National Resilience – how to prepare Australian industry to support protracted conflict.
(The author’s presentation to the ANI’s 2025 Goldrick Seminar explored the themes in this paper.)
Dr Graeme Dunk*
Australia’s geopolitical environment is deteriorating. China is increasingly belligerent and is demonstrating a sense of strategic superiority in the Indo-Pacific. The 2024 National Defence Strategy (NDS) has highlighted that the current defence strategy is a strategy of denial; ‘[d]esigned to deter a potential adversary from taking actions that would be inimical to Australia’s interests and regional stability’.[1] The NDS has also warned that there is an increasing ‘risk of military escalation or miscalculation that could lead to a major conflict in the region’.[2] Major conflicts are, almost by definition, protracted and characterised by their ‘longevity, intractability and mutability’.[3]
