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It is becoming increasingly clear that the old world order is dead and the once unassailable “rules-based order” is collapsing before our eyes, only to be replaced by what can be best described as the “law of the jungle”. So why then did the 2026 National Defence Strategy overlook that proverbial “elephant in the room”?
Since Federation in 1901, Australia’s defence and national security posture has undergone profound transformation, from a settler-colonial state sheltering beneath great power patronage to a middle power of consequence navigating an increasingly contested Indo-Pacific.
Yet throughout this evolution, certain anxieties have remained remarkably constant: geography as both gift and vulnerability, the imperative of alliance, and an enduring unease about whether Australia can, or should, act independently in the world.
For much of the 20th century, Australian strategic thinking was organised around what might be called the doctrine of the great and powerful friend. Federation itself was partly a defence project, a union of colonies seeking collective security on an island continent at the edge of empire.
The two world wars confirmed this logic: Australia committed enormous blood and treasure to distant theatres, understanding that reciprocal great power protection was the price of security. When Singapore fell in February 1942, the shock was not merely military but existential; the architecture of imperial security had collapsed overnight.
The turn to the United States was swift, instinctive and durable.
The Cold War consolidated the American alliance as the centrepiece of Australian strategic policy, formalised through ANZUS in 1951. Public threat perception during this era was vivid and geographically proximate – communist expansion in Korea and Vietnam, the Indonesian confrontation, the spectre of falling dominoes to Australia’s north.
Defence policy reflected genuine public anxiety and forward defence commitments enjoyed broad bipartisan legitimacy. The moral and strategic rationale for alliance was rarely distinguished; they were treated as synonymous.
The post-Vietnam era introduced greater nuance. The Whitlam government’s embrace of a more independent foreign policy, followed by the Dibb review of 1986 and the landmark 1987 white paper, repositioned Australian strategic planning around defence of Australia proper rather than forward commitments.
This was both a strategic recalibration and a public repositioning, Australia was invited to think of itself as a resident rather than a visitor to its own region. The Pacific and south-east Asia moved from backdrop to centrepiece. The decade following the 2001 terrorist attacks again reconfigured Australian threat perception.
Terrorism, particularly the horror of the 2002 Bali bombings, brought existential insecurity into sharp relief for ordinary Australians in a way that state-based threats had not for a generation. Defence commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq were sold domestically as both alliance obligations and direct responses to threats confronting Australians at home and abroad.
Yet by the 2010s, a structural tension had begun to accumulate quietly within Australian policy, one that subsequent defence white papers and strategic updates would articulate with increasing urgency while simultaneously declining to name its full implications. Australia’s primary security ally and its primary trading partner were diverging, and the comfortable assumption that economic engagement and strategic alignment could be pursued in parallel without contradiction was becoming strained.
The 2020 Defence Strategic Update acknowledged a deteriorating strategic environment with unusual candour. The AUKUS announcement of 2021 signalled a decisive, if still incompletely understood, strategic bet.
What this trajectory reveals is a nation whose public conception of threat and whose formal security architecture have repeatedly evolved in response to changed circumstances, but which now confronts a challenge qualitatively different from its predecessors.
The central tension animating contemporary Australian defence and security policy is not simply about capability gaps or alliance management. It is a deeper question about whether the frameworks inherited from the 20th century remain adequate for a world in which the distribution of power and the rules that once governed it are being fundamentally renegotiated.
Bringing me to some timely and critical analysis by Griffith University, Strategic Studies Visiting Fellow, Professor Peter Layton, titled The new National Defence Strategy feels written for a bygone era – and ignores the elephant in the room, in which he articulated a growing concern surrounding a mismatch between the rhetoric of our policymakers and their actions.
A long culture of strategic anxiety – the weight of history v the challenges of the future
The analytical framework established in the preceding section – Australia as a nation whose strategic culture has long been organised around great and powerful friends, whose threat perceptions have repeatedly reconfigured in response to external shocks, and which now confronts a qualitatively new challenge – finds its most contemporary expression in the 2026 National Defence Strategy (NDS).
Released a week ago by Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles, the document is, on its face, a statement of resolve: additional defence spending of $53 billion over the next decade, which the government claims will reach 3 per cent of gross domestic product.
It is, in reality, something considerably more ambivalent.
Layton captured the document’s essential character with blunt economy. In being a warmed-up version of the 2024 strategy, the 2026 document seems to ignore what’s happened since, and that’s been considerable.
Over the last two years, there’s been a worsening war in Ukraine, an expanded conflict in the Middle East that has encompassed the entire region and sent shockwaves through the global economy, and many unpredictable American military adventures.
At times, the strategy is backward-looking to a bygone era, lacking courage and confidence.
This is not merely a technical critique of capability gaps. It is a diagnosis that goes to the heart of the long-run tension in Australian strategic policy: the persistent inability or unwillingness to name, clearly and publicly, the structural realities that drive its choices.
From the fall of Singapore to ANZUS, from the Dibb review to AUKUS, Australia has repeatedly reorganised its posture while presenting each shift as refinement rather than rupture. The 2026 NDS continues this tradition with considerable fidelity.
The elephant in the room – continuity as strategy or evasion?
The document’s central claim is one of consolidation. The main takeaway appears rather muted: there’s been “significant progress in implementing the 2024 National Defence Strategy”.
For a document arriving at a moment of acute and demonstrable global instability, this is a striking choice of register.
The 2026 NDS retains the architecture established in 2024, including the strategy of denial, a defensive posture seeking to prevent an adversary from projecting force against Australia.
This orientation represents a genuine evolution from the forward-engagement doctrines of the Cold War era and post-September 11 counterterrorism commitments, continuing the logic that repositioned Australia as a resident of its region rather than a participant in others’ conflicts.
Yet the strategy of denial has a problem of vagueness that spending alone cannot resolve. Vagueness in language or generalities in proposed actions will not cut it.
The document’s reliance on broad formulations, defending sovereignty, upholding the rules-based international order echoes earlier strategic eras while declining to engage with the specific and considerably more fraught realities of the present moment.
The fiscal illusion and the capability gap
The spending commitment attracts the most scrutiny. NATO measures are based on how much cash is spent annually rather than the future spending laid out in long-term plans.
The headline figure is, in accounting terms, a commitment to future governments rather than an immediate operational uplift. The gap between announcement and delivery, a familiar feature of Australian defence procurement, in Layton’s mind, remains unaddressed.
The operational implications are equally concerning. The planned allocations for operating and crewing the Australian Defence Force’s current ships, aircraft and vehicles are unlikely to be enough. There is a structural contradiction at the centre of the 2026 NDS: it commits Australia to a more capable and self-reliant force while failing to adequately fund the day-to-day operation of the force it already has.
The ongoing fuel question exposes this gap most starkly. This document and the previous NDS rightly declare that defending Australia involves a whole-of-nation approach that goes far beyond just the defence forces. But how this approach is meant to work is only briefly noted.
For Layton, the absence of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese from the strategy’s launch – he was in Asia securing fuel shipments – is an inadvertently revealing detail. Australia’s most basic strategic vulnerability was being managed in real time while its formal strategic document remained largely silent on a coherent resolution.
The AUKUS narrative gap
The most expensive single commitment in Australia’s recent strategic history, nuclear-powered submarines under AUKUS, receives curiously thin treatment. The 2026 NDS could have placed the submarines into a coherent strategic framework and provided a clear and compelling reason for acquiring them.
It didn’t.
AUKUS was presented as a decisive rupture, signalling that Australia had made a fundamental bet on continued American strategic primacy in the Indo-Pacific. The 2026 NDS, however, does not articulate what AUKUS is actually for in the altered environment Australia now inhabits.
Former Defence Department secretary Dennis Richardson’s observation hangs uncomfortably over the document: these vessels “are only worth having if they’re a net addition to defence capability”.
Whether they are is a question the strategy declines to answer.
The unavoidable elephant in the room – an unreliable America
The most consequential silence in the 2026 NDS, and the one that most directly connects to the through line of this analysis, concerns the United States. From Federation, Australian strategic policy has been organised around an allied great power: first Britain, then America.
That arrangement has never been tested as it is being tested now. The 2026 NDS needed to explain where an unreliable and unruly America now fits into Australian defence thinking or does not.
The American position is no longer ambiguous. The US’ own 2026 National Defense Strategy is explicit: “America’s alliances and partners have an essential role to play, but not as the dependencies of the last generation. For too long, allies and partners have been content to let us subsidise their defence.”
This is not the language of partnership. It is the language of transactional reassessment. Yet Australia’s document responds by discussing the alliance in the pre-Trump language of shared strategic interests, with just a nod to the importance of “upholding Australian sovereignty and increasing our self-reliance”.
This is precisely the rhetoric-action mismatch identified in the introduction as the defining structural tension of contemporary Australian security policy. The NDS acknowledged that the deteriorating trends in our strategic environment have broadened and intensified and that Australia has entered a more dangerous and unpredictable era, characterised by a more overt struggle among states where thresholds against the use of force are being eroded.
It then proceeds to describe the US alliance in terms that would have been entirely familiar to a policy analyst in 2015.
The real limitations of strategic ambiguity
There is a case that strategic ambiguity is itself a posture that declining to specify red lines preserves flexibility and reduces the risk of miscalculation.
This is a legitimate tradition in middle-power statecraft. But it requires a stable underlying framework to remain credible. When the major ally is recasting the terms of the alliance, and when the global order the strategy invokes is, as the document itself concedes, in transition, ambiguity ceases to be a strategy and becomes an evasion.
The 2026 NDS reflects an institutional preference for managed continuity in a period that demands something more. The additional spending is real and investments in autonomous systems, missile defence, and Australian-manufactured platforms are meaningful steps.
But they sit within a strategic narrative that remains, at its core, the narrative of the 20th century Australia sheltering beneath a great power’s umbrella while carefully avoiding the uncomfortable questions that umbrella now raises.
The question of where Australia stands when that great power becomes a principal source of strategic uncertainty is the one this document most conspicuously fails to answer and it is, as this analysis has sought to show, the question on which everything else ultimately depends.
Final thoughts
Our shift towards national defence, denial-based deterrence and greater self-reliance reflects a genuine attempt to grapple with a harsher Indo-Pacific.
But questions persist and deepen as Layton correctly identified as to whether Australia’s policy settings, capability choices and political appetite for reform are keeping pace with the speed and scale of change.
The comfortable assumptions that underpinned Australian defence policy for much of the post-Cold War era that geography provided time, that American primacy was assured, that economic and security interests could be pursued in parallel have not simply eroded.
They have collapsed.
Yet the 2026 NDS responds to that collapse in the measured cadences of a more settled era. Critics are right to observe that, despite the rhetoric, there remains no shift in thinking or planning commensurate with the environment Australia now inhabits.
Spending commitments spread across a decade, capability investments queued behind other nations’ orders, and an alliance framework discussed in pre-Trump language while the alliance itself is being fundamentally renegotiated, these are not the hallmarks of a nation that has made a clear-eyed reckoning with its position.
And yet the case for complete strategic autonomy must contend with enduring structural realities that resolve cannot wish away. Australia’s dependence on secure maritime trade and the stabilising role American power has played in the Indo-Pacific impose limits on what is strategically feasible that no government can simply legislate past.
Australia therefore faces a narrower set of genuine choices than public debate typically acknowledges. The question is not whether to act – the strategic environment has resolved that – but how decisively and coherently the country is prepared to align its strategy, resources and institutions with its stated objectives.
That requires something Australian strategic culture has historically struggled to sustain – genuine prioritisation. Not the prioritisation of the budget cycle or the electoral timetable, but the kind that accepts hard trade-offs and makes sustained demands on national institutions across decades.
The Indo-Pacific is the centre of gravity of global economic and military power, and great-power competition is already shaping its outcomes. Against that backdrop, incrementalism carries real risk.
A strategy that balances ambition with caution, self-reliance with alliance dependence, and regional focus with global interests may be politically palatable but risks becoming incoherent if not anchored by clear priorities and credible capability.
Australia is a nation capable of strategic adaptation, but whose political culture has consistently sought to manage that adaptation at the lowest possible cost to existing arrangements. That disposition served Australia well enough in a more forgiving world. It is far less certain it will serve Australia in the one now taking shape.
The coming decade will test not just policy settings, but execution, institutional resilience and national will. The gap between what Australia says it understands about its strategic environment and what it is actually prepared to do about it is the central problem this analysis has identified.
Closing that gap, not gesturing towards it, is the work that remains.
Get involved with the discussion and let us know your thoughts on Australia’s future role and position in the Indo-Pacific region and what you would like to see from Australia’s political leaders in terms of partisan and bipartisan agenda setting in the comments section below or get in touch at
Stephen Kuper
Steve has an extensive career across government, defence industry and advocacy, having previously worked for cabinet ministers at both Federal and State levels.
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