By Robbin Laird
My latest book on Australian defence has focused on the significant challenge facing liberal democracies to develop credible defense in depth capabilities that extend far beyond traditional force structures to encompass whole-of-society considerations.
The contemporary security environment demands a fundamental reimagining of how nations prepare for, deter, and respond to existential threats. The lessons learned from ongoing conflicts, particularly the war in Ukraine, combined with the strategic challenges posed by authoritarian powers like China, underscore that defense is no longer solely the province of professional military forces.
Modern defense requires the active engagement, preparation, and resilience of entire societies. This is not merely a return to earlier models of national service or mass mobilization, but rather the development of sophisticated, multi-layered capabilities that integrate civilian infrastructure, industrial capacity, technological innovation, and social cohesion into a comprehensive defense posture. As President Kennedy once challenged Americans, “we must ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country” and in the current context, this question has never been more urgent or complex.
The Manufacturing and Industrial Imperative
The hollowing out of manufacturing capabilities due to economic relationships with China, a pattern visible not only in Australia but across the Western alliance system. Australia and Brazil, having become major food and commodity providers to what can be termed “Global China,” have witnessed the systematic atrophy of their manufacturing capabilities, creating dangerous vulnerabilities in any scenario requiring rapid industrial mobilization.
This deindustrialization represents more than an economic policy failure; it constitutes a strategic vulnerability that undermines the foundation of national resilience. The capacity to rapidly produce, modify, and scale production of critical defense materials, from ammunition to advanced electronics, has proven decisive in modern conflicts. Ukraine’s ability to innovate and adapt its defense industrial base under extreme pressure demonstrates both the possibility and necessity of maintaining robust manufacturing capabilities.
For middle powers seeking to maintain strategic autonomy in an increasingly bipolar world, the restoration of manufacturing capacity is not optional but existential. This requires not merely government investment but a comprehensive strategy that integrates energy security, raw material access, technological innovation, and skilled workforce development. The challenge extends beyond defense-specific manufacturing to include the broader industrial ecosystem that supports modern military capabilities, semiconductors, advanced materials, precision manufacturing, and the complex supply chains that enable rapid scaling of production.
The path forward demands recognition that economic security and national security are inseparable in the contemporary environment. This means making deliberate choices about supply chain diversification, accepting higher costs for domestic production capabilities, and investing in the long-term development of industrial capacity even when cheaper alternatives exist abroad. For Australia specifically, this represents a fundamental shift from the resource extraction model that has dominated recent decades toward a more balanced economy capable of supporting sophisticated defense requirements.
An additional challenge is to overecome the bureaucratic and procedural barriers that prevent rapid acquisition and continuous innovation, capabilities that modern conflicts have proven essential. The Australian Department of Defence’s traditional procurement processes, designed for stability and accountability in peacetime, have become impediments to the kind of agile, user-driven development that characterizes successful military innovation today.
Ukraine’s remarkable success in integrating new technologies, particularly unmanned and autonomous systems, demonstrates the power of operational units driving technological development rather than traditional top-down acquisition programs. This represents a fundamental shift from the platform-centric thinking that dominated twentieth-century military development to the payload revolution that defines contemporary warfare. In this new paradigm, the ability to rapidly integrate, test, modify, and scale new capabilities becomes more important than the traditional metrics of platform performance.
The implications extend beyond defense procurement to encompass broader questions about how democratic societies organize themselves for technological competition with authoritarian rivals. China’s ability to rapidly transition from research to deployment, unencumbered by the procedural constraints that characterize Western democracies, presents a systemic challenge that requires institutional innovation rather than merely procedural reform.
This suggests the need for new institutional structures that can operate with greater speed and flexibility while maintaining appropriate oversight and accountability. Special acquisition authorities, experimental units with broad testing mandates, and direct partnerships between operational forces and technology developers represent possible models. The key insight is that technological superiority in the contemporary environment requires not just superior research and development but superior integration and deployment capabilities.
Perhaps the most sobering observation from the September 2025 Sir Richard Williams seminar on which the book is based came from an attendee who focused on what he saw as the relative lack of attention paid to the human dimension of national defense, both in terms of military personnel and broader societal preparation for conflict. The stark reality highlighted by this ADF officer was that Ukraine’s standing military from February 2022 has largely disappeared through casualties, capture, and medical retirement. This clearly underscores the brutal mathematics of modern high-intensity conflict.
This observation forces uncomfortable questions about the sustainability of professional military forces in protracted conflict against peer competitors. The assumption that conflicts can be managed through limited engagement by professional forces, while civilian society remains largely insulated from the costs and demands of war, appears increasingly untenable. The multi-domain nature of contemporary threats, cyber, space, information warfare, means that civilian infrastructure and civilian populations become both targets and participants regardless of government preferences.
The challenge extends beyond military casualties to encompass the broader question of societal resilience under pressure. As one seminar attendee noted, there has been almost no discussion about preparing families and communities for the targeting they will inevitably face through cyber operations and information warfare. The assumption that war can be compartmentalized away from civilian life reflects a strategic blind spot that authoritarian competitors are prepared to exploit.
Modern conflicts demonstrate that societal cohesion, public understanding of threats, and civilian preparedness for disruption become crucial elements of national defense capability. This includes practical preparedness, backup communication systems, food security, energy resilience, but also psychological and social preparedness for the sustained pressure that characterizes contemporary strategic competition.
The concept of mobilization, as explored throughout this book, requires substantial reconceptualization for contemporary challenges. Traditional mobilization focused primarily on expanding military forces and defense production during periods of declared war. Modern mobilization must be understood as a continuous capability that integrates responses to natural disasters, pandemics, cyber attacks, and military threats within a comprehensive framework of national resilience.
Australia’s experience with wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated both the potential and limitations of existing mobilization capabilities. The Australian Defence Force, particularly the Army, proved capable of rapid deployment and sustained operations in support of civilian authorities. However, these experiences also revealed the dangers of over-reliance on military forces for tasks that properly belong to broader governmental and societal capabilities.
The development of effective mobilization systems requires thinking beyond military expansion to encompass the full spectrum of national capabilities. This includes industrial surge capacity, civilian infrastructure resilience, information system security, supply chain diversification, and social cohesion under pressure. As Air Marshal Harvey emphasized in an earlier Williams Foundation seminar, mobilization capability becomes a foundation for national resilience that supports deterrence through demonstrated capacity to sustain pressure and respond effectively to diverse challenges.
This broader understanding of mobilization aligns with the strategic reality that deterrence in the contemporary environment depends less on the threat of decisive military victory than on the demonstrated capacity to impose unacceptable costs through sustained resistance and resilience. For geographically isolated nations like Australia, this resilience-based deterrence becomes particularly important given the challenges of rapid external assistance in crisis scenarios.
The broader challenge facing liberal democracies involves what we might term the “citizenry gap” or the disconnect between professional military forces and the societies they defend. With the exception of the Baltic states, Nordic countries, and Poland, most Western democracies have moved away from models of universal service or broad civilian involvement in defense preparation. This separation, while understandable given the absence of immediate threats during the post-Cold War period, has created vulnerabilities that authoritarian competitors are positioned to exploit.
This does not suggest that liberal democracies must abandon their commitment to individual freedom and prosperity, but rather that they must find ways to prepare their populations for the realities of strategic competition. This includes education about threats and vulnerabilities, practical preparedness for infrastructure disruption, and the development of social cohesion capable of sustaining pressure over extended periods.
The challenge is particularly acute given the dependence of modern societies on cyber and space systems that are inherently vulnerable to attack. Unlike previous conflicts where governments could potentially insulate civilian populations from direct effects of war, contemporary threats guarantee civilian involvement regardless of government preferences or military strategies.
The path forward requires developing new models of national defense that integrate professional military capabilities with broader societal resilience and civilian preparedness. This is not simply a return to earlier models of mass mobilization but rather the development of sophisticated, multi-layered systems appropriate for contemporary challenges.
Key elements of this new model include:
- Industrial resilience: Maintaining sufficient domestic manufacturing capacity to support sustained operations while reducing dependence on potentially hostile suppliers.
- Infrastructure hardening: Developing redundancy and resilience in critical systems including communications, energy, transportation, and logistics networks.
- Civilian preparedness: Educating and preparing civilian populations for the disruptions that accompany modern conflicts, including cyber attacks, supply chain disruption, and information warfare.
- Institutional adaptation: Reforming procurement, development, and deployment processes to enable rapid innovation and integration of new capabilities.
The analysis presented in this book points toward a fundamental choice facing liberal democracies in the contemporary strategic environment. They can continue operating under assumptions developed during the post-Cold War period that defense is primarily the responsibility of professional forces, that civilian society can remain largely insulated from strategic competition, and that economic and security considerations can be managed separately or they can adapt to the realities of renewed major power competition that demands whole-of-society engagement. The rise of the multi-polar world is a reality not to be ignored while clinging the past hopes of globalization.
The evidence suggests that maintaining the status quo is not viable. The nature of contemporary threats, the demonstrated vulnerabilities of over-specialized defense models, and the strategic approaches of authoritarian competitors all point toward the necessity of fundamental adaptation. This adaptation need not compromise the values and institutions that define liberal democracy, but it does require acknowledging that defending those values and institutions demands more comprehensive preparation than has been undertaken in recent decades.
For Australia specifically, this means embracing the challenge of developing genuine strategic autonomy through industrial capacity, infrastructure resilience, and social preparation for sustained pressure. It means recognizing that geographic isolation, while providing certain advantages, also creates unique vulnerabilities that require specific attention to self-reliance and endurance capabilities.
The ultimate test of these adaptations will not be their effectiveness in preventing war, though deterrence remains a crucial objective, but their capacity to sustain liberal democratic societies through whatever challenges emerge from the current period of strategic transition. The goal is not to militarize civilian society but to create resilient civilian society capable of supporting defense requirements while maintaining the characteristics that make democratic societies worth defending.
The choice, ultimately, is between adaptation and vulnerability. The analysis presented in this book suggests that adaptation, while challenging and costly, remains possible for societies willing to acknowledge the changed strategic environment and commit to the sustained effort required for effective response.
The alternative, continuing with assumptions and structures developed for a different era, risks not merely military defeat but the broader failure of the liberal democratic model in the face of sustained authoritarian pressure.