Australia has been regarded for the last 80 years as a member of the elite club of truly industrialised and modern nations. The fact of Australia’s industrialisation is regarded by most people, particularly scholars, as an inevitable consequence of being part of the industrial and technological culture of north-western Europe. But there was never anything inevitable about the industrialisation of Australia. Australia was a battle ground for competing major economic powers including Britain, the United States, France, Germany and later Japan. In 1900, Australia was a valuable market for manufactured goods. While the struggle for this market was at times intense, there was de facto agreement among the major powers that the emergence of local secondary industry was not to be encouraged.

This compendium of essential works clarifies that the Australian Army’s force structure is organic and constantly changing. It provides a starting point for quickly acquiring new capabilities at short notice when required to meet emerging threats and challenges. The Army’s response to realising government direction and investment in new capabilities is being examined via a series of options under the Army Objective Force. It involves a careful and deliberate program of analysis that will provide a framework to develop the Army of the future. Readers can be assured that the Australian Army’s future is informed through understanding of its past – understanding that is provided to the Army’s planners today through contributions such as this.

During the Second World War, as a status and an organisation, the Militia quickly became a unique entity that only loosely resembled its interwar predecessor. At their peak, in May 1942, Australian militiamen numbered over 300 000, and they were more numerous than the members of the Second Australian Imperial Force until November 1942. Over the course of the war, the Militia constituted a multitude of formation headquarters, infantry battalions, armoured and cavalry regiments, and artillery regiments, as well as various signals, service, supply and support units.

This chapter describes and analyses national force projection rehearsals called the Kangaroo series of joint exercises, conducted in 1989, 1992 and 1995. These exercises measured Australia’s military proficiency in defending the homeland. The chapter finds that the major challenge during these early post–Cold War years involved synchronising Australian maritime, land and air power under joint command and control arrangements. Despite not stress testing other force projection functions, the ADF struggled for military self-reliance on home soil.

The current strategic environment can be characterised as a return to great power competition, centred on the Indo-Pacific region, within an environment of post-pandemic climate change. The ’region is in the midst of the most consequential strategic realignment since the Second World War’, and the confluence of these characteristics has resulted in a major step-change for Australia’s strategic policy and has significantly increased expectations of the Australian Defence Force. For the ADF, the force generation and force employment requirements to effectively shape, deter and respond within a ’competitive and contested’ region increase the demand signal on the force. For the Australian Army, accelerated warfare requires land forces ’to be ready to do more tasks, fight at all ranges, and enable the joint force in every domain’.

In the last few years, the issue of mobilisation for war has, in Australia at any rate, shifted from the arcane to the highly pertinent. Concerns publicly manifested in the government’s 2020 Defence Strategic Update, which asserted that the long-held notion of up to 10 years’ warning for a possible conventional attack on Australia had – as 10-year rules tend to eventually do – evaporated. Moreover, it alluded to what was thought to be a remote, but nevertheless alarming, possibility of a ‘high-intensity conflict’ in Australia’s region. Suddenly, generating combat power, perhaps more than what was readily to hand, has taken on some urgency.

This chapter uses three declassified case studies to examine the varying and complex mobilisation processes that led to each of Australia’s major Afghanistan commitments throughout 2005–6. It examines how the Department of Defence implemented its decisions – what it did to organise for operations – up until the point that military forces deployed overseas. Questions of manpower, supply and logistics, force preparation, combined planning with coalition partners, force insertion and policy development were different for each of these deployments. What worked, and what did not? What was done, and what was left undone? And what impact did any of this have on subsequent operations?

The 2019–21 period required unprecedented mobilisation of the Australian Defence Force in response to domestic contingencies, including the National Bushfire Emergency, the COVID-19 pandemic and high-risk weather season events. The extensive employment of the ADF Reserves during this mobilisation provides a valuable opportunity to consider the ADF’s scalability and the emerging role of the part-time force. This chapter explores the Reserve’s contribution to recent domestic contingencies and how historical compromises which have limited the Reserve’s past employment now warrant revision.

In the years since the deployment to Afghanistan, Australia’s predicament has become increasingly challenging closer to home, and further abroad, as complex environmental and geopolitical security challenges overlap and become more acute. Australian policymakers should look to create an incentivised but voluntary scheme for national and community service to bolster national resilience. This chapter makes the case for such a scheme: an Australian universal scheme for national and community service. It argues that given the current threat environment and the frequency and scale of natural disasters, it would be imprudent for the Australian Defence Force to continue on a course that was appropriate in past decades.

This chapter highlights one strategically significant complexity in Australia’s Second World War: concurrency’s impact on labour distribution. In the absence of centralised planning, concurrency forced employing stakeholders to win their workforces through frank competition – a competition made all the more damaging, the Minister for War Organisation of Industry pointed out on the very eve of the Pacific War, by employers operating ‘in numerous watertight compartments’ in which each ignored their likely effect ‘on the man power resources of the Nation as a whole’.

In the introduction to his official history of British intelligence in the Second World War, Professor F.H. Hinsley says he has not attempted to cover the war in the Far East, ‘when this was so much the concern of the United States’. The United States, on the other hand, did not hesitate to publicise its signals intelligence victories over the Japanese. The nature of signals intelligence is such that a smaller country, like Australia, can and did make a difference. But because there has been no official history of Australian intelligence in the Second World War, Australia’s achievements have been largely overlooked and are only now beginning to receive recognition.