This report argues that Australia must treat \u201cfight tonight\u201d as an immediate, whole\u2011of\u2011nation standard and shows how air, maritime, space, industrial and alliance choices over the next few years not the 2030s will determine whether its strategic advantages are realized or squandered.<\/p>\n
The report opens by reframing high\u2011end war from a distant contingency to an urgent planning case for Australia, driven by China\u2019s rapid military build\u2011up, compressed warning time, and the risk of overlapping crises in Europe and the Indo\u2011Pacific. \u201cFight tonight\u201d is defined not as a slogan or checklist, but as a stringent test of what Australia can actually bring to bear and sustain in the opening days, weeks and months of a major conflict, especially if allied bandwidth is stretched. Geography is recast from comfortable buffer to operational problem: a continent\u2011sized archipelago with vast distances, thin infrastructure and long, exposed lines of communication that must be actively defended and exploited.<\/p>\n
From the outset, the report insists that readiness cannot be understood in platform or sortie terms alone but as\u00a0whole\u2011of\u2011nation\u00a0readiness that reaches into industrial mobilisation, national support bases, critical civilian infrastructure, cognitive resilience and alliance design. Lessons from Ukraine feature heavily, particularly the contrast between societies that invested early in sovereign capacity and adaptation and those that assumed just\u2011in\u2011time mobilisation would work in a crisis.<\/p>\n
Drawing on the earlier volume Fight Tonight Force and the Williams Foundation\u2019s 2025 seminar, the report distils recurring practitioner themes: deterrence through demonstrated capability; the impossibility of crisis\u2011only industrial mobilisation; the tyranny of compressed timelines; and the need for forward defence and distributed, multi\u2011domain operations. Senior ADF logisticians and commanders highlight the national support base, industry, workforce, social cohesion and institutional decision\u2011making, as decisive to any serious concept of readiness. This pushes planning beyond force\u2011on\u2011force models to include airlines, telcos, fuel, port and rail operators as integral elements of defence, whose resilience and crisis decision processes matter directly to combat outcomes.<\/p>\n
Industrial mobilisation is treated as a core capability rather than an adjunct. Historical contrasts between U.S. wartime mobilisation and Australia\u2019s pre\u2011war frustrations, and Ukraine\u2019s eight\u2011year industrial adaptation after 2014, are used to show that money cannot buy back lost time once conflict begins. The report describes Australia as running a \u201ctwo\u2011speed defence economy,\u201d trying to fund both near\u2011term readiness and big\u2011ticket recapitalisation through peacetime bureaucratic processes that reward efficiency over surge capacity. It argues that sovereign capability must be deliberately invented\u2014by bringing local firms into supply chains early, accepting managed risk, and prioritising scale and exportability\u2014rather than assembled at the last minute.<\/p>\n
Operationally, the Royal Australian Air Force is presented as the leading edge of near\u2011term \u201cfight tonight\u201d capability, having completed its generational shift to a fifth\u2011generation force built around F\u201135A, Super Hornet and Growler. Air Combat Group\u2019s experience at high\u2011end exercises and in live operations demonstrates an ability to \u201cget night one right,\u201d but the report is frank about the harder question of sustaining operations into \u201cnext week\u201d under missile, drone and cyber attack. Agile basing, hardened shelters, distributed operations and resilient fuel and logistics systems are identified as pre\u2011conditions for continuing to generate airpower at tempo, not optional extras.<\/p>\n
Air Marshal Stephen Chappell frames deterrence as \u201cdemonstrated competence,\u201d arguing that continuous proof of the ability to degrade, disrupt, destroy and defeat, through high\u2011end training, realistic exercises and visible integration with allies, is more persuasive than promises of future capability. His \u201csix Cs\u201d of deterrence \u2014 capability, credibility, being comprehended and communicated, collectively and consistently \u2014 underscore the cognitive dimension: adversaries must be convinced that Australian and allied forces are real, integrated and politically backed. Uncrewed and autonomous systems such as Ghost Bat and Ghost Shark are presented as critical multipliers that add mass, resilience and reach to a small manned force, absorbing risk that would otherwise fall on irreplaceable crews while amplifying existing platforms rather than replacing them.<\/p>\n
The report also stresses the cognitive and political foundations of readiness. It warns that digital technologies and AI may erode attention, judgement and resilience in democracies, just as compressed timelines demand hard decisions at speed. The answer, it suggests, lies in \u201caugmented intelligence\u201d and in deliberately building cognitive resilience, education, training, decision\u2011making cultures so that commanders and governments can exploit technology without being overwhelmed by it.<\/p>\n
Mike Pezzullo\u2019s intervention provides the report\u2019s sharpest temporal edge. He argues that Australia is preparing for \u201cthe wrong war on the wrong timeline,\u201d noting that the dominant ten\u2011year planning horizon in force\u2011design documents does not match the window of strategic risk created by PLA modernisation and leadership directives to be ready for a Taiwan option by 2027. Pezzullo assigns a non\u2011trivial probability to coercive or kinetic scenarios in the 2026\u201327 timeframe and anchors his \u201cten\u2011month clock\u201d in allied intelligence assessments and public statements by U.S. commanders and officials.<\/p>\n
His prescription has three main elements. First, commission a modern national \u201cwar book\u201d that addresses fuel, pharmaceuticals, critical infrastructure now in private hands, the status of undersea cables and internet connectivity, and the treatment of vulnerable populations in exposed northern cities. Second, restructure diplomacy for a coalition fight in which the United States and China are the principals, with brutally honest conversations in both Beijing and Washington about Australia\u2019s role, command arrangements and expectations. Third, produce a ten\u2011month readiness plan in parallel with ten\u2011year recapitalisation, focused on what the ADF can do with what it has now: unit proficiency, platform readiness, munitions stockpiles and the institutional capacity to command and sustain operations under fire.<\/p>\n
This \u201cstrategic clock\u201d concept is then applied across domains. In air and missile defence, analyst Justin Bronk dissects lessons from Ukraine and recent Gulf operations, debunking the myth of \u201ccheap mass\u201d and highlighting the staggering cost and quantity of interceptors consumed in modern IAMD. He concludes that Australia and its partners cannot afford to buy defensive stockpiles at the scale implied by shoot\u2011shoot\u2011look doctrines, and must therefore lean more heavily on passive defence, hardening, dispersal, rapid repair, and offensive precision strike that denies the adversary a theory of victory.<\/p>\n
Rear Admiral Matt Buckley\u2019s contribution shows a Navy defined by two intertwined imperatives: availability and lethality. On any given day, around half the fleet is at sea, with more than twenty ships routinely deployed, embodying readiness as practiced behaviour rather than a paper plan. Programs to integrate Tomahawk, NSM, SM\u20116 and Aegis Baseline 9 onto surface combatants are turning them from presence platforms into serious contributors to joint deterrence, even as the Navy faces the challenge of expanding by roughly a quarter in people and platforms over the next decade. Buckley\u2019s confidence rests heavily on the quality of personnel, illustrated by Australian nuclear technicians excelling in U.S. training pipelines\u2014an example the report uses to argue that human capital is the ultimate constraint and advantage.<\/p>\n
Space emerges as a \u201cfight tonight\u201d domain in its own right. The report notes that any force that loses assured access to space loses the ability to integrate joint effects at scale, and highlights the rapid proliferation of counter\u2011space capabilities alongside the dominance of commercial constellations. This drives a logic of resilience\u2011by\u2011design: hybrid military\u2011commercial architectures, sovereign control of critical ground infrastructure, and industrial integration that delivers at \u201ccommercial speed\u201d rather than traditional multi\u2011year acquisition tempo.<\/p>\n
Industry voices reinforce the centrality of corporate decision\u2011making to national readiness. BAE\u2019s Kris Christensen introduces a back\u2011casting methodology, imagining a 2027 crisis and asking what workforce, business and capability decisions leaders will wish they had made in 2026, to test organisational readiness across three axes: workforce (people, clearances, surge capacity), business (contracts, delegated authority, ability to decide at speed) and capability (spares, tooling, dual\u2011sourced suppliers). Northrop Grumman\u2019s Richard Morris argues that in a zero\u2011warning world margin must come first, because profits fund investment, investment builds factories, and factories generate combat mass; on this view, Australia\u2019s attractiveness to multiple foreign primes is itself a strategic asset if harnessed to build sovereign capacity before crisis.<\/p>\n
All of this is nested within a re\u2011examined alliance architecture. The report acknowledges fraying post\u2011Cold War assumptions about uncontested U.S. support and stable institutions and calls for \u201cdeliberate incrementalism\u201d: deepening cooperation with the United States and like\u2011minded partners while preserving national freedom of action. It argues that alliances are a genuine asymmetric advantage only if translated into pre\u2011positioned stockpiles, shared industrial capacity, realistic combined exercises and frank communication about what each partner can and cannot do. It also stresses the need to build alternative security networks in the region\u2014such as with the Philippines\u2014that complement traditional alliances and spread operational and political risk.<\/p>\n
Across its parts, the report converges on a stark choice for Australia. Enhancing the \u201cfight tonight\u201d force is not about achieving a notional state of perfect readiness or relying on a handful of exquisite acquisitions; it is about deciding, in relative peace, to treat defence as a long\u2011term whole\u2011of\u2011society endeavour. That entails treating industrial mobilisation as a core capability and investing early in sovereign capacity even when the peacetime business case is weak; expanding readiness to include national support bases, cognitive resilience and decision\u2011making institutions; using airpower, uncrewed systems and forward partnerships as pathfinders for distributed, resilient, multi\u2011domain operations; and shaping alliance structures and regional ties that enhance deterrence while preserving genuine autonomy in crisis decisions.<\/p>\n
The seminar and the report do not claim to close the gap between rhetoric and readiness; they aim to define it clearly and to compress the timeline on which it must be addressed.<\/p>\n
The underlying message is that Australia can either begin serious industrial and societal preparation now, or accept strategic dependence and improvisation under fire later, a choice that, by definition, must be made before events force the issue.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
For a podcast discussing the report, see the following:<\/p>\n