Falling on deaf ears? Australia needs to break addiction to ‘just-in time’ supply chains

Conversely, ask the same question about our dependence on global supply chains for fuel, additives like AdBlue and urea-based fertilisers – even the most basic of medical items like personal protection equipment, like masks and face shields, are imported as we witnessed during COVID-19 – and most Australians would agree that is an unacceptable state of affairs.

At a macro level, this dependence on global supply chains made a great deal of sense during the heady days of post-Cold War hyperglobalisation and Australia was a nation that rapidly and wholeheartedly embraced the economic and financial opportunities presented by this globally transformative system of political economy.

However, now nearly four decades on, the optimistic and idealistic view of the globalised world is rapidly collapsing before our eyes. But for Australia, in many ways, the canary in the coal mine for the broader collapse of the “global rules-based order” and its ramifications for the economic order, the current global predicament isn’t exactly new.

During the height of COVID-19, Australia was very much on the frontline of the collapsing world order as its economic relationship with China, our largest trading partner, was weaponised and targeted for the Australian government daring to question the origins of the pandemic and call for an international investigation.

Yet for all the recognition by successive Australian governments and policymakers over the past six years, Australia as a nation remains hopeless and, in some cases, hilariously exposed to the whims of an increasingly volatile and contested global supply chain ecosystem and it seems as though we show no sign of slowing its integration.

Someone who is no stranger to this reality is the former head of Joint Operations and the face of the government’s COVID-19 response taskforce, Major General (Ret’d) John Frewen, who recently unpacked the challenges Australia faces in a detailed analysis for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), titled Goodbye, just-in-time. Australia must prepare for contested logistics, in which he said: “For decades, advanced economies optimised logistics for efficiency. Just-in-time was king: lean inventories, centralised hubs and finely tuned global supply chains designed to minimise cost and maximise speed.

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“That era is over. Australia is now moving into a world of just-in-case logistics, where reserves, redundancy and options matter more than minimal stockholdings and lowest-cost routing.”

So what does this mean for Australia moving forward?

End of an era and rise of ’contested logistics’

Critically, it is important to understand that supply chains have moved from the background to the foreground of strategy and Australia’s north now sits on the forward edge of that contest. He was articulating something that defence planners have long known but governments have been slow to internalise.

The logic of contested logistics, a concept proposed by Frewen argues that the deliberate targeting of the systems that sustain national power is not a near-term emergency to be managed and then forgotten. It is a structural condition of the Indo-Pacific’s emerging strategic order that will define Australia’s security environment for decades to come.

Equally, it is critical to understand that we are facing both short and long-term implications both within the immediate decade and beyond, out to the middle of the century. This requires us to look beyond the immediate inventory shortfalls and infrastructure gaps that Frewen identified, towards the deeper institutional, industrial and geopolitical transformations that Australia will need to undertake if it is to emerge from the coming era of strategic competition not merely intact, but genuinely resilient.

The near horizon: 2026–35

The most pressing implications of Frewen’s argument are already visible in Australia’s policy landscape, even if implementation continues to lag aspiration.

Australia’s 2024 National Defence Strategy and it’s succeeding 2026 National Defence Strategy are explicit about the threat environment, and equally explicit about the supply chain and industrial capability implications.

It identified the need to build and sustain sovereign industrial capability in priority areas, reduce dependence on foreign supply chains for critical inputs, and ensure the Australian Defence Force can operate and sustain itself in contested environments without relying on just-in-time global logistics.

But none of this is new, with rhetoric going back to arguably the 1987 Defence White Paper and echoed in similar language and mediums since.

Fuel security is perhaps the starkest illustration of the gap between ambition and reality. In 2025, Viva in Geelong and Ampol in Brisbane produced approximately 12 billion litres of petrol, diesel and jet fuel, around 20 per cent of Australia’s annual needs.

The remaining 80 per cent is imported, predominantly via sea lanes that run through the very chokepoints Frewen identified as vulnerable.

Parliament’s recent passage of the Export Finance and Insurance Corporation Amendment (Strategic Reserve) Bill 2026, giving Export Finance Australia new powers to underwrite fuel purchases from international markets and establishing a Critical Minerals Strategic Reserve, is a meaningful first step.

But new legislative powers do not automatically translate into the physical infrastructure, commercial arrangements and practised workforce required to sustain an economy under wartime disruption

In the north, an estimated $8.2 billion in defence infrastructure investment is planned for the Northern Territory over the next decade, spanning resilient airfields, expanded fuel storage, upgraded port facilities, and training infrastructure.

The 2024 Integrated Investment Program outlined approximately $330 billion of investment through to 2033–34, projected to reach around 2.4 per cent of gross domestic product, anchoring multi-year programs for bases, digital systems, shipbuilding and sustainment. These are substantial commitments.

Yet as ASPI’s own analysis has noted, strategy has advanced faster than execution, and the infrastructure, logistics architecture and industrial base required to sustain northern operations remain incomplete.

The workforce dimension compounds the challenge. Nuclear-powered submarine construction and the northern posture emerging from the 2024 National Defence Strategy will intensify national competition for specialist trades and engineering skills.

In a labour market already under pressure from the energy transition and broader construction demand, building the logistical depth Frewen advocates cannot rely solely on market forces.

Government will need to make deliberate, funded choices about skills pipelines and sustain them across electoral cycles.

The middle-term: 2035–45

If the near-term challenge is primarily one of closing known capability gaps at sufficient pace, the medium-term challenge is more structural reshaping of Australia’s economic geography and industrial base around the demands of persistent strategic competition.

Frewen’s argument about critical minerals crystallises this point. The ADF relies heavily on secure access to critical minerals essential for defence technology, including rare earths for magnets, tungsten for heat resistance, titanium for aerospace parts, and antimony for military alloys and night vision equipment.

While Australia is rich in mineral resources, its limited processing capabilities and its reliance on exporting raw ore restrict its ability to produce the defence-grade components needed by the ADF in times of conflict.

The recently announced $17 billion production tax credits program to incentivise domestic processing, alongside a critical minerals strategic reserve mechanism, signals that Canberra has accepted the argument in principle.

The harder question is whether Australia can develop the industrial ecosystem, the refineries, the manufacturing lines, the engineering workforce, the commercial off-take arrangements within the time frame that strategic competition demands, before the window closes.

As Minister for Resources Madeleine King acknowledged in 2025: “In Australia we’ve been mining them, but we haven’t moved along that processing path.” That processing gap, if unclosed by the mid-2030s, could leave Australia with all the geological wealth it needs and none of the strategic autonomy.

Coalition logistics integration will also become more, not less, important through this period. Australia, Japan and the United States are pursuing an ambitious defence industrial and technology cooperation agenda, driven by shared maintenance, production capacity and workforce challenges, as well as the contested logistics dilemma posed by China’s growing anti-access/area denial capabilities.

The AUKUS framework, trilateral industrial sharing agreements, and the US Force Posture Initiatives in the Northern Territory are the early architecture of what will need to become, by the 2040s, a genuinely integrated allied logistics ecosystem, with shared fuel and sustainment infrastructure, common data standards and pre-positioned capability distributed across trusted partners.

The long game: 2045–50

By the mid-century mark, the implications of today’s choices will be fully apparent.

The decisions Australia makes now about industrial depth, northern infrastructure, sovereign capability and allied integration will either have produced a nation capable of sustaining itself and its partners through extended disruption, or a country that, despite enormous investment in platforms and systems, cannot endure a prolonged contest in its own region.

Frewen’s core warning bears restating at this timescale: some capabilities must exist in peacetime, in case they are needed to surge in crisis or conflict. Complex industrial and logistics capabilities cannot be switched on at short notice. They require a continuously practising workforce, maintained equipment, viable business models and regulatory familiarity.

The 25-year horizon makes this axiom even more unforgiving. Capabilities that are not seeded, resourced and practised through the 2020s and 2030s will not exist in usable form by the 2040s.

The urban and environmental dimension will compound these pressures. Two-thirds of the world’s population is estimated to be living in urban environments by 2050, and militaries must prepare for the eventuality that the majority of modern warfare will happen in the urban environment.

For Australia, this means logistics systems must be designed not only for the open Indo-Pacific maritime and air domains but for the dense, degraded and congested operational environments that will characterise future conflict.

Above all, the 2050 horizon demands that Australia treat contested logistics not as a defence problem with economic dimensions but as a national condition requiring a whole-of-government, whole-of-economy response.

Federal, state and territory governments, regulators, ports, freight operators, miners, energy companies, telcos, software vendors, financiers and universities all sit inside the same system and all need a common picture of risk.

That common picture, a shared national understanding of where Australia is genuinely exposed, what the cost of exposure is, and who is responsible for closing the gaps, remains the most consequential thing Australia still lacks. Frewen’s essay added rigour and urgency to a conversation that successive governments have circled without truly entering.

The arc from just-in-time to just-in-case is not a policy adjustment. It is a generational project, and the clock is running.

Final thoughts

The strategic warnings embedded in Australia’s contested logistics debate carry enormous weight on their own terms. The vulnerability of supply chains, the hollowness of just-in-time in a just-in-case world, the underdeveloped north, the processing gap in critical minerals – these are genuine, measurable deficiencies that will take a generation of sustained political will and national investment to close.

But those warnings land in a country that is quietly asking a harder question, one that no defence white paper has yet answered with any honesty.

The same generation being asked to underwrite Australia’s strategic transformation through taxes, through civic commitment, through the possibility of military service is the generation that has watched housing become structurally unaffordable, employment become chronically insecure, and the promise of upward mobility quietly retired without acknowledgement.

They have been told the system works. Their lived experience tells them otherwise.

That dissonance does not simply complicate the logistics of national resilience. It strikes at its foundation.

John Frewen is right that contested logistics is ultimately about time, about the ability to endure, absorb disruption and sustain action. But national endurance is not purely a function of fuel reserves and munitions stockpiles. It is a function of social cohesion, institutional trust and the belief, however imperfect, that sacrifice is shared and the future is worth defending.

A nation whose younger citizens increasingly feel that the social contract has been broken in their direction and whose older citizens have yet to reckon honestly with the cost of that perception, is a nation whose logistical depth may outstrip its psychological depth.

Hardened airfields and distributed manufacturing hubs are of limited strategic value if the workforce required to operate them feels no meaningful stake in what they are sustaining.

Australia’s contested logistics challenge and its fraying generational compact are not separate problems wearing different uniforms. They are the same problem. One operates in the physical and economic domain. The other operates in the human one. Neither can be resolved while the other is ignored.

The central question facing Australia between now and 2050 is not whether it can build the systems, stockpiles and sovereign capability that genuine strategic resilience requires. It probably can.

The question is whether it can rebuild, simultaneously, the social foundation upon which all of that ultimately rests. Without that, the logistics chain stretches from factory to foxhole but stops well short of the national will that gives the whole enterprise its meaning.

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.