2026 National Defence Strategy: evolution, not revolution

Let's talk about the National Defense Strategy 2026.

You were sitting in this exact chair in 2024 when the first National Defense Strategy came out.

What's changed between then and now?

I think there's been some small, specific technical changes, but the, the big trends, the big picture has remained fairly consistent.

I think you've, you've probably heard in a lot of other commentary that there's many people talking about this as a evolution, not a revolution, and I think that's, that's a very fair reading of what's happened in, in the NDS26.

And, and honestly, if we were anticipating much more than that, I think that's probably setting ourselves up for disappointment to some degree because the nature of defense strategy making or indeed any government strategy making tends to be more evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

But it does point, I think, in a very positive direction as to where the defense enterprise is heading and the priorities the government's laid out.

I, I think looking at it from a sort of structural standpoint, this is only the second one of these that we've had.

And so what constitutes normal or indeed the norms of a national defense strategy are really still being bedded down in the Australian context.

Uh, we can look to, say, the United States, which has a, uh, a, a structural-- once every presidential term, there is a national security strategy, national defense strategy, and a national military strategy that all come out at, at sort of in the first roughly 12 months of that, that term of office, um, whereas we have this two-year rolling cycle that's just been initiated.

So we're bedding down some norms and some structures.

We're moving away from that, uh, sort of occasional defense white paper or defense strategic review model towards this.

So I think from a sort of structural technical standpoint, I think it's remained largely consistent, but, but some of the assessments have definitely evolved, and that makes sense given the way in which the, the international security environment has evolved over that time as well.

So we're seeing more of a focus-

Hmm

... on, I suppose, the, the war in, in Ukraine.

The role of drones and, and uncrewed systems has become a bit more emphasized in, uh, in this iteration, as well as one of their little explanatory pull-out boxes on fuel security, which, um, I, I wonder why that might have been triggered in the last few months.

So there's a few of those points that are, that are keeping track with, uh, the, the changes in our strategic environment over the last two years, which is the whole point of having a two-year cycle of national defense strategies, is it's not necessarily going to make enormous dynamic change to the enterprise, but it helps ground it in evolving strategic realities and make those tweaks and changes and modifications to defense's sort of long-term acquisitions and intent based off just how quickly things are evolving around the world.