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Opinion: Despite its strategic importance, northern Australia remains poorly integrated into national defence planning, requiring a networked, whole-of-nation approach to link northern operations with southern industry and enable faster, more resilient capability, ASPI’s Dr John Coyne has explained.
Despite the strong emphasis placed on northern Australia in both the Defence Strategic Review (DSR) and National Defence Strategy (NDS), progress on implementing this vision has been inconsistent, fragmented, and often overly simplistic.
What’s needed now is a more granular, networked understanding of northern Australia, not as a distant frontier but as a critical part of the national defence ecosystem tied directly to Australia’s industrial base and strategic depth.
For all the speeches and reports, the practical, systemic integration of the north into Australia’s broader defence framework remains incomplete. In many instances, planning and investment still focus on the north as a standalone geography rather than as part of a national system of capabilities. Infrastructure upgrades remain siloed, and there is limited integration between northern operational hubs and southern industrial centres.
A better way forward starts with mapping and understanding the corridors of capability that link the north to the rest of the country. These are not abstract linkages; they are operationally real, strategically vital, and increasingly urgent to get right. Take, for example, the Royal Australian Air Force’s Triton uncrewed aerial surveillance capability. While the aircraft are maintained in Adelaide, their forward operating base is RAAF Base Tindal near Katherine.
This isn’t a one-way pipeline; it’s a deliberate and strategic pairing of deep technical capability with a forward posture, and it speaks to the kind of networked thinking our national security requires.
The same logic applies to the Australian Army’s emerging littoral and amphibious capabilities. Townsville, home to the 3rd Brigade and 5th Aviation Regiment, isn’t just a staging point; it’s a hub that connects directly to Cairns and Darwin, enabling scalable deployments across northern waters.
These aren’t isolated nodes. They’re parts of a continuous arc of capability that stretches across Queensland and the Northern Territory, providing the backbone for littoral operations and force projection across the archipelagic and maritime south-east Asian region.
Likewise, when it comes to maritime surveillance involving the P-8 Poseidon, the production and sustainment link back to Adelaide, but the platforms themselves are regularly deployed across Northern Australian airfields, such as RAAF Darwin and Learmonth, to provide persistent domain awareness in our northern approaches. In these examples, northern Australia isn’t just a recipient of defence assets. It’s an active, dynamic node in a national network of defence capability.
This networked approach is equally visible, though often underappreciated, in the context of AUKUS. While Perth’s HMAS Stirling has rightly been identified as the Australian home of AUKUS Pillar 1, the reality is that the strategic corridor doesn’t stop at the Swan River. It extends through to Darwin, where future sustainment, logistics, and potentially operational deployments will intersect with US force posture and regional forward presence.
This corridor needs to be planned for and invested in now, not just acknowledged after the fact.
For the Army’s armoured capability, the national connection runs south. Townsville may be the operational home for many of the Army’s combat units, but sustainment, training, and industrial support are often traced back to Victoria’s defence manufacturing centres. Again, the strategic geography here isn’t linear or centralised; it’s layered, dynamic, and national in scale.
As we reimagine Northern Australia’s strategic role, we must also reimagine how we deliver logistics and sustainment across the force. Australia’s southern industrial base, concentrated in South Australia and Victoria, will continue to play a vital role in manufacturing and deep maintenance.
However, if we want our forward-deployed capabilities to be credible and persistent, we must develop complementary industrial capacity in the north. This doesn’t mean relocating manufacturing or replicating complex supply chains in every northern location. But it does mean building the ability to conduct intermediate-level maintenance, rapid parts fabrication, and scalable logistics support in location to keep our platforms in the fight.
And yes, we must be clear-eyed about the economic and commercial realities. Doing business in the north is, in many cases, more expensive than in the south. The costs of labour, materials, freight, and infrastructure are higher.
But if we continue to use cost as the only deciding factor, we’ll never break the cycle of fragility in our northern posture. Building sovereign capability in the north requires long-term commitment and a strategic acceptance that cost is not the only metric that matters.
Resilience, readiness, and strategic depth must carry equal, if not greater, weight in our decision-making calculus. The price of inaction isn’t measured in dollars but in reduced deterrence, slower response times, and increased vulnerability.
As Australia expands its force posture across the Top End, we must invest in a distributed, dual-use sustainment network that enables systems to be maintained, repaired, and returned to the field without returning to the south. Northern Australia’s defence hubs, from Darwin to Townsville to Cairns, should be equipped with modular, deployable, and digitally connected logistics infrastructure that enables real-time responsiveness.
This will reduce operational lag, strengthen sovereign readiness, and give our northern forces the depth they need to remain combat-effective over time.
To move from vision to implementation, Defence must do more than announce plans or allocate budget lines. We need a coordinated, corridor-based strategy that aligns infrastructure upgrades, capability decisions, logistics planning, and force posture across the geography of Defence.
This means not only investing in runways, ports, and roads but also ensuring that industrial and logistical support systems, from Adelaide to Darwin and from Townsville to Cairns, are connected, resilient, and strategically aligned.
Finally, the north must be integrated into our strategic narrative, not as a vulnerable outpost, but as a central pillar of national Defence. That requires Defence and government communications to reflect the complexity and importance of these linkages and for public policy to catch up with operational reality.
The idea that northern Australia is strategically important is not new. What’s new is the opportunity and the necessity to stop treating it as a remote frontier and start embedding it into the heart of our national defence planning.
John Coyne is the director of ASPI’s national security programs.
