Russell Buzby

The 2026 National Defence Strategy commits roughly A$181.9 million a day to defence, and it is a materially stronger document than the version it replaced. The 2026 strategy reads the contest with China more clearly than its 2024 predecessor did, foregrounds preparedness and national mobilisation, and treats resilience as a defence problem rather than a civil afterthought. So the cluster of critiques levelled at it in late May is worth taking seriously, because the critics are not the usual partisans. Several credible and independent voices converged on a single worry: that this is the right strategy for the wrong era.

The phrase comes from ASPI, and it captures something real about how the strategy was built. The document draws heavily on the conflicts in front of us, with Ukraine’s territorial defence and the Middle East’s algorithmic targeting supplying much of its imaginative furniture. Those wars are instructive, but importing their lessons wholesale risks misreading Australia’s own strategic geography. The publication Dead Reckoning made exactly this argument under the heading “misreading the map,” and the geography is the heart of it. Australia is a maritime nation with vast approaches, thin population density along its northern coast, and an alliance dependency that behaves nothing like a European land border. A strategy optimised for someone else’s war can be coherent on its own terms and still be solving the wrong problem.

The sharpest version of that mismatch sits in the information domain, and it is the critique most relevant to anyone who works in strategic communications. The NDS gestures at cognitive warfare and offers strategic communications as the response, which sounds reassuring until you notice how thin the commitment behind it is. ASPI’s judgement is blunt: Australia is not prepared for the war over perception. Adversaries are already shaping how regional crises are perceived and how quickly they escalate, using digital information environments that move faster than any government press cycle. This is not a future contingency to be planned for. It is a live operational reality that the strategy treats as a communications function rather than a warfighting one.

I have argued for years that strategic communications is routinely undervalued and under-resourced, lumped in with change management or handed to whoever has spare capacity, when it is a distinct discipline that produces distinct effects. The NDS makes that argument for me at the level of national strategy. A defence posture that names perception as a vulnerability and then resources it as an afterthought has not understood the vulnerability. The war over perception is not won by a better media plan. It is won by treating the information environment as terrain that has to be contested continuously, with the same seriousness applied to the maritime approaches.

The research that came through the same week sharpens the point. A nine-country survey of roughly 9,000 respondents found that public support for military AI is driven mostly by general pro-AI sentiment and hawkish foreign-policy instincts rather than by any settled ethical position. Support of that kind is geopolitically contingent and highly malleable, which means the domestic consensus underpinning a defence posture can be moved by whoever shapes the information environment most effectively. If public opinion on military force is that pliable, then the perception fight is not adjacent to the strategy. The perception fight is one of the conditions the strategy depends on.

Underneath the operational critiques sit deeper drivers that the Lowy Institute named with unusual candour. Lowy described Australia’s “layered anxieties,” the anxiety of strategic dependence on the United States and an unresolved question about where the country belongs in its own region. These are not inputs to a force-structure spreadsheet. They are the psychological context in which every Australian defence decision is actually made, and a strategy that does not reckon with them honestly will keep producing capability choices that feel contradictory because the anxieties driving them were never brought into the open. Naming the anxiety is the first step to managing it rather than being managed by it.

There is also a resourcing problem that none of the strategic ambition resolves. The Perth USAsia Centre called the NDS “well designed, poorly timed,” pointing to the gap between what the strategy wants to do and what the budget will fund. ASPI’s 24th annual Cost of Defence report reached a similar conclusion, finding spending commitments that remain modest against the scale of the security challenge being described. A former US Navy Secretary added his own version of the complaint, criticising Australia publicly for moving too slowly on AUKUS preparations. The through-line is consistent across all of them: the rhetoric of urgency has outpaced the money and the tempo behind it, which is the same strategy-investment gap I have written about separately in reading the NDS against its own investment program.

The hardest implication comes from the emerging work on what some researchers call intelligentized warfare. That research argues AI and autonomous systems are lowering the threshold at which states are willing to use force, while producing a centralisation paradox in which tactical decisions decentralise to machines even as strategic control tightens at the top. A strategy that imports crewed-platform assumptions from recent wars is poorly placed to govern that shift, because the shift changes who decides and how fast. This connects directly to the doctrinal reframing I have traced elsewhere, from the 2024 strategy’s language of a rules-based order to the 2026 strategy’s franker talk of a favourable balance of power, and to the cyber pivot that the same document makes. The doctrine has moved. The era it is built for may already have moved further.

None of this makes the 2026 strategy a bad document. It is a serious piece of work that reads the threat more honestly than anything Canberra has produced in a decade. The trouble is narrower and more uncomfortable. A strategy can be right about the adversary and still be built for the wrong era if it prepares for the last war’s information environment while the next one is already being contested. The perception fight is the one underway now, and on the evidence of the NDS, it is the one we are least prepared to win.

References

Australian Strategic Policy Institute. (2026, May 30). The NDS 2026: the right strategy for the wrong era. The Strategist.

Australian Strategic Policy Institute. (2026, May 25). Australia is not prepared for the war over perception. The Strategist.

Australian Strategic Policy Institute. (2026, May 27-28). The Cost of Defence 2026 (24th ed.).

Lowy Institute. (2026, May 29). Australia’s layered anxieties. The Interpreter.

Dead Reckoning. (2026, May 25). Misreading the map.

Perth USAsia Centre. (2026, May). The NDS 2026: well designed, poorly timed.

Public support for military AI – a nine-country survey [Preprint]. (2026, May 27). arXiv.

Intelligentized warfare and the centralization paradox [Preprint]. (2026, May 29). OpenAlex.