Three crumbling pillars of Australia's defense

It’s time to recognize that with changed strategic circumstances, Australia’s “enduring pillars of defense” have become Australia’s “outdated pillars of defense.”

At this year’s ASPI Defence Conference, the Chief of the Australian Army discussed the three enduring pillars of Australia’s defense: “alliance with the maritime power of the day,” “collective defense and security,” and “ensuring that we are net contributors to those alliances.”

It is a neat framework. Three “enduring pillars”. Only, are they really enduring?

The first pillar—that Australia should align itself with the dominant maritime power—has failed before, and will fail again. First Britain. Then the United States. Sure, it can be presented as an “enduring pillar”, but that kind of hides the panic that went into make it seem so “enduring.”

Britain’s collapse in Asia, above all the fall of Singapore, shattered the assumption that loyalty guaranteed imperial defense. Australia did not slowly drift toward the United States or make a planned strategic decision, it panicked like a possum in the torchlight. Its alliance failed at the very moment it was needed most. We’ve obviously forgotten about that part of the “enduring pillar.”

Let’s assume that “an alliance with the maritime power of the day” can be enduring. Great. Only being “the maritime power of the day” is no longer anything like the uncontested dominance once exercised by the Royal Navy or the post-Cold War US Navy.

For two centuries maritime strategy assumed that command of the sea translated into the capacity to exert power across the globe. That assumption no longer holds in an age of precision missiles, drones, satellites and long-range strike. Oceans are no longer the protective moat they once were. Naval forces themselves increasingly operate under the shadow of inexpensive weapons capable of threatening billion-dollar platforms hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away.

Meanwhile, the technologies that make maritime power more vulnerable often make continental defense relatively cheaper. Defending one’s own territory has always been easier than conquering someone else’s. Today that advantage is growing. Long-range missiles, autonomous systems, distributed sensors and resilient logistics increasingly favor states seeking to deny access rather than dominate entire regions. Middle powers no longer require aircraft carrier fleets to impose meaningful costs on an aggressor.

That’s the first enduring pillar crumbling.

Which brings us to the second pillar: collective defense. Collective defense has become almost sacred in Australian strategic thinking. Yet, history is considerably less reassuring than official speeches suggest.

Alliances are political agreements, not laws of physics. They endure while interests align and dissolve when they do not. Every alliance ultimately depends on one uncomfortable question: will another government ask its own citizens to die for yours? Sometimes the answer is yes. Quite often it is no.

Recent years have reminded us how selective international responses can be. States support partners when they judge the costs acceptable and their interests sufficiently engaged. Geography, domestic politics, economics and escalation risks all shape those decisions. There is nothing automatic about solidarity. Ask the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, if you can get a word in while they reluctantly renegotiate their relationship with Iran in the face of the U.S. failure to defend them.

That’s the second enduring pillar crumbling.

The third pillar—that Australia should always be a net contributor to alliances—is perhaps the most curious of all. Contributing to allies is sensible. Building influence through capability is sensible. But contributing should be a means, not an objective in itself. The question should not be whether Australia contributes enough to alliances. It should be whether every contribution actually makes Australia safer. These are not necessarily the same thing.

A defense force optimized for coalition operations will less likely be optimized for defending the Australian continent. A procurement decision that earns praise in Washington may not represent the most effective investment for Australia’s own security (see nuclear submarines). Strategy becomes distorted whenever alliance management begins driving force structure rather than the defense of Australia itself.

Perhaps the most striking feature of today’s strategic environment is not simply the relative decline of American primacy but the growing capability of middle powers themselves.

Countries once expected merely to support great-power coalitions are developing sophisticated indigenous defense industries, missile forces, drones, cyber capabilities and increasingly self-reliant military strategies. Ukraine has demonstrated remarkable adaptation under extreme conditions. Israel has repeatedly shown the value of indigenous defense technology. South Korea has become one of the world’s leading arms exporters. Turkey has transformed itself into a major drone producer. Poland is rapidly expanding its own military capacity. Finland and Sweden have long invested heavily in territorial defense. Then there’s Iran.

Iran has challenged one of the central assumptions underpinning Australian defense policy: that only great powers can meaningfully resist great powers. Whatever one thinks of Tehran, its military performance demonstrated that a determined, technologically adaptive middle power can impose significant costs on even the world’s most capable military powers.

Rather than collapsing after an initial wave of strikes, Iran continued to absorb attacks, and retaliated with missiles and drones, and sustained a credible deterrent, ultimately contributing to an outcome that all but Fox News calls a victory. Iran defeated the U.S! Something unimaginable before it happened. For middle powers, that may be one of the most strategically significant developments of the twenty-first century.

The lesson is not that alliances no longer matter. The lesson is that capable states increasingly complement strategic procurement and intelligence alliances with genuine self-reliance rather than treating alliances as substitutes for it.

That’s the third enduring pillar crumbling.

There we go, three enduring pillars crumbled on the floor in a useless rubble pile of outdated 20th century strategic thought ready to be swept up and discarded. Maybe it’s time to recognize that with changed strategic circumstances, Australia’s “enduring pillars of defense” have become Australia’s “outdated pillars of defense.”

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