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Opinion: Australia’s defence map has never looked stronger. It sits inside a lattice of alliances: AUKUS for nuclear propulsion and advanced technology, Five Eyes for intelligence, the Quad for Indo-Pacific coordination, and ASEAN for regional legitimacy, explains strategic analyst Shay Gal.
Add the 2024 National Defence Strategy and the Integrated Investment Program – focused on denial, long-range strike and a rebuilt northern posture – and the picture appears complete. Yet beneath that confidence lies fragility.
The architecture is robust in design but porous in time, politics and capacity. Beijing sees the seams clearly. If Australia wishes to stay secure through the coming decade, it must convert alliance strength into sovereign power – an act of self-reliance born not of isolation, but of maturity.
AUKUS is historic but incomplete. It promises nuclear-powered submarines – rotational US and UK deployments by 2027, Virginia Class transfers in the early 2030s, and a future joint SSN-AUKUS class. It opens Pillar II cooperation in AI, quantum, autonomy and hypersonic systems.
Yet this promise rests on the US and UK shipyards struggling to build even 1.2 submarines per year, when over two are required to satisfy both nations’ needs and the AUKUS bridge.
That shortfall is a window Beijing intends to exploit. Five Eyes shares intelligence, not replenishment; the Quad unites democracies but binds no one; ASEAN grants legitimacy yet paralyses itself through consensus. A single member swayed by Chinese loans can block action – as in the failed 2012 and 2016 statements on the South China Sea. These are not failures of goodwill but of design. Alliances provide structure, not mass.
China’s doctrine is brutally simple: grow power faster than democracies can integrate theirs, weaponise consensus and normalise pressure until it feels like peace. The PLAN – over 370 combatants strong – launch massed salvos of anti-ship and land-attack missiles from every hull.
Its new carrier Fujian projects presence across multiple seas, while DF-21 and DF-26 missiles extend deep into maritime and theatre strike, shrinking the logistic depth Australia relies on. Economic coercion remains its second front.
The easing of tariffs on barley and wine was not goodwill – it was leverage. In the South Pacific, Chinese police advisers now train beside Australians, normalising dual authority. And at every forum, Beijing repeats the narrative: AUKUS undermines non-proliferation and drags ASEAN into an arms race. The purpose is attrition, not persuasion – raising the cost of resolve until hesitation looks responsible.
Canberra has begun to respond. It redesigned its force for denial and strike, expanded the Hunter anti-submarine warfare fleet to six, added 11 general purpose frigates and six large optionally crewed vessels, and upgraded Hobart destroyers with Tomahawks.
It ordered more than 200 Tomahawks, integrated Naval Strike Missiles, advanced Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles-Extended Range, and is building a significant High Mobility Artillery Rocket System force. The Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance enterprise will co-produce Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, manufacture BLU-111 bombs and build sovereign stockpiles. The Ghost Shark XL-AUV has become a AU$1.7 billion program and the Ghost Bat teaming drone now flies with the E-7 Wedgetail. Together, they form a scalable strike web no adversary can pre-target. Yet rearmament still trails reality. The danger is not alliance failure but alliance latency – success that comes after deterrence has collapsed.
Submarines alone cannot secure Australia. US industrial expansion will take years and emerging AI-enabled sensing is eroding the invisibility on which manned stealth depends. Canberra must adopt a hybrid undersea paradigm: fewer assumptions about perfection, more emphasis on numbers, deception and autonomy.
Self-reliance here means eliminating single points of failure – missiles, fuel, spares, data – and ensuring Australia can fight, resupply and recover without waiting for allies. It requires a sovereign strike magazine of thousands of precision weapons, a hardened network of northern bases tied by rail and fuel infrastructure, and a manufacturing rhythm measured by throughput, not announcements.
Autonomy must move from prototype to mass production – hundreds of Ghost Sharks and Ghost Bats every 18 months – and the surface fleet must privilege quantity over refinement. Finally, nuclear literacy can no longer be taboo. Without civilian expertise, regulators and technicians, Australia cannot safely sustain the submarines that will anchor its deterrence. The human and legal foundations must be built before the boats arrive.
History offers precedent. Israel fused industry with doctrine, creating layered missile defence and surge manufacturing that replenishes in combat and exports what it proves. Its 2024 defence exports are set to exceed US$14 billion. India legislated self-reliance through “indigenisation lists”, banning hundreds of imports, now exporting over ₹21,000 crore in defence goods annually.
The lesson is clear: sovereignty is not a speech – it is a production schedule. Australia should blend Israel’s surge capacity with India’s procurement discipline – produce what must never run out, import only what can be replaced, and codify local content as survival, not sentiment.
Beijing expects Australia to wait – for US yards to ramp, for Quad rhetoric to settle, for ASEAN diplomacy to align. What it does not expect is decisive action. The true surprise would be for Canberra to publish concrete targets for domestic munitions and autonomous platforms, fund them on multi-year contracts, and show production curves instead of renderings.
The surprise would be to treat AUKUS as a backstop, not a centrepiece – to field sovereign mass that changes China’s calculus this decade, not the next. Within two years, Australia could place two munition families and one maritime-strike effector into local production, finalise a Northern Magazines Plan with storage and throughput targets, and commit to multi-year autonomous orders tied to cost-control glide paths.
Demonstrating these systems in Pitch Black and Talisman Sabre would signal what communiqués cannot: that Australia intends to outpace coercion, not outtalk it.
Alliances remain vital, but they are multipliers only when there is substance to multiply. Self-reliance is not rhetoric; it is a bill of materials, a workforce, an assembly line and a chain of bunkers in the north. It is the ability to fight for weeks at intensity without foreign resupply.
Only then do AUKUS, Five Eyes and the Quad become amplifiers, not crutches. The paradox of Australian strategy is that the more self-reliant it becomes, the stronger its alliances will grow – because partners trust nations that can stand alone. That is the logic Beijing hopes Canberra will ignore. It is the logic Australia must now embrace, before the next decade tests every seam it has drawn on the map.
Shay Gal is an international strategic analyst and adviser specialising in defence policy, diplomacy and crisis management. His work focuses on the convergence of geopolitics, national security and public diplomacy, advising senior government and defence officials worldwide. He previously served as vice president for external relations at Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), where he led global strategic communication and government affairs.
