine did not have.

Australia’s reserve: an expansion base that cannot expand

Set against these warnings, Australia’s own settings look complacent. The Army Reserve was built, and has essentially remained, an ‘expeditionary’ model, a part-time force designed to top up small contingents for distant, discretionary deployments alongside allies, inherited from the era of Korea, Malaya and Vietnam. It was never designed to be a homeland defence force capable of rapid, large-scale mobilisation against a direct threat, and successive governments have allowed it to atrophy rather than adapt.

The numbers tell the story. The government’s own 2024 Strategic Review of the ADF Reserves found that of roughly 41,000[9] people formally registered as reservists, some 10,000[10] had never actually rendered any service at all, leaving a real deployable pool closer to 31,000, many of whom fill individual capability gaps rather than forming a genuine expansion force.

Structurally, the Reserve has been stripped of the equipment that would let it fight as formed units: its armoured vehicles have been progressively replaced with unarmoured 4x4s, it has little or no organic indirect fire support, minimal long-range mobility, and essentially no remote sensing or drone capability of its own. In the assessment of defence analysts, it currently has “no real armoured capability, no real means of transporting itself rapidly over long distances[11]“, a mobilisation base that could not credibly mobilise.

Most damning is the government’s own response to the problem it commissioned a review to solve. The 2023 Defence Strategic Review explicitly found Australia’s force structure “not fit for purpose[12]” and called for a larger force with greater war-fighting endurance and national resilience, yet the subsequent Strategic Review of the ADF Reserves, released in December 2024, proposed a net recruitment target of just 1,000 additional personnel by 2030. As strategic analyst Ross Babbage has argued, this is “an exercise in deck chair rearrangement[13]” administrative tinkering dressed up as reform, when what the strategic environment demands is a fundamentally different model.

The comparison that should worry us

Babbage’s comparison of reserve models is instructive. Countries that face genuine, proximate threats of direct attack do not run expeditionary-style reserves; they run homeland and theatre defence models built for rapid, large-scale mobilisation.

Finland, with a population of 5.6 million, fields 16,000 permanent personnel backed by 870000 trained and equipped reservists[14]. Israel, with 9.8 million people, fields 170,000 regulars and 465,000 active reservists[15]. Singapore, with 6 million people, fields 51,000 regulars and 253,000 trained reservists[16]. Even the hybrid US model, from a population of 340 million, backs 1.3 million regulars with 807,000 reservists[17].

Australia, facing an increasingly capable and assertive China in a region its own Defence Strategic Review says could see major conflict before the end of this decade, still runs the reserve model of a country that expects to send a modest contingent abroad, not one that expects to have to defend itself. That mismatch is the central strategic risk.

The 2026 National Defence Strategy: diagnosis without a mobilisation prescription

The government’s own 2026 National Defence Strategy inadvertently makes the case for reserve reform better than any outside critique could, simply by the size of the gap between what it says about the world and what it proposes to do about it. The strategy is genuinely alarming in its diagnosis: it describes Australia entering “a more dangerous and unpredictable era[18]” in which thresholds against the use of force are eroding and warns of coercive pressure at levels “not seen since the Second World War[19].”

These are not routine bureaucratic formulations. Yet the response the strategy prescribes, continued transformation, reform of delivery functions, prioritised capability acquisition, strengthened partnerships, reads like the language of a departmental restructure rather than a national mobilisation plan for the era of strategic shock the document itself describes.

Independent defence analysts have converged on the same conclusion. Commentators from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) have characterised the strategy as “an evolution, not a revolution[20],” and noted that despite acknowledging a deteriorating security environment, the new funding attached to it is comparatively modest.

That funding question has itself become contentious: the headline commitment to reach 3%[21] of GDP by 2033 relies on a Norther Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)-style accounting method that folds in items, including military pensions, Australia has not traditionally counted, with critics arguing the true trajectory under the conventional measure sits closer to 2% and that the new figure “pretends we are spending more” without a corresponding increase in real capability.

Retired officers and strategic commentators have separately noted that the spending increases remain “relatively modest compared to the scale of the security challenges now faced by Australia“, an assessment hard to square with a strategy that also assumes Australia has most of the coming decade to get its house in order, when the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army (PLA)-readiness and Indo-Pacific warnings discussed earlier in this essay suggest a much narrower window.

Three specific gaps in the strategy bear directly on the case for reserve expansion:

The Ukraine lessons are cited, not absorbed. The strategy explicitly references Ukraine’s experience as evidence of “the risks associated with an overreliance on small numbers of advanced capabilities“, precisely the lesson about mass, depth and attrition this essay has drawn on.

Yet the strategy’s own investment priorities lean heavily toward exquisite, boutique platforms, long-range strike systems, advanced submarines delivered over a decade-long pathway, rather than the personnel mass and industrial surge capacity that Ukraine’s war has shown actually determines whether a force can sustain a long conflict. Investment in autonomous systems and uncrewed platforms is a genuine and welcome step toward affordable mass, but it does not substitute for the trained personnel depth that a reserve expansion specifically provides.

Mobilisation appears only as a gesture, not a plan. The strategy references “national civil preparedness” and “national resilience,” but, as this essay’s own case for reserve reform has argued throughout, these remain conceptual placeholders rather than funded programs. There is no reserve expansion target embedded in the strategy, no industrial surge doctrine, no national stockpile plan, and no serious civil-military integration framework to match the scale of warning the document itself issues.

Australia once had a concrete, practical doctrine for exactly this problem: the Cold War-era Australian Civil Defence Manual (ACDM), commonly known from its cover as the “Red Book,” which set out in plain terms how government, councils and citizens would mobilise, disperse, communicate and endure in a national emergency.

Nothing resembling it exists today; it has been replaced by a scattering of glossy “resilience” frameworks that describe the problem without committing to how it would actually be solved. A funded reserve expansion, of the kind proposed throughout this essay, is precisely the kind of concrete mobilisation commitment that would give the strategy’s resilience language actual substance.

Self-reliance rhetoric sits uneasily with deepening alliance dependence. The strategy repeatedly frames greater self-reliance as a central ambition, in the same document that expands Australia, United Kingdom & United States (AUKUS) integration, grows United States (US) force posture on Australian soil, and concedes that “any effective balance of military power… will require the continued presence and role of the United States.”

This is not necessarily a contradiction, allied cooperation and national self-reliance are not mutually exclusive, but a reserve force genuinely capable of holding Australia’s own approaches, as the Falklands case study above illustrates, is one of the few concrete ways Australia could reduce its dependence on the timing and availability of an ally during the exact opening days of a crisis when that ally’s own attention may be divided across multiple fronts.

None of this means the 2026 strategy is dishonest, its underlying diagnosis of the strategic environment is broadly sound, and its modest gains on civil preparedness, fuel security and autonomous systems are real improvements on the 2024 iteration it replaced. The problem is precisely the one this essay has argued throughout: a strategy that correctly identifies the risk of major conflict this decade, while addressing the personnel and mobilisation dimension of that risk almost entirely by omission, is a strategy prepared for a war of gradual competition, not the fast-moving crisis it says Australia may actually face.

The clock: how much time does Australia actually have?

Scepticism about precise deadlines is healthy, but the weight of official warning is now hard to dismiss. Since 2021, successive US Indo-Pacific commanders, Admiral Philip Davidson, then Admiral John Aquilino[22], have told the US Congress that Xi Jinping has directed the PLA to be capable of taking Taiwan by force by 2027, a marker that has become known as the “Davidson Window[23].”

Then- Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Burns[24] confirmed in 2023 that this was a genuine intelligence assessment of a military-readiness target Xi had set for his forces, even while cautioning that a capability deadline is not the same as a decision to invade. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth[25] repeated the warning at the Shangri-La Dialogue in 2025, and US officials have continued to describe a PLA on track to meet it, building missile stockpiles and naval mass at pace.

Most intelligence assessments are careful to separate ‘capability’ from ‘intent’. Beijing may well prefer to achieve unification without war, and 2027 is a readiness marker, not a confirmed invasion date, but the consistent, bipartisan message from Washington and Canberra’s own strategic guidance is that the risk window opens this decade, not next.

Australia’s own official planning reflects this. The 2023 Defence Strategic Review warned that Australia no longer has the “ten-year strategic warning time[26]” that shaped defence planning for a generation, and that the country must be prepared for the possibility of conflict with much shorter notice. Analysts have also been blunt that a Taiwan contingency would not stay contained to the Taiwan Strait, it would very likely draw in US bases and forces across the Indo-Pacific, including in Australia, and could rapidly become a regional war affecting sea lanes, alliance commitments and Australian territory itself.

This timeline matters enormously for reserve reform, because it sets the outer limit on how long Australia can afford to take. Recruiting, training and equipping a reserve force at meaningful scale is not a project that can be compressed into months.

Building trained infantry, engineering, logistics and armoured reserve capability typically takes several years per intake once the training pipeline, instructors and equipment are actually in place, and Australia does not yet have that pipeline built. If the risk window is genuinely this decade, the practical reality is that any reserve expansion program needs to begin now, at pace, to have meaningful trained mass in place by the early 2030s. A program announced in response to a crisis, as Ukraine’s experience shows, arrives too late to matter in the opening phase of a conflict.

Sizing the force: what the numbers could look like

Having established the case, the timeframe and the design principles, it is worth putting indicative numbers on what “dramatically expanded” should actually mean, while being upfront that no Australian government has yet set a target anywhere near the scale this essay argues for, and any figures here are planning benchmarks drawn from historical precedent, comparative allied models and defence-analyst commentary, not official policy.

The starting point. The Australian Army’s full-time permanent strength currently sits at roughly 29,000–30,000. Against that stands an Army Reserve carrying about 41,000 people on its nominal roll, but, as the government’s own 2024 Strategic Review of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) Reserves found, around 10,000 of those have never actually rendered service, leaving a real pool closer to 31,000, of whom only a much smaller number, commonly estimated in the 15,000–17,000 range, parade regularly enough to be considered trained and current[27].

In other words, Australia’s genuinely available part-time land force is smaller than its full-time one, the reverse of what a serious homeland-defence posture requires. Against this backdrop, the government’s current reform plan, an additional 1,000 reservists by 2030, is not a scaling-up in any meaningful sense; it barely keeps pace with normal turnover.

A near-term benchmark: close the “hollow force” gap. The first, most modest target should simply be to convert the existing nominal roll into a genuinely trained and available force, taking actively parading, deployable strength from around 15,000–17,000[28] today to at least the full nominal 41,000, and beyond, within the next few years. This alone would roughly double Australia’s real part-time land capability without requiring a single additional person to be recruited on paper, it is a readiness and retention problem as much as a recruiting one and should be achievable on a relatively short timeline if resourced properly.

A medium-term benchmark: double the size of the Regular Army. Defence commentary specifically addressing Australia’s mobilisation shortfall has proposed that the Reserve should be manned, at minimum, at a level of trained, routinely parading personnel at least twice the size of the Regular Army.

Applied to a Regular Army of around 30,000 (noting the ADF’s own broader ambition to grow permanent numbers toward roughly 80,000 across all three services by 2040), this would mean a target of 60,000[29] or more trained, current reservists, roughly triple to quadruple today’s actively parading strength, and a genuinely credible base from which to expand further in a crisis.

This is the kind of figure this essay’s proposals, a tiered readiness structure, a digital and IT reserve, wider age bands, a limited-service veterans’ pathway, and rebuilt local/regional recruiting, are collectively designed to make achievable within a decade, roughly aligning with the 2027 Davidson Window and the years immediately following it.

These numbers matter because of what modern conflicts demand.

First, Australia may need to conduct multiple tasks simultaneously. A regional contingency would likely require protection of critical infrastructure, northern approaches, offshore territories, logistics hubs and military facilities while also supporting broader defence operations. A single deployable formation cannot achieve all of these tasks at once.

Second, modern conflicts consume personnel through attrition, fatigue and rotation. Even forces suffering relatively modest casualties require continual replacement flows to sustain readiness over time. Personnel depth is therefore not merely a wartime luxury but an operational requirement.

Third, larger reserve forces free regular soldiers for tasks that only they can perform. Reservists assigned to infrastructure protection, logistics, engineering support and domestic security functions effectively multiply regular force capacity by preventing highly trained full-time personnel from being diverted into rear-area responsibilities.

The objective should not be creating a mass army for its own sake. It should be creating enough depth to sustain operations, absorb shocks and provide government with meaningful strategic options during a crisis and adopt a longer-term, wartime-expansion benchmark.

For scale, it is worth recalling that Australia has held a much larger part-time force before, from a much smaller population. In the mid-1950s, the Citizen Military Forces[30] reached a strength of around 80,000, this from a national population of roughly nine million, meaning close to 1% of the entire population was in the part-time reserve at its post-war peak.

Applying that same proportion to Australia’s current population of around 27 million would suggest a reserve approaching a quarter of a million people. No credible proposal is currently arguing Australia should recruit at 1950s CMF-to-population ratios in peacetime, that force was substantially built on conscription-era participation that a modern volunteer system cannot simply replicate, but the comparison is a useful corrective to any sense that today’s roughly 30,000–40,000-strong Reserve represents some natural ceiling.

It does not; it is a historically unusually small reserve, both in absolute terms and as a share of population, for a country of Australia’s size and strategic exposure. Read against the homeland-defence comparators cited earlier in this essay, Singapore fielding roughly five reservists for every regular, Israel roughly 2.7, Finland roughly ten, even a relatively conservative Australian ambition of doubling or tripling today’s real reserve strength over the coming decade would still leave Australia towards the lower end of what comparably exposed democracies consider necessary.

Why these numbers matter specifically for a Pacific or South China Sea contingency. A generic figure means little without connecting it to what the force would actually be asked to do. Three features of a plausible regional contingency point toward needing genuine depth, not just a slightly larger boutique force:

• Distributed, simultaneous commitments. A Taiwan or South China Sea contingency, as noted earlier, would very likely draw in US bases and forces across the Indo-Pacific, including in Australia, while also requiring Australia to simultaneously secure its own northern approaches, offshore territories and critical infrastructure, the Falklands-style delay-and-hold task described above, replicated at multiple dispersed locations at once rather than a single garrison. That requires enough trained personnel to generate several geographically separate forces simultaneously, not one deployable brigade.

• Attrition and rotation at a scale Australia has not planned for since Korea. Ukraine’s experience shows that brigades in sustained high-intensity combat need continuous replacement flow, Ukraine’s own officials estimated a need for around 500,000 additional personnel in a single year of that war to replace losses and allow rotation, a scale of attrition and turnover utterly unlike the six-month rotation cycles the ADF has planned around for East Timor, Iraq or Afghanistan. Even a much smaller-scale Australian contingency in a peer or near-peer conflict would need a far deeper personnel reserve behind it than expeditionary-era planning assumed, simply to sustain losses and burnout over months rather than weeks.

• Freeing the Regular Army for the fight, not the rear. As happened in the Solomons and East Timor deployments, an adequately sized, properly trained Reserve can take on domestic security, critical infrastructure protection, logistics and rear-area tasks that would otherwise consume Regular Army personnel needed at the front, meaning that reserve depth directly multiplies the number of regular soldiers actually available for forward commitments, rather than simply sitting in reserve as a separate figure on a ledger.

Put together, a realistic, staged numerical ambition for Australia would look something like converting the existing nominal Reserve into a genuinely trained force of 30,000–40,000 within the next few years; grow that to at least 60,000, roughly double the Regular Army, within a decade; and build the recruiting pipelines, digital, regional, cross-generational and veteran-inclusive, needed to expand further toward a six-figure wartime mobilisation base if a crisis actually materialises.

These are not official government figures, and no current policy commits Australia to anything like them, which is itself the central problem this essay has argued needs to change.

A third case study: the Falklands model of territorial defence-in-depth

Israel and Ukraine show what happens when a reserve system breaks under the strain of a war already underway. The Falkland Islands offer a different, and arguably more directly relevant, case study for Australia: a small, remote, thinly populated territory a very long way from reinforcement,  the exact geography Australia’s own north and offshore territories share, and the design choices Britain made, first badly and then well, about how to defend it.

Before the Falklands War, Britain’s defence of the islands rested on a small Royal Marines detachment of around 40–70 personnel[31] and the locally raised Falkland Islands Defence Force (FIDF), a volunteer reserve unit descended from a nineteenth-century militia and numbering only a few dozen active members.

In February 1982, weeks before the invasion, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wrote to a party worker that this garrison was “sufficient deterrent“[32] on its own. When Argentina invaded on 2 April 1982 with a far larger force, the Marines and FIDF put up a brief, three-hour resistance before the governor ordered them to surrender; FIDF members had their equipment confiscated and were held under house arrest for the duration of the war.

The lesson historians and defence analysts draw from this is blunt: a token, symbolically sized local force, unsupported by a credible reinforcement plan, does not deter a determined adversary, it can actually invite invasion by signalling that the territory is undefended and not worth reinforcing. This is precisely the danger analysts like Ross Babbage warn Australia’s current, hollowed-out Reserve now represents: a “paper” mobilisation base is not a deterrent, it is an invitation.

The post-1982 “Fortress Falklands” model: garrison, reserve and reinforcement as one system. After recapturing the islands, Britain rebuilt Falklands defence from the ground up around a very different, three-layered design that holds real lessons for Australia:

• A properly resourced standing garrison, not a token one. Britain built RAF Mount Pleasant[33], a purpose-built airbase, and now maintains a tri-service garrison of roughly 1,200–1,500 personnel, including a rotating infantry company, four Typhoon fighters on permanent quick-reaction alert, ground-based air defence (Sky Sabre), and a Royal Navy patrol vessel, usually backed by submarine support.

• A reformed, locally integrated reserve. The FIDF[34] still exists, now organised as a light-role infantry company trained to British Army doctrine, but it operates as an augmentation and local-knowledge force embedded within the standing garrison’s plan, providing highly mobile light infantry able to move by Land Rover, quad bike and rigid inflatable boat across difficult terrain the regular garrison knows less well, rather than standing alone as the primary defence, as it had to in 1982.

• A rehearsed reinforcement pipeline. Mount Pleasant’s runway supports a twice-weekly strategic airbridge from the UK, precisely so reinforcements and supplies do not depend, as they did catastrophically in 1982, on informal routing through third countries. The doctrine is explicitly to deter first, and if deterrence fails, to hold and delay using the standing garrison and reserve until reinforcement can arrive by air and, if needed, by sea.

Even this improved model has acknowledged limits that are directly relevant to Australia’s own planning. Analysts and former commanders have pointed out that the garrison functions as a “holding force” rather than one that could defeat a large, well-prepared modern assault outright, that a determined adversary who captured or destroyed the Mount Pleasant runway could sever the reinforcement pipeline entirely, and that the loss of Royal Navy amphibious shipping in recent years means Britain may no longer have a credible way to stage a 1982-style recapture task force if the islands were lost.

In other words, even a well-designed territorial defence-in-depth system only works if every layer, standing force, local reserve, and the transport and logistics needed to reinforce it, is actually resourced together. Neglect any one layer, and the whole system reverts to the pre-1982 vulnerability.

What this means for ADF scenarios. Australia has its own version of the Falklands problem, at much larger scale: a vast northern coastline, offshore territories (Christmas Island, the Cocos Keeling Islands, Ashmore Reef), and remote northern bases (RAAF Tindal, Scherger, Curtin, Learmonth) that sit thousands of kilometres from the population centres where most of the ADF, and almost all of the current Reserve, is based.

Many of these “bare bases” in northern Australia currently hold minimal permanent garrisons in peacetime, relying on the ability to surge personnel and aircraft forward in a crisis, a model that, on the Falklands precedent, only works if the surge and reinforcement plan is real, rehearsed and resourced, not assumed.

A credible reserve-based application of the Falklands lesson for Australia would involve:

• Purpose-built, regionally recruited reserve units in northern Australia and offshore territories, trained and equipped specifically for local terrain, maritime approaches and infrastructure protection, echoing the FIDF’s local-knowledge, light-mobile role rather than trying to replicate southern-state infantry battalions in the tropics.

• Prepositioned equipment and supplies at key northern bases and territories, so that reserve and regular units flowing forward in a crisis are not waiting on a fragile single supply line, the exact vulnerability that nearly doomed the Falklands garrison in 1982 and that critics say still threatens it today.

• A genuinely rehearsed reinforcement pipeline, airlift, sealift and logistics plans exercised regularly, not assumed, linking northern bases and offshore territories back to the regular Army and allied reinforcement (including under AUKUS and US force posture initiatives in northern Australia), so that any local reserve or garrison force is a ‘delaying’ element within a system, not a standalone defence expected to hold indefinitely.

• Honesty in strategic messaging: the Falklands case shows that a government which describes an under-resourced token force as “sufficient deterrent” can talk itself into strategic disaster. Australia’s own reserve reform should avoid the same trap, either properly resource a territorial defence-in-depth model, or be honest that current arrangements provide only symbolic, not credible, coverage of the north.

The core transferable lesson is not simply “raise more local reserve units,” but that a ‘reserve is only ever one layer of a system’, worthless without the standing force, the equipment, and above all the reinforcement pipeline it is meant to buy time for. Australia’s Defence Strategic Review effectively concedes that this system does not yet exist in the north; the Falklands experience, both the failure and the fix, is a concrete, tested template for building one.

The lost culture of local service, and why it matters for national resilience

There is a dimension to reserve decline that is harder to quantify than manning tables and equipment shortfalls, but arguably just as important: the erosion of the local, town-based culture of service that once made the Reserve a genuine part of the social fabric of regional and suburban Australia, not just a military organisation that happens to be part-time.

For most of the twentieth century, the Army Reserve, known for most of that period as the Citizen Military Forces (CMF)[35], was built around a dense network of local drill halls in country towns and suburbs. These units recruited from, trained in, and were genuinely ‘of’ their local community.

Service in the local CMF unit was a recognisable, respected part of what it meant to be a member of a country town, something you could see, walk past, and join alongside people you already knew, in a hall that had often stood in the same street for generations.

That model has been steadily dismantled. Analysis published through the Army’s own professional development platform has documented regional Army Reserve units shrinking from company or squadron size in the 1990s to the point where many now struggle to field a single platoon or troop, even as population in many regional centres has grown, describing regional recruitment and retention as “a canary in the coal mine“[36] for the health of the Reserve as a whole.

The response to that shrinkage has too often been further consolidation rather than investment: individual town-based units folded into larger, more centralised “Super ARCs” serving several communities at once, and depots divested or relocated. Community petitions calling for local Army Reserve centres to be kept open, or reopened, are a direct, grassroots expression of what is lost in this process, not just a training venue, but a visible, accessible link between the military and the community that “grouping unrelated units together” quietly severs.

The consequence is not merely fewer reservists; it is the loss of the mechanism that used to ‘generate’ reservists in the first place. A young person in a country town who could once see the local Reserve unit training on a Tuesday night, whose father, aunt or neighbour had served in it, and who could walk into a hall a few streets from home to join, faced a far lower barrier to service than someone today who must travel, often a considerable distance, to a centralised facility serving a much wider catchment, with no particular local identity attached to the unit at all. Service stops being something embedded in a place and a community and becomes, instead, an individual transaction with a distant institution, precisely the kind of relationship that is hardest to sustain when a nation actually needs to call on large numbers of people quickly.

This matters directly for the concept of national resilience that Australia’s own Defence Strategic Review says the country needs to build. Resilience is not simply a matter of stockpiles and infrastructure; it is a social and civic quality, the depth of a population’s familiarity with, and willingness to participate in, its own defence.

Finland’s model, cited earlier in this essay, does not produce 870,000 trained reservists from a population of 5.6 million through recruitment marketing alone; it does so because reserve service is a normalised, near-universal civic expectation, reinforced by decades of local, generational participation. Israel’s reserve system, for all the strain it is now under, drew its original depth from exactly the same social embedding, reserve duty as something whole communities, not just individuals, understood and organised their lives around.

Australia had the beginnings of an equivalent culture in its CMF-era town-based units and has spent the decades since quietly allowing it to disappear through consolidation decisions made for administrative and cost reasons, without ever weighing what was being traded away.

If Australia is serious about the homeland and theatre defence model this essay has argued for, it needs to rebuild reserve service as something towns and suburbs can see, join, and identify with locally, not just something administered from a handful of consolidated regional hubs. That means resisting further depot closures purely for cost efficiency, reinvesting in smaller, genuinely local force elements even where they cannot immediately field large numbers, and treating the ‘social’ function of the local unit, as a visible presence, a source of community identity, and an easy entry point into service, as a capability in its own right, not a legacy cost to be minimised.

This is also why the case for reserve expansion cannot be framed as an alternative to investing in a hardened, capable, high-readiness permanent force, it has to be framed as both, together. A credible permanent force is what actually fights and deters on day one; it needs to be sufficiently equipped, trained and resourced to hold its own against a peer adversary without excuse.

But no permanent force, however capable, can substitute for the depth, geographic reach and social legitimacy that only a properly resourced, genuinely local reserve provides, the capacity to draw on the whole nation, not just the relatively small professional cohort willing to serve full-time.

Israel’s crisis shows what happens when even a large reserve lacks the depth to sustain a long war; the Falklands case shows what happens when a token local force is asked to deter and defend without the standing force and reinforcement pipeline behind it; and Australia’s own history shows what is lost, socially and culturally, when the local reserve unit disappears from the towns and suburbs that used to sustain it.

A serious defence policy needs all three legs of that stool, hardened permanent force, an expansive and properly resourced reserve, and the local culture of service that makes the reserve more than an administrative category, because a nation that has stopped seeing its own defence as something ordinary people in ordinary towns take part in will struggle to generate the willingness to serve that any of these crises ultimately depend on.

How stark this gap has become is captured bluntly in recent commentary responding to the Institute of Public Affairs’ “Defence of Australia” blueprint, which argues the ADF is currently structured for the “small wars of choice“[37] of the past two decades rather than the “wars of necessity” Australia may now face. That analysis describes a force that is, in its own words, “all show and no go“[38], one that presents well in recruitment campaigns and capability briefings but lacks the depth to sustain operations, scale in a crisis or mobilise communities quickly.

It points to regular infantry battalions currently able to field only two rifle companies rather than a full complement, and to brigade manoeuvre elements that depend on outsourced civilian logistics and transport contractors simply to move troops to their own training exercises.

Whatever one makes of the sharper edges of that critique, the underlying point reinforces this essay’s argument directly: a force that looks credible in a brochure but cannot generate depth, redundancy or rapid mobilisation is not prepared for the kind of conflict Israel and Ukraine are currently fighting.

The same commentary makes a further point directly relevant to the recruiting barriers discussed earlier in this essay: entry standards designed for a small, elite, all-volunteer professional force do not necessarily suit a reserve that is meant to provide national mass.

Skilled tradespeople, the commentary cites truck drivers, among the most operationally useful skill sets a mobilisation base could ask for, have reportedly been turned away from local transport reserve units over minor administrative or aptitude-test technicalities, even as the same units struggle to fill their ranks.

A reserve built for depth should prioritise getting genuinely useful people in uniform, training them to a reasonable general standard, and building specialisation from there, rather than applying a filter calibrated for full-time special-forces-adjacent recruiting to a part-time mass-mobilisation force.

It is also worth acknowledging, soberly, that public trust in the institution asking people to serve matters to recruitment in ways that are hard to legislate around.

A reserve expansion strategy cannot ignore that reputational backdrop; it reinforces, rather than undercuts, the case made earlier in this essay for genuinely fixing DVA support and veteran treatment as a precondition for successful recruitment, not an afterthought to it.

Drawing these threads together, a practical program for rebuilding the local Reserve would need to include:

• restoring genuine local depots with real training capability rather than token parade-night shopfronts;
• deliberately aligning reserve unit roles with the industries and skills already present in each region, from logistics and engineering to agriculture, trades and cyber;
• allowing units to retain a distinct local and regimental identity rather than being homogenised into indistinguishable “Super ARC” branding;
• recruiting through schools, cadet units, community events and word of mouth rather than centralised online portals alone, since, as the same commentary puts it, people join people, not websites;
• treating the Reserve as a capability worth investing in, not a convenient, low-cost labour pool to be filled only when administratively easy.

What an enlarged Army Reserve would actually look like

A reserve built for homeland and theatre defence, rather than for expeditionary top-ups, would look structurally different from what exists today. Drawing on the lessons above and on the homeland-defence models used by Finland, Israel and Singapore, a credible enlarged force would likely include:

Formed, equipped combat units, not just individual reinforcements. Rather than reservists filling isolated capability gaps in regular units, the Reserve would need its own brigade-level formations, infantry, engineer, artillery and armoured or mechanised elements, held at a real (if lower) readiness standard, with their own establishment of Bushmasters, artillery, engineering plant and, ideally, restored armoured mobility rather than the light 4x4s that have replaced it. A reserve unit that cannot move, dig in or bring fire support is not a fighting unit.

A tiered readiness structure. Not every reservist needs to be ready to deploy within 48 hours, but a meaningful proportion should be. A tiered system, a smaller high-readiness tier held to near-regular standards for rapid call-up, a larger general tier trained to deploy within weeks, and a deep ‘expansion’ tier of skilled personnel (engineers, medical staff, logisticians, tradespeople) who could be brought in over months, mirrors how most serious reserve systems are actually structured, and avoids the current Australian problem of a large nominal roll with limited real deployability.

Deliberate integration of niche and civilian-sourced skills. Cyber, space, drone operation, electronic warfare, medical and logistics specialists are exactly the kind of personnel who exist in depth in the civilian economy and can be brought into uniform through short, intensive conversion training rather than years of general military development, a direction the ADF’s own 2025 Cyber Reserve Concept[39] has already begun exploring, and one that should be expanded well beyond cyber into drones, maritime autonomous systems and space-domain awareness.

Genuine geographic depth, especially in the north. Given that a regional contingency would most plausibly involve Australia’s northern approaches, an enlarged Reserve should deliberately grow its footprint in northern Australia, drawing on local recruitment, regional infrastructure and existing exercises such as Talisman Sabre, rather than remaining concentrated in the same state-capital population centres the Reserve has traditionally drawn from.

A designed mobilisation and demobilisation system. As both the Israeli and Ukrainian cases show, size without a plan for sustainable rotation simply relocates the crisis from recruitment to burnout. A larger Reserve needs legislated call-up authorities that specify tour lengths and mandatory rest-and-rotation cycles, clear employer protections and compensation, and a public, honestly communicated compact about what will be asked of reservists and their families if the call-up ever comes, negotiated and understood in peacetime, not improvised under fire.

Innovative options to widen the recruiting funnel

Scaling the Reserve to the size this problem demands cannot be done through the traditional recruiting funnel alone, physically fit 18-to-35-year-olds willing to do weekend training are a finite and heavily contested pool, and the regular ADF is already competing hard for the same people. Some of the more promising ideas now circulating among defence commentators and being trialled in other countries point to a much larger and more realistic pool of talent, if Australia is willing to change entry settings.

A genuine digital and IT reserve, not just a small cyber unit. Defence has already begun down this path: its Cyber Reserve Force, stood up as a direct outcome of the Defence Strategic Review, deliberately recruits cyber operators, AI specialists, cloud security engineers and digital forensics experts through a fast-tracked entry pathway that recognises existing civilian skills and, notably, prioritises technical competence over conventional fitness standards. It is a small start, a few hundred personnel drawn initially from telecommunications, banking and government, but the model deserves to be expanded far beyond cyber.

Estonia’s Defence League[40] runs a dedicated Cyber Defence Unit built almost entirely from part-time volunteer IT professionals holding civilian day jobs, and Ukraine’s crowdsourced “IT Army“[41] demonstrated, admittedly in extremis, just how much capability can be mobilised quickly from a technically skilled civilian population.

Analysts have gone further, arguing Australia needs a broader “civilian” cyber reserve modelled on the state emergency services: a large, lightly-uniformed volunteer corps of IT professionals who train periodically and can be surged to defend critical infrastructure in a crisis, without every member needing to become a full military reservist. Given Australia’s deep bench of telecommunications, finance and software talent, a digital reserve of this kind could realistically be scaled into the thousands within a few years, far faster than growing an armoured brigade.

Deliberately expanding the age span at both ends. Australia’s current Army entry settings max out around 50, a ceiling set more by tradition than by operational necessity for most reserve roles. Other allied reserve forces are already moving the other way: Ireland lifted its Reserve Defence Force maximum recruitment[42] age to 39 and its mandatory retirement age to 60 in 2024 as a deliberate ‘regeneration’ measure, explicitly to widen the pool of skilled, experienced entrants available to a force competing for the same talent as the private sector.

Australia has flirted with this idea before, a former defence minister publicly floated recruiting people in their 50s into non-frontline roles, on the logic that plenty of valuable military work (planning, logistics, training, engineering, medical, intelligence, cyber) does not require the physical standards of an infantry section.

For a Reserve deliberately structured in tiers, as described above, raising the entry and retention age ceilings for the general and expansion tiers, while keeping tougher physical standards for high-readiness combat roles, would open recruiting to experienced tradespeople, engineers and professionals in their 40s, 50s and even 60s who bring exactly the kind of mature, qualified skill sets a mobilisation base most needs.

Recruiting former veterans despite injuries, rather than losing them entirely. Roughly 6,000 ADF members separate from full-time service every year, many of them highly trained, security-cleared and operationally experienced, and a significant number leave with a medical condition or injury that would prevent full deployable service, but not necessarily any service at all.

The ADF already operates a four-tier Medical Employment Classification system, distinguishing personnel who are fully deployable (MEC1) from those who are employable with restrictions (MEC2) or in rehabilitation (MEC3); in practice, however, the current system still pushes many partially fit veterans straight out the door into full medical discharge rather than into a genuine part-time or restricted-duty reserve pathway.

Should a conflict erupt in the near future, an MEC would appear pointless given the experiences in Ukraine at the present time, with amputees still on the frontlines fighting and many soldiers engaged in fighting well over the age of 50.  

A dedicated “limited-service” or “home defence” reserve category, explicitly designed for veterans and serving members who no longer meet MEC1 standards but retain valuable skills in training, staff work, logistics, cyber, intelligence, simulation and mentoring, would let Australia retain rather than discard a highly experienced, already-trained cohort that current settings simply write off.

This is precisely the kind of talent pool the private cybersecurity sector is already competing hard to recruit veterans into; there is no reason Defence itself should not capture more of it first, particularly in roles that do not require combat fitness.

Taken together, these three ideas point to the same underlying principle: a homeland-defence-scale reserve cannot be built solely from the same narrow demographic the regular Army already recruits from. It has to actively design pathways for skilled civilians, older Australians and veterans with injuries or restrictions. people the current system is structurally set up to exclude, but who represent some of the fastest, cheapest and most experienced manpower Australia has available.

Getting DVA and veteran support right, the precondition for sustainable mobilisation

None of the above works unless the system that supports people during and after their service is fixed first. This is not a peripheral welfare issue; it goes directly to the Israeli lesson about burnout, and to whether Australians will actually be willing to serve, and re-serve, in a much larger reserve.

Australia already has hard evidence of what happens when the compensation and support system behind the ADF fails. The Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, which reported in 2024 after finding that Australia has lost more serving and ex-serving personnel to suicide than it lost in twenty years of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, identified a Department of Veterans’ Affairs claims backlog of more than 41,000[43] unallocated cases and found that the sheer complexity of the veteran compensation and rehabilitation system was itself a contributing factor to suicidality among current and former members.

Its final report ran to seven volumes and 122[44] recommendations; the government has agreed or agreed in principle to 104 of them. Progress has been real, the claims backlog has reportedly been cleared, new claims are now triaged within 14 days, and from mid-2026 veteran compensation is due to be assessed under a single simplified Act rather than the three overlapping pieces of legislation[45] that veterans and their families have had to navigate for years.

But the Commission was blunt that Australia has received more than 50 prior reports and 750 recommendations on this problem since 2000 without lasting fix, and even government’s own statements acknowledge there is “still more to do” and that complex claims are still taking too long[46].

This matters directly to reserve expansion for three reasons. First, a much larger, more heavily used Reserve, one genuinely available for mobilisation rather than symbolic service, will generate far more injury, illness and compensation claims than today’s system, and a DVA that is still working through legacy backlogs and legislative complexity cannot absorb that load without the reform being locked in and properly resourced, not just announced.

Second, the credibility of any call for expanded service depends on trust: Israel’s experience shows that when troops and reservists lose confidence that the institution behind them will treat them fairly, discipline and willingness to serve erode quickly, and Ukraine’s shows what happens when the state’s compact with those who serve is seen as unequal or dishonoured.

A Reserve recruiting campaign asking tens of thousands more Australians, including older Australians and veterans with existing injuries, to put their hand up will only succeed if DVA support is demonstrably fast, fair and simple, not still defined by the horror stories the Royal Commission documented.

Third, the “limited-service” reserve pathway for injured veterans proposed above is not a new idea invented for this essay, it is explicitly foreshadowed in the government’s own response to the Royal Commission, which committed to reforms of the Military Employment Classification System “to provide more options for members who are unable to deploy for medical reasons to continue to serve within the ADF.” That commitment needs to be built out specifically as a reserve pathway, not left as a general aspiration, and matched with DVA processing capacity and mental health support scaled to the number of people the reform is meant to retain.

In short: expanding the Reserve and fixing how Australia looks after the people who serve in it are not two separate projects. A larger reserve built on top of an unreformed, under-resourced DVA system would simply manufacture the next Royal Commission a decade earlier. Any credible reserve expansion plan has to treat sustained, fully funded implementation of the Royal Commission’s recommendations, not just the headline commitment to them, as a precondition, not an afterthought.

How Australia could actually resource this

None of this is free, and any serious proposal has to reckon with cost, workforce competition and political will. There are several realistic levers available:

• Ride the spending increase already underway. In April 2026, Defence Minister Richard Marles announced that Australia would lift defence spending to 3.0%[47] of GDP by 2033, an extra $53 billion over the decade and $14 billion over the next four years alone, compared with the prior 2024 trajectory. That increase is politically committed and already the subject of debate over exactly how it will be spent (and over the NATO-style accounting method used to calculate it, which critics argue flatters the headline figure).

• A dramatically expanded, properly equipped Reserve is a comparatively low-cost, high-value claim on that new funding relative to major platforms like submarines and frigates, reservist pay, training and light-to-medium equipment cost a fraction of what a warship or squadron of jets costs, while directly building the national mobilisation base the Defence Strategic Review itself says is needed.

• Reallocate rather than only add. The government has already flagged that an audit of surplus defence real estate, ordered under the 2023 Defence Strategic Review, could free up billions of dollars for reinvestment elsewhere in the budget. Directing a meaningful share of proceeds from asset sales and administrative savings specifically toward reserve equipment and infrastructure, rather than letting it disappear into general consolidated revenue, would be a politically saleable, ring-fenced way to fund expansion without new taxes.

• Use the reserve to relieve pressure on recruitment, not compete with it. The regular ADF already struggles to meet its own recruitment targets. A properly resourced Reserve, with genuine flexible service options, accelerated entry pathways and recognition of civilian qualifications, can access parts of the workforce, older, regionally based, career-established, or simply unwilling to commit to full-time service, that the regular force cannot reach. Framed this way, reserve expansion is not a competitor for scarce Defence funding but a way of solving the ADF’s wider workforce crisis at lower cost per person than full-time recruitment, since reservists require only a fraction of the ongoing salary, housing and support costs of permanent personnel.

• Leverage industry and training partnerships. Some of the equipment, training infrastructure and even instructor capacity a larger Reserve needs could be accessed through partnerships with Australian defence industry, universities and Technical and Further Education (TAFE)s, particularly for technical trades, cyber and engineering roles, spreading cost and capability-building beyond the Defence budget alone, and building the “sovereign industrial capability” that the Defence Strategic Review says Australia needs regardless.

• Accept that some of this requires new legislated cost, not just reallocation. Ultimately, a homeland-defence-style reserve of the kind Finland, Israel or Singapore maintain is not achievable purely through efficiency savings. It will require sustained, multi-year budget commitment specifically tagged to reserve force growth, something Australia has never done at scale, and a government willing to make the case publicly, the way the Defence Minister has already begun doing on the broader spending increase, that this is where new defence dollars should go.

What a serious expansion would actually require

None of this is an argument for simply making the existing Reserve bigger while leaving it as it is, that would only produce a larger version of a force that cannot mobilise, train adequately or fight as formed units. A serious response, drawing directly on the lessons above, would need to address size, capability and mobilisation together:

• Size and recruitment. Australia needs an honest, quantified target for a genuinely useful reserve, not the current review’s 1,000 extra personnel by 2030, but an expansion measured in the tens of thousands, with streamlined, accelerated entry pathways that make far better use of the existing national skills pool: engineers, medical professionals, logistics specialists, and increasingly cyber and drone operators who could be brought in through short, intensive training rather than years of process.

• Capability. A reserve without armour, indirect fire, organic transport or modern sensing is not an expansion base; it is a list of names. Equipping reserve units to a standard closer to that of the regular Army, even if that means investment many governments have preferred to avoid, is essential if reservists are to do more than administrative and individual-augmentee roles in a real conflict.

• Mobilisation. Israel shows what happens when a country has the reserve but not the depth to sustain it; Ukraine shows what happens when mobilisation is designed on the fly, without clear, fair, trusted rules. Australia should design its mobilisation and rotation system ‘now’, in peacetime, clear expectations of call-up length, credible limits to prevent the burnout that is currently breaking the IDF, transparent and equitable rules about who serves, and legislated protections for reservists’ civilian employment, so that if mobilisation is ever needed, it does not have to be invented under fire.

This all requires clear Commonwealth government direction and intent, and then the execution of it by the Chief of the Defence Force (CDF).  

The cost of waiting

Building a serious reserve force takes years: recruiting, training, equipping, and, most importantly, building the institutional trust that makes citizens willing to answer the call when it comes. It is a cultural transformation affecting a generation. Israel and Ukraine did not choose the timing of their crises; they discovered the gaps in their reserve systems only once war had already begun, when it was far too late to fix them cheaply or calmly. Australia is not at war, and has no way of knowing exactly when, or whether, it will be. That is precisely the point: this is the only window in which reform is inexpensive, deliberate and calm rather than panicked and improvised.

The Australian government and the ADF have spent several years now acknowledging, in successive strategic reviews, that the strategic environment has changed fundamentally and that a business-as-usual approach is no longer appropriate. It is time the Army Reserve was treated as the serious component of national defence that those reviews say it needs to be, rather than the historical afterthought it has remained.

The alternative, discovering the gaps in Australia’s mobilisation base only after a crisis has already begun, is a risk no responsible government should be willing to accept when the warnings from Tel Aviv and Kyiv are this clear, and this current.

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