What makes a ‘good’ national security strategy?

The headlines, as expected, focused on the heavy metal of modern statecraft: a maritime-heavy build-up, the acceleration of uncrewed autonomous systems like the Ghost Shark and Ghost Bat, hypersonic missile development, and a defence budget structurally engineered to scale towards 3 per cent of gross domestic product over the next decade.

Yet beneath the triumphalist rhetoric of enhanced long-range strike capabilities and the reinforcing of Australia’s northern bases, a familiar, unsettling critique began to circulate among the nation’s premier strategic thinkers.

The Lowy Institute and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, among others, all pointed to a glaring, systemic vulnerability. For all its focus on hard military deterrence, Australia’s latest strategic doctrine is fundamentally a military strategy, not a national security strategy.

Recognising this vulnerability, particularly in light of the ongoing economic, political, strategic and social ramifications of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor and his national security team took the opportunity of the 2026 Budget Reply to commit to the development and delivery of the nation’s first comprehensive national security strategy (NSS) since 2013.

In doing so, they sought to leverage the longstanding work of the late senator Major General (Ret’d) Jim Molan AO DSC to strengthen the legitimacy of their efforts and intentions, hoping to stimulate a wider national conversation.

Australia has spent the better part of two decades avoiding the creation of an overarching, whole-of-nation national security strategy. Instead, successive governments have treated national security as a synonym for defence procurement, trying to solve complex, multi-domain national vulnerabilities, such as supply chain fragility, energy insecurity, social cohesion fractures, and AI-driven foreign interference, using a purely military toolbox.

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As the Indo-Pacific slips further into a volatile era defined by raw realism and the fraying of the global rules-based order, the central dilemma facing Canberra is no longer just how much to spend on submarines, but how to coordinate the entire apparatus of the state to survive an era of poly-crisis.

To understand what a “good” whole-of-nation strategy looks like today, Australia must first look back to when it last attempted to draft one, examine the systemic silos that followed, and chart a blueprint for a resilient state capable of weathering the geopolitical storms of the late 2020s.

The ghost of 2013: An optimistic blueprint for a bygone era

In order to understand the current deficit in Australian grand strategy, one must travel back to 23 January 2013. On that day, Prime Minister Julia Gillard released Strong and secure: A strategy for Australia’s national security. It was the nation’s first and to date remains its only codified and comprehensive national security strategy.

The 2013 document was uniquely tethered to its time, deeply influenced by the simultaneous release of the Australia in the Asian century: white paper. It established a framework built on eight distinct pillars, ranging from counter-terrorism and border integrity to the integration of cyber policy and the preservation of the Australia–United States alliance.

Viewed through a modern lens, however, the 2013 strategy reads like an artifact from a different world. The core vulnerability of the Gillard strategy lay in its foundational assumptions. The document confidently asserted that: “Neither strategic competition nor the growth in defence capabilities of regional countries makes conflict inevitable or even likely.”

It viewed China predominantly through the prism of a benign economic windfall, a critical trading partner with whom Australia should continue to build a "comprehensive, constructive, and cooperative relationship”.

The strategic landscape was seen as a landscape of opportunities, where regional architecture like the East Asia Summit would naturally mature to resolve interstate differences.

Furthermore, the 2013 NSS was fundamentally shaped by the post-9/11 security paradigm. The primary threats it sought to counter were non-state actors, transnational serious and organised crime, and violent extremism.

While it presciently noted the emerging threat of malicious cyber activity and the long-term disruptions of climate change, it completely failed to anticipate the rapid return of large-scale state conflict, the aggressive weaponisation of economic interdependence, or the deployment of grey-zone coercion below the threshold of conventional warfare.

Ultimately, the 2013 strategy suffered from a structural hypocrisy that has long plagued Australian statecraft: it laid out an ambitious, multi-layered roster of tactical goals but was immediately hollowed out by fiscal reality. Eager to deliver a politically expedient budget surplus ahead of an election, the Gillard government introduced knee-jerk cuts to Defence spending.

It was a grand strategy divorced from a sustainable funding model and within months of its release, the rapid militarisation of the South China Sea and a leadership transition in Beijing rendered its optimistic tenets obsolete.

The era of silos: How Australia lost its way and gave up on grand strategy

Following the rapid expiration of the 2013 NSS, subsequent Australian governments, spanning the Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison, and Albanese administrations, abandoned the pursuit of a unified national security doctrine.

In its place, Canberra embraced an era of fragmented, sectoral policymaking. The business of securing the nation was broken down into isolated fiefdoms. Australia produced:

• The 2016 and 2019 Defence white papers.
• The 2020 Defence Strategic Update and Integrated Investment Program.
• The 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper.
• A succession of standalone cyber security strategies;
• Critical technology blueprints.
• Critical Infrastructure Protection Acts.
• Sector-specific reviews into foreign interference and supply chain resilience.

While many of these individual documents were highly sophisticated, they existed in structural isolation. Strategic analysts have noted that this balkanisation created a profound coordination deficit.

Without a centralised, binding national security strategy issued from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, individual departments began to operate as independent actors, occasionally working at cross-purposes. Treasury viewed foreign investment through a fiscal lens; Foreign Affairs pursued diplomatic alignment; Home Affairs focused on domestic disruption; and Defence focused on high-end kinetic capabilities.

In essence, this siloed approach created a Gordian knot of bureaucracy all competing for their own interests and influence, devoid from the rapidly changing reality at home and abroad.

The systemic flaw of this approach became undeniable with the release of the 2023 Defence Strategic Review and the subsequent 2024 and 2026 National Defence Strategies.

These documents introduced the concept of “National Defence”, a theoretical acknowledgement that securing Australia required a whole-of-government and whole-of-nation effort. Yet because these strategies were commissioned, drafted and owned by the Department of Defence, they remained inherently military-centric.

However, as commentators observed following the release of the 2026 NDS, the strategy continues to exist in a policy vacuum. It is an excellent military strategy, but it lacks the necessary integration with Australia’s civil apparatus, intelligence agencies and economic statecraft.

Australia has sought to build a sharper, longer-range spear through its investments in guided weapons, long-range land strike capabilities and the AUKUS submarine program, but it has largely neglected the structural shield of the state.

In doing so, Australia has, for all intents and purposes, relegated the broader levers of national power to the realm of peripheral luxuries rather than core elements of a unified grand strategy.

A world order in flames, competition rising

The necessity of a comprehensive, whole-of-nation NSS is driven home by the grim realities of the 2026 strategic landscape. The global order is no longer transitioning; it has transformed.

The 2026 National Defence Strategy quietly codifies a profound shift in Australian strategic thought: Canberra has effectively abandoned its long-standing rhetorical reliance on the preservation of an abstract "rules-based international order," explicitly replacing it with the hard-nosed, realist pursuit of a regional "balance of power."

This shift reflects a world defined by a continuous poly-crisis.

The war in Ukraine, stretching into its fifth devastating year, has permanently shattered European security and provided a masterclass in the realities of modern, protracted industrial warfare. It has demonstrated that state-of-the-art, niche platforms are easily exhausted without strategic mass, deep logistical reserves and resilient, sovereign industrial supply chains.

Closer to home, the Indo-Pacific has become a theatre marked by the largest, most rapid peacetime military build-up since the end of the Second World War. The threat of conflict over Taiwan or the South China Sea is no longer an abstract exercise for wargamers; it is an active variable in national economic planning.

Concurrently, Australia must navigate a deeply transactional and volatile relationship with its principal security guarantor, the United States.

While the ANZUS alliance remains indispensable, providing the critical intelligence, technological edge and advanced capability access that underpins Australia’s defence, Washington now explicitly demands that its regional allies do more heavy lifting for collective defence under a shared “strategy of denial”.

Beyond the threat of conventional military clash, Australia has recognised that it faces an unprecedented array of sub-kinetic vulnerabilities:

• Economic and technological dependencies: the weaponisation of trade routes and essential imports means that access to critical minerals, pharmaceuticals and technology can be turned off overnight.
• Cognitive warfare: as strategic analysts have pointed out, AI-enabled cognitive warfare waged across social media algorithms is actively targeting the civic trust and social cohesion of democratic societies, transforming domestic political debates into security vulnerabilities.
• Grey-zone coercion: state actors are routinely utilising cyber espionage, maritime militias and infrastructure buyouts to alter the strategic balance of power without firing a shot.

In an environment where the boundary between peace and conflict has been thoroughly blurred, relying on a purely military strategy is a form of strategic myopia.

If Australia’s sea lines of communication are disrupted or if its domestic energy grid is crippled by a cyber attack, an advanced fleet of stealth fighters or a future squadron of nuclear-powered submarines cannot solve the immediate national emergency.

A blueprint for ’good’

If the definition of national security has expanded to encompass the entirety of a nation’s sovereign life, then a “good” national security strategy must serve as the primary policy ligament that binds the state together.

Given the rapid deterioration of the post-Second World War order and the security foundations that have served to underpin global and Australian peace, prosperity and security since 1945, we cannot afford for any NSS to be a bland public relations document or a mere synthesis of pre-existing departmental white papers.

Rather, a modern, effective whole-of-nation NSS for Australia must possess five foundational characteristics.

The first being the establishment of true institutional integration over bureaucratic silos. Ultimately, a good NSS must be driven directly by the prime minister and cabinet, carrying the legislative and bureaucratic authority to subordinate all federal departments to a singular, synchronised national objective.

Ultimately, it must explicitly detail the division of labour between the military, diplomatic, economic and intelligence arms of statecraft.

Now for those initiated into the world of public policy, if this conceptualisation of a contemporary NSS is starting to sound more like a presidential style of policymaking, you’re not alone and I would argue that it is in fact the very thing needed for Australian politics and public policy to mature, after all, you should always back the horse named self-interest.

Crucially, it must elevate diplomacy and trade diversification to the front line of defence. A nation of 26 million people cannot rely solely on military deterrence to shape its environment.

A good strategy would treat a well-funded, agile diplomatic corps and a highly diversified trading portfolio as strategic assets equal in value to a brigade of the Australian Defence Force, ensuring that the deployment of state power is always balanced and multidimensional.

Second, the recognition that contemporary Australia requires a comprehensive level of national resilience and civil preparedness.

A genuine whole-of-nation strategy must look far beyond the barracks, integrating civil society, state governments and the private sector into the national security architecture. This requires a fundamental shift from an economic model optimised purely for “just-in-time” global efficiency to one built for “just-in-case” sovereign survival.

This can be translated across a host of areas, including the latest cause du jour, fuel and energy security, broader supply chain security and the hardening of civil infrastructure in order to serve as active participants in broader national defence efforts and mobilisation frameworks.

Third, and something that are increasingly critical as Australia grapples with a host of factors serving to directly undermine and impact social cohesion, are political franchise and engagement by the Australian public.

One of the most glaring deficiencies of Australia’s current strategic architecture is its failure to properly address cognitive warfare. A good NSS must explicitly recognise that social cohesion is a vital national security asset.

The strategy must outline a comprehensive framework to counter foreign interference, digital disinformation and algorithmic manipulation.

This cannot simply involve classified intelligence operations; it must feature a public-facing, transparent program to build media literacy, protect democratic institutions from digital subversion, and foster a resilient national narrative that reduces polarisation during times of international crisis.

Fourth, Australia requires dynamic agility and a broader, wide spread adaptive capacity and this goes beyond the traditional myopic view of defence as the sole realm of national security policymaking.

As retired major general and military strategist Mick Ryan has frequently emphasised, the greatest asset a nation can possess in an era of rapid technological disruption is adaptive capacity.

The slow, risk-averse, process-driven management model transferred from the civil public service into Australia’s defence procurement apparatus is dangerously unsuited for the speed of modern conflict.

A good NSS builds an institutional culture of learning. It creates mechanisms that allow the nation to rapidly prototype and field commercial technologies, such as low-cost uncrewed aerial systems, and scale them into operational capabilities within months rather than decades.

Furthermore, it must establish clear, realistic legislative frameworks for limited or broad national mobilisation, ensuring that the nation’s human and industrial capital can be seamlessly organised if a major crisis erupts.

Fifth and finally, while it is often said that grand strategy is solely the domain of great powers, the reality is, at the core of any grand strategy and at the end of the day, Australia must put its self-interest first, or to use rhetoric similar to that regarding our relationship with Beijing: we will agree where we can and disagree where we must.

A grand strategy that is not transparently funded is merely a hallucination. Australia is currently attempting to finance an extraordinarily capital-intensive military modernisation program, anchored by the multi-decade AUKUS commitment while simultaneously facing severe domestic fiscal constraints, including an ageing population, rising healthcare costs and the economic impacts of climate transition.

All of this comes well before one considers the significant challenges facing Australian society and the growing levels of atomisation, polarisation and dislocation Australians, like many of their Western counterparts, continue to experience at a rapidly increasing rate.

A good NSS must strike a sustainable grand bargain. It must be brutally honest with the Australian public about the financial costs of security, detailing exactly how national security initiatives will be funded without bankrupting the social programs that underpin the nation’s high standard of living.

It must avoid the temptation of creative accounting, back-ended funding structures or reliance on unrealistic efficiency dividends, ensuring that every strategic objective is backed by hard, long-term budgetary commitments.

Above all, however, and here is one of the key factors often overlooked, it must identify and articulate the opportunities available to Australia and future generations of Australians if we get it right.

What ’good’ looks like in action: The rubber hits the road

When a nation successfully implements a whole-of-nation national security strategy, the nature of its deterrence undergoes a profound transformation. In the face of a crisis, a resilient Australia would not look like a vulnerable state nervously relying on a small, high-tech military to hold an adversary at bay.

Instead, “good” looks like an Australia where an economic boycott or a sudden trade embargo against a major domestic agricultural or resource sector fails to trigger a political crisis, because the state has pre-engineered alternative markets and temporary sovereign safety nets.

It looks like an economy where a catastrophic cyber attack on a major telecommunications network or an energy grid does not lead to societal paralysis, because the private operators, civil defence units and local communities have rehearsed decentralised back-up procedures.

In the region, a successful strategy manifests as a deep, multilayered web of minilateral partnerships. Australia’s security would not be singularly dependent on the traditional US alliance framework; rather, it would be reinforced by deep, institutionalised security, economic and technological ties with a network of regional partners, including Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, India and Vietnam.

This creates a collective strategic weight that increases the costs of coercion for any aspiring regional hegemon.

Finally, “good” looks like a mature, open conversation between the political leadership and the Australian demos, a good strategy is not snuck out on a slow news night before a public holiday.

It is presented openly to Parliament, discussed in community halls and integrated into school curricula. It actively treats the Australian public not as a fragile collective to be shielded from uncomfortable geopolitical truths, but as the ultimate source of the nation’s resilience and resolve.

Final thoughts

The ultimate test of an Australian National Security Strategy is not whether it looks impressive on a shelf in Canberra or whether it aligns perfectly with the doctrinal preferences of our principal allies. The test is survival.

In an anarchic world where power increasingly trumps rules, Australia cannot afford to leave its national security fragmented across isolated bureaucratic silos.

It is time for Canberra to look beyond the barracks, acknowledge the vast scale of the challenges ahead, and build the missing architecture of a true, whole-of-nation grand strategy.

The strategic question, then is not whether Australia can afford to act but whether it can afford not to. Because once generations of Australians conclude it has no stake in the future, the foundations of both prosperity and security begin to hollow out, quietly at first, and then all at once.

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 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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.