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Like all liberal democracies, Australia and Australians have a tough time understanding, let alone accepting the concept of mobilisation. Yet while successive Australian governments continue to play politics with our national security and preparedness, adversaries are taking the challenges seriously and mobilising, leaving our allies questioning our value.
No matter where you look, the world is in chaos, whether it is conflict at the edge of Europe or in the Middle East, natural disasters devastating nations from Asia to South America, combined with the looming emergence of artificial intelligence, domestic and global economic headwinds, great-power competition or fraying social cohesion particularly in nations across the Western world.
Australia is no different and, in many ways, we are more significantly afflicted by the perfect storm of geopolitical, economic and societal factors now fundamentally transforming the world we live in regardless of how we delude ourselves about the protective shield that is our celebrated “tyranny of distance” and the cultural attitude of “she’ll be right” that has metastised into a now near-terminal approach to the world.
As a result, we find contemporary Australia a deeply unserious nation and Australians a deeply unserious people, protected by the harsh realities of the newly emerging multipolar world by a combination of willful and government-reinforced naivety about the dangers and challenges emerging both in our region and more broadly across the globe.
Now it is fair to say that with the burden of everyday life – from making ends meet to getting dinner on the table, mowing the lawn and getting the kids to school, after hours extracurricular activities to just being a decent husband or wife and parent – Australians already have A LOT on their respective plates and expecting them to be across the minute details and intricacies of regional and international geopolitics and power shifts is a bridge too far.
And I can respect that perspective because I live it and experience it just like the millions of other Australians.
But.
This has let successive Australian governments – going back at least a decade – off the hook for a serious dereliction of duty to the nation and its people: the security, prosperity and stability of the Commonwealth.
Again, while Australia certainly isn’t alone in facing this reality, we are, outside of a few examples, one of the worst culprits when it comes to our significant apathy towards the harsh realities of the new, competitive multipolar world.
Contrasting this, we have seen across the “authoritarian world” led by Russia and China. These nations, and even some who nominally sit in the “non-aligned” camp of emerging powers like India, Turkey, Brazil, Indonesia and others, are not only reading the writing on the wall, but they are also actively preparing their whole-of-nation strategy for a world characterised by competition, disruption and conflict.
These nations have, in some cases, long recognised that competition, disruption and the re-emergence of a multipolar world – or as many students of history would recognise, a return to the historic norm – was only a matter of time and have accordingly spent the better part of the last nearly four decades preparing for the end of the Pax Americana and the post-Second World War economic, political and strategic order.
Buoyed by economic growth and opportunity, traditional patriotic nationalism and often homogenous societies, albeit largely dominated by either outright autocratic systems or pseudo-autocratic, “hybrid regimes”, these nations have effectively mobilised their people with the promise of rebuilding forgotten imperial majesty, writing historic wrongs and taking “their rightful place” in an otherwise soft world.
Bringing me to a recent opinion piece from Major General (Ret’d) Mick Ryan, writing for News24, titled, No ally will aid us’: Labor is sidestepping a desperately needed defence measure as Australia faces its most perilous global environment since 1901, in which he said: “A new national inquiry on civil preparedness has been called after Labor abrogated its responsibility to keep us safe by failing to reveal how it would mobilise an armed force in the event of war.”
At the core of Ryan’s thesis is pushing and, in some cases, dragging both our policymakers and the Australian public towards a conversation the nation has been studiously avoiding – whether the federal government possesses the political courage to confront national mobilisation planning.
What emerges is not merely an argument for bureaucratic planning but a more unsettling proposition, that Australia’s strategic credibility itself hangs on its willingness to demonstrate collective will to its allies and potential adversaries alike. In an era when the international order faces what Ryan characterised as “perhaps the most perilous international security environment since Federation”, the omission of mobilisation planning from the 2026 National Defence Strategy represents not an administrative oversight but strategic abdication.
National preparedness v mobilisation
The foundation of Ryan’s argument rests on a transformed strategic landscape that most defence commentators acknowledge but few articulate with such directness.
He identified three interconnected pressures reshaping Australia’s security calculus. The first concerns American reliability. Where post-World War II security architecture was predicated upon the assumption of indefinite US underwriting of Western defence, Ryan identified a fundamental shift: the United States has “become unwilling to fund the defence of other nations to the degree it has since the end of World War II”.
This is not apocalypticism. It reflects genuine constraints: declining munitions stockpiles, the finite nature of American defence budgets, and domestic political pressures that the 2026 and 2028 US election cycles may intensify.
The second pressure emanates from authoritarian coordination. Ryan described a “learning and adaptation bloc” formed by China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, where lessons from Ukraine, the Middle Eastern conflicts, and Chinese assertiveness in the Pacific are being actively exchanged.
The third pressure is geographic: Australia’s presumed insularity from global conflict has been thoroughly disproven. “Our geography does not isolate it from global shocks,” Ryan said, pointing to vulnerabilities in supply chains for medical supplies, energy and fertiliser that the COVID-19 pandemic and Middle East instability have laid bare.
Within this context, the omission of mobilisation planning from strategic guidance becomes something more than an administrative convenience. It represents, in Ryan’s formulation, “an abrogation of the government’s national defence responsibilities”.
We must help ourselves first
The rhetorical power of Ryan’s analysis lies in its reframing of what mobilisation actually represents. In contemporary Australian political discourse, the notion carries baggage associations with conscription debates, wartime rationing and state overreach.
Yet Ryan recast mobilisation as foundational to strategic signalling. A mobilisation plan is not merely “a way to harness national resources during a time of collective emergency”; it is simultaneously “an essential component of our national deterrent” and “a profound statement of will”. This is the piece’s most incisive observation. Deterrence operates on perception.
An adversary calculating whether to engage Australia does so with reference to whether Australia can demonstrably mobilise its economic, industrial and human resources in extremis. Similarly, an ally considering whether to commit forces to Australia’s defence implicitly asks whether Australia would do the same for itself.
“No ally will aid us,” Ryan said, “if we are unwilling to defend ourselves.”
This formulation inverts conventional Australian strategic thinking. Where Australian defence policy has long emphasised alliance dependence, the assumption that US involvement in Australian contingencies was automatic, Ryan’s argument suggested that allies assess whether Australia is “worth” supporting by examining Australia’s demonstrated commitment to its own defence.
The US, already constrained by resource limitations and domestic political pressures, is unlikely to extend itself for a nation that has not demonstrated comprehensive preparation for conflict. By this logic, the failure to develop mobilisation plans is not merely a planning failure – it is a credibility failure.
The comparative framework Ryan employed is instructive. He noted that “in many other democracies in Scandinavia, eastern Europe and Asia, the preparation of mobilisation plans and the conduct of national service is entirely unremarkable”. Sweden, Finland, and Poland – nations that have reconsidered conscription and civil defence in response to Russian aggression provide implicit models.
More directly, Ryan referenced Taiwan, which “has reinvigorated their mobilisation planning and exercises since the war in Ukraine with their All Out Defence Mobilization Agency”. For an island nation facing potential Chinese military action, mobilisation planning has become a cornerstone of strategic communication.
Taiwan’s emphasis on civil-military integration and demonstrable popular commitment to national defence sends a signal to allies (principally the US) that Taiwan is not a basket into which allies should place resources on behalf of an indifferent population.
We have all the raw materials
Australia occupies an asymmetric position relative to Taiwan. It possesses vastly greater resources, indigenous defence industrial capacity, and a secure alliance with the United States.
Yet Ryan’s invocation of Taiwan is not accidental. Australia, like Taiwan, is a democracy facing authoritarian pressure from China. Unlike Taiwan, Australia has the luxury of not yet facing imminent military threat a luxury that creates political space to dismiss mobilisation planning as premature.
Ryan’s logic inverted this reasoning: precisely because Australia is not under immediate military pressure, now is the time to construct the frameworks legislative, civil-military relational, and strategic-messaging infrastructure that mobilisation requires. To defer such planning until crisis arrives is to guarantee improvisation under pressure, with all the inefficiencies and social costs that entails.
The parliamentary inquiry into national resilience and civil preparedness provided what Ryan identified as an opportunity, though his tone suggested he viewed it more as a last chance.
The inquiry ostensibly emerged from concern about supply chain vulnerabilities exposed by the Strait of Hormuz disruptions affecting Australian fuel and fertiliser supplies. Yet Ryan positioned this inquiry within a larger frame: it offered space to examine “foundational aspects of societal cohesion and national capacity to prepare for, and respond to, global shocks and attacks on Australia”.
The shift from supply-chain vulnerability to national cohesion is deliberate. It acknowledged that mobilisation is not merely a technical exercise in logistics and military manpower; it is fundamentally a social question. How does a modern, atomised, prosperous democracy convince its citizens that collective sacrifice is necessary?
How does the state rebuild civil-military relations that have become attenuated in a generation that has not faced existential threat? These are the questions Ryan’s invocation of “societal cohesion” gestures towards.
Much-needed realism
Yet Ryan’s confidence in the inquiry is tempered by realism. “To arbitrarily limit discussion of mobilisation,” he warned, “would be strategically foolhardy.”
This is a pointed reference to the political likelihood that the inquiry will be permitted to examine everything except the one issue Ryan considered most urgent: whether Australia should reconstruct mobilisation capacity, whether through conscription, compulsory national service or other mechanisms.
The phrase “the ’M’ word has become the term that shall not be mentioned by government” captured the political pathology Ryan diagnosed. Mobilisation is treated not as a legitimate policy question requiring technical analysis and democratic deliberation, but as a third rail discussed in closed strategic forums but excluded from public policy development.
The diagnosis here rests on an uncomfortable assessment of Australian political culture. Successive governments, Labor and Coalition alike, have evidently concluded that the domestic political costs of mobilisation planning, even as a declaratory framework before any actual conscription, exceed the strategic benefits.
Yet Ryan’s argument implicitly rejected this calculation. If strategic credibility with allies is genuine, if deterrence operates through perception of will, then treating mobilisation as unspeakable represents a strategic choice with consequences.
It signals to Washington that Australia is unprepared to contemplate the mobilisation of national resources; it signals to Beijing that Australia’s commitment to its own defence is conditional on American support; it signals to Taiwan and other Indo-Pacific democracies that Australian strategists have not genuinely grappled with what contemporary deterrence requires.
Ultimately, Ryan’s argument challenged a comfortable consensus. The consensus holds that Australia’s security challenges, while real, can be managed through defence spending, alliance management and technological sophistication.
Mobilisation planning suggests something more troubling: that genuine security might require societal transformation, the reconstruction of relationships between state and citizen, and public acknowledgment that the post-Cold War peace dividend has expired.
Whether Australia’s political class possesses the courage to have this conversation remains, Ryan’s analysis suggested, the genuine test of strategic seriousness.
Final thoughts
Australia’s greatest strategic vulnerability has never been material: it has been psychological. For decades, geographic isolation and powerful allies masked a deeper problem, strategic complacency masquerading as strategy.
That calculus is collapsing.
The international order has transformed fundamentally since the Cold War. Great-power competition has returned, but it operates across domains the Australian Defence Force cannot address alone.
The battlefield now extends through factories, ports, power grids, telecommunications networks and financial markets. Economics, technology, energy and supply chains have become instruments of national power.
Australia’s economic transformation has compounded the risk. As manufacturing migrated offshore and supply chains globalised, Australia became efficient in benign circumstances and dangerously fragile when circumstances deteriorate.
A modern military requires fuel, ammunition, electronics, skilled workers and reliable supply chains.
A nation requires sovereign capacity to guarantee access to essential goods and energy. Neither can be assured through imports alone.
Australia therefore faces a binary choice: continue betting on geography and allied benevolence or deliberately construct the national power to defend itself.
The second option demands far more than defence budgets. It requires rebuilding sovereign industrial capacity, expanding advanced manufacturing, securing affordable energy, hardening critical infrastructure, developing resilient supply chains and accelerating technological innovation.
Australia’s mineral and energy reserves must be treated not as export commodities but as foundations for a genuine industrial economy.
None of this works in silos. Defence, foreign policy, trade, industry, energy, infrastructure, science and economic policy must operate as an integrated whole-of-nation strategy. National security is no longer Defence Department business, it is determined by economic strength and resilience itself.
It is worth repeating, luck has never been a strategy. Great-power competition is not a distant prospect; it already defines the strategic landscape.
The question is whether Australia will shape that landscape through deliberate preparation or passively endure decisions made by others.
Australia still possesses extraordinary advantages. The challenge is converting them into national power before the window to choose closes.
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
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