Australia urgently needs a national security strategy

06 August 2025 | By: Alana Ford, Senior Research and Programs Fellow, Perth USAsia Centre and WiDA Member

Many nations, including Australia, continue to operate as if strategic shocks are exceptional, not the new norm. This illusion of peace leaves us dangerously unprepared for the multipolar, contested, and volatile world rapidly unfolding around us.

Unlike our closest allies—including Japan, Britain and the United States—Australia lacks a unified, public-facing national security strategy to guide coordinated action across defence, diplomacy, intelligence, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure protection, and national resilience.

A national security strategy is not a luxury for Australia in 2025. It is a necessity for navigating uncertainty, strengthening resilience and protecting our future.

Peacetime is over. The relative post-war stability that defined the late 20th century has given way to an era of persistent geopolitical competition, regional militarisation and conflict across several arenas. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, conflicts across the Middle East and beyond, China’s growing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific, the resurgence of authoritarian regimes, and intensifying cyber and information warfare all underscore this reality.

The world is once again in an age of competition and conflict. Only this time, advancements in cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, robotics and surveillance tools mean that modern threats do not operate at the speed of government; they operate at the speed of technology.

These new technologies are enabling actors to project power, shape narratives, disrupt adversaries and conduct military operations in ways never seen before. As a result, technology has become both a domain of competition and a weapon within it, blurring the lines between war and peace, combatant and civilian, and influence and coercion. The tactical ingenuity, low cost and technological aspects of Ukraine’s recent Operation Spiderweb make it a compelling example of such developments. The attack was coordinated, multi-theatre and long-ranging. It used cheap equipment paired with non-kinetic means of warfare, including deception and strategic surprise.

Meanwhile, Australia’s institutional response to the end of peacetime remains fragmented and reactive. Australia’s first national security strategy was released more than a decade ago in 2013, under vastly different global conditions when smartphone penetration was nascent, China’s military modernisation was in its early stages and hybrid warfare was more theoretical than operational reality. No government has issued a new national security strategy since then.

Our allies understand that national security strategies serve multiple functions: they provide strategic direction to government agencies; communicate national intent to adversaries and partners; establish priorities for resource allocation; and, most importantly, engage the public in understanding and supporting national preparedness efforts. Australia’s lack of a national security strategy means that we do not have a coherent framework to align priorities across agencies, communicate national intent to the public and allies, identify trade-offs in resource allocation, or integrate responses to hybrid threats that operate across multiple domains (or multiple minister’s portfolios).

Australia has not been idle. The Albanese government has delivered the Defence Strategic Review and Cyber Security Strategy 2023–2030, alongside various other sectoral initiatives. These represent important progress but remain reactive and fragmented rather than proactive and integrated. The government also delivered the 2024 National Defence Strategy, which is comprehensive and based on the concept of a coordinated, whole-of-government and whole-of-nation approach.

Another important initiative is Australia’s Annual National Threat Assessment, which is delivered by Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Director-General Mike Burgess. The 2025 assessment was comprehensive, sobering and forward-looking. Yet without an overarching national security strategy, there is no framework to integrate the full spectrum of contemporary security challenges.

Our adversaries operate according to comprehensive strategic frameworks; our responses should be equally systematic and forward-looking. Australia needs cohesion and clarity about its interests, vulnerabilities and ambitions. A modern Australian national security strategy should clearly define our national interests and values in the contemporary strategic environment. It must outline traditional and non-traditional threats while integrating defence, foreign policy, intelligence, economic security and social cohesion into a unified framework.

Crucial elements include public-private collaboration, setting clear priorities for international partnerships and alliance relationships, and articulating our approach to technology competition, innovation and acquisition, and sovereign capabilities. The strategy should address how Australia will strengthen resilience against hybrid threats, coordinate responses to foreign interference, protect critical supply chains and maintain social cohesion in the face of information operations. It must reconcile our economic relationships with our security requirements and establish clear principles for navigating these complex trade-offs. And importantly, it should engage the Australian public in understanding and supporting national preparedness efforts.

Our allies understand such priorities and are acting accordingly. Australia must follow, not merely to keep pace with friends, but to ensure we can protect what matters most—our nation and its people.

Learn More About Alana:

Published via Perth USAsia Centre: Australia urgently needs a national security strategy – Perth USAsia Centre

Alana Ford – Perth USAsia Centre

Expertise: Cyber and tech policy, national security, andthe role of the US in the Indo-Pacific.

Alana leads the Centre’s work on critical and emerging issues, including cyber and tech policy, national security, and democratic resilience. She brings to the role extensive experience working on these issues for the Commonwealth Government in Australia and internationally, as well as passion for driving social impact and policy change at the intersection of technology and society.

Prior to joining the Perth USAsia Centre, Alana served as the Attorney General Department’s representative to the United States in Washington D.C. In this role, she led the Australian Government’s efforts to address online harms and criminal exploitation of technology, as well as other high profile national security, law enforcement and criminal justice matters.

Previously, she served in the Department of Home Affairs, where she led work on a broad range of national security issues, including cyber and digital technology policy, law enforcement policy, countering online terrorism, child exploitation, and intelligence.

Alana was named as a 2025 Young Women to Watch in International Affairs, is a member of the United States Studies Centre’s 2025 Women in the Alliance network, and also sits on the Board of Directors at the Data Federation Lab.