Replication of the defense structures of great powers is not necessary for Australia’s national security, due to our unique geography. However, despite this, Australian defense has been concerned mainly with a few expensive assets which are vulnerable to disruptions.
The past two years have offered Australia a live-fire seminar in what modern power really looks like. Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea forced global shipping onto longer, costlier routes. China’s Justice Mission 2025 drills around Taiwan simulated a sustained blockade, and a PLA task group cruised close to Australian waters to test our awareness and resolve. Each episode pointed to the same lesson: the flows of energy, data, and trade are now the first targets in any contest of coercion.
Yet Australia’s defence debate still revolves around a handful of exquisite platforms: nuclear submarines, stealth aircraft, long-range missiles, and the comforting assumption that we can protect them. The danger is that we are building a boutique force in a non-boutique neighbourhood, betting national security on the survival of a few high-value assets and fragile supply chains that have been repeatedly disrupted by recent crises.
A more credible approach is emerging from our own Defence Strategic Review: National Defence as deterrence by denial. Pushed further, that logic becomes resilient denial – trading concentration for dispersion, perfection for scalable mass, and platform-centric thinking for national resilience.
Distributed Denial
Australia cannot and need not replicate the force structures of great powers. Our geography is a strategic asset if we make it costly to use and impossible to exploit quietly. That means dense, persistent sensing across maritime and air approaches, undersea domain awareness, and austere bases that can be activated on demand. It also means pre-approved legal and environmental frameworks for rapid use of northern facilities. The PLA’s blockade rehearsals around Taiwan and its long-range deployments toward Australia underline that control of access, not occupation, is the modern currency of power. Our response should be to approach the adversary’s problem.
Resilience as Deterrence
Resilience is often treated as domestic housekeeping; in reality, it is the first line of national defence. The Red Sea crisis showed how one maritime chokepoint can disrupt global supply chains. For an island continent with concentrated refining capacity and limited fuel stockpiles, that vulnerability is existential. Recent reviews suggest Australia still falls short of the International Energy Agency’s 90-day oil-stock benchmark. If adversaries believe logistics shocks can disable us, deterrence evaporates before conflict begins. Hardened fuel storage, inland sustainment hubs, redundant communications, and protected undersea cables are strategic capabilities, not support functions.
Mobilisable Mass
The regional balance is shifting toward numbers, persistence, and replaceability. Here, Australia is finally moving. The A$1.7 billion Ghost Shark program – sovereign, extra-large autonomous undersea vehicles designed for “affordable, disruptive and distributed mass” – signals a shift from exquisite scarcity to scalable deterrence. These systems will enter service years before the first AUKUS submarine and can be produced and evolved rapidly onshore. The logic is simple: quantity creates uncertainty; uncertainty complicates planning; complication deters aggression.
Resilient denial does not weaken alliances. It makes Australia a more durable ally, one that can operate when logistics are contested and communications degraded. The 2025 Geelong Treaty under AUKUS formalised shared industrial projects, but allied production bottlenecks and long lead-times mean we must shoulder more of the load ourselves. Investing in distributed sensing, uncrewed systems, and hardened infrastructure strengthens the alliance by reducing dependency, not by withdrawing from it.
A Whole-Nation Frame
Defence capability extends beyond the ADF. A structured civilian maritime auxiliary could expand the depth of logistics and surveillance. Local manufacturing of unmanned systems and sensors would create jobs and build capacity. The national research base, already geared for AUKUS technology cooperation, should be linked to surge production plans so that adaptation is possible under pressure. Deterrence begins with persuading adversaries that Australia cannot be quickly isolated or exhausted.
There is a political dividend in this logic. Voters are more likely to support high defence spending when it is visibly tied to national resilience: fuel security, infrastructure hardening, cyber protection, and sovereign industry. By contrast, long-term procurement of imported platforms, with first delivery dates in the 2030s or 2040s, invites scepticism . A policy centred on resilience and mobilisation aligns public interest with strategic necessity.
The Strategic Choice
Australia will spend heavily on defence regardless of which party governs. The real choice is conceptual: will we keep building a narrow, boutique force in a world defined by blockades, supply shocks, and attrition? Or will we disperse, harden and mobilise, accepting that resilience itself is a form of deterrence?
The events of the past two years, blockades in the Red Sea, encirclement exercises around Taiwan, and our own fuel-security warnings, show that the most decisive contests are now fought in the spaces between peace and war, where logistics and willpower decide outcomes long before fleets engage.
Disperse, harden, mobilise: this is the grammar of credible Australian defence in 2026. It is less glamorous than talking about single platforms, but more honest about the world we now inhabit, and the kind of nation we must become to deter it.
Michael Stuckey is an Australian legal academic and legal historian with senior leadership experience as Dean of Law at several universities. He now leads a private higher education provider and writes on institutional design, accountability, and the intersection of law, strategy, and national security policy.
This article is published under Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.
