Australia’s Army Is Adapting for the Littorals

“Since men live upon the land and not upon the sea, great issues between nations at war have always been decided—except in the rarest cases—either by what your army can do against your enemy’s territory and national life, or else by the fear of what the fleet makes it possible for your army to do.”

—Sir Julian Corbett

Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, 1911

U.S. Army General Charles Flynn and Lieutenant Colonel Tim Devine have made a persuasive argument for the value of the land power an army provides in the application of sea power in the Indo-Pacific. Flynn and Devine offered three characteristics of this value: an “asymmetric advantage,” “unity of effort,” and “staying power.” They conclude that the U.S. Army Pacific’s contribution to sea power is “significant, vital, and growing.”¹

The Australian Army is in a similar position. In 1942, Australian Prime Minister John Curtin laid the foundations for the Australia, New Zealand, and United States Security (ANZUS) Treaty when he said, “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America.”² The following three years of war in the Pacific saw Australian and American soldiers, sailors, Marines, and aviators spill blood together in the shallow waters and beaches of places such as Buna, Sanananda, Salamaua, and Lae. Together, the two countries were victorious time and again. These ties set the foundation for a relationship now 80 years strong—one that continues to strengthen.

The Australian Army—much like the U.S. Army Pacific (and indeed U.S. Marine Corps Forces Pacific)—also is “transforming in contact” for an era Australia’s recent Defence Strategic Review defined as “radically different,” and one in which the nation faces “the prospect of major conflict in the region.”³ The review concluded that the Australian Defence Force (ADF) must transition rapidly from a “balanced force” postured to deal with many contingencies to an “integrated, focused force” designed to specifically address the nation’s most significant strategic risks. Australia will adopt a strategy of denial: an approach that aims to deter conflict and prevent the coercion of Australia by force. This strategy naturally has a strong maritime focus for an island nation.

The Australian Army has an important role in this maritime strategy. It is to be “optimised for littoral manoeuvre operations by sea, land and air from Australia, with enhanced long-range fires.” This direction is genuinely transformational. The Australian government is procuring for the Army 18 medium landing craft of around 500 tons and 9 heavies of between 3,000 and 5,000 tons—the largest fleet of littoral watercraft operated by the Australian Army since World War II—as well as multiple batteries of land-based air-defense and long-range-strike missile systems. These new capabilities, rounded out with a modernized combined-arms fighting system and operating in conjunction with the Royal Australian Navy’s two 27,500-ton amphibious assault ships (LHDs), will transform the Army’s ability to maneuver, deter, and deny in the littorals and peripheries of Australia’s archipelagic region.

Characteristics

General Flynn and Lieutenant Colonel Devine’s article reveals the similarities between and shared opportunities resulting from the two services’ collective transformations. The Australian Army formulates the value of land power in the nation’s strategy through a series of characteristics that convey advantages, of which there are five: presence, persistence, asymmetry, versatility, and value.

Presence. As Sir Julian Corbett reminds us, people “live upon the land,” and societies are connected to the land on which they live. All journeys—civilian and military—start from and return to the land. Australians’ most important land lies along the coast, the home of trade. Eighty-seven percent of Australians live within 30 miles of the sea.

Armies provide security among societies. For the Australian Army, this security depends on building trust and projecting Australia’s influence. We employ our presence to develop positive networks with other land forces, principally through training and engagement: reassuring communities, enhancing collective security, and reducing instability. We operate with a sophisticated understanding of the human terrain. The presence of the Australian soldier is a symbol of stability and reassurance during a crisis.

Enhancing the Australian Army’s presence in the Indo-Pacific as part of the ADF’s integrated force has been a major focus in the past two years. Multilateral training exercises are a case in point. In 2023, Australian armored units practiced amphibious landings alongside the Armed Forces of the Philippines and U.S. Army in the northern Philippines in Exercise Alon, while simultaneously landing tanks with the Indonesian and U.S. armies in Java, Indonesia, as part of Super Garuda Shield. Elsewhere, Australian soldiers provided security in the Solomon Islands for elections and the Pacific Games. This increasing presence signals collective will and cohesion.

Presence builds relationships, which ensure access, which enables force projection, which allows theater maneuver by joint and combined forces writ large. Alongside key allies and partners, the Australian Army’s forward presence will provide depth to collective defense should conflict threaten. Army forces can identify, deter, and, if required, defeat threats to Australia early by employing littoral maneuver, long-range fires, and close combat. This Australian presence helps maintain control of what the National Defence Strategy identifies as “strategic land positions”: the archipelagic passages, ports, bases, and supply lines that give positional advantage.⁴

Persistence. The persistence of armies helps the joint force persist. It is often overlooked that the contest for the South China Sea already involves the significant use of land forces in a maritime campaign. Historically, the persistent stationing of ground forces—today, deploying missile- and air-defense systems secured within the contested seas—has proved to be the only way to control strategic sea terrain. Recognizing this, some nations in recent decades have gone so far as to create new land—“fortresses” built on reclaimed reefs and shoals—on which to station them, a potentially decisive move. An aphorism often attributed to Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson says, “A ship’s a fool to fight a fort,” and nowhere would this be truer than in the South China Sea.

As Flynn and Devine point out, maintaining a continuous presence of aircraft and ships in specific areas in the vast Indo-Pacific is difficult, even for the most capable militaries. Armies, however, can offset the challenges by persisting for extended periods in all weather and at a low-cost/high-benefit ratio. Land forces are survivable: able to disperse, conceal themselves in land clutter, and establish sophisticated physical and electronic defenses. Their capability to reach into other domains to contribute to air and sea control from the land is growing—protecting friendly surface or subsurface maritime maneuver, for example. Even a small, well-prepared land formation can have major effects, forcing aggressive and high-cost actions by an adversary to remove it.

This effect is not just physical. Persistent presence shifts the burden of aggression onto others, an important factor in the battle for public legitimacy, as the Ukrainian Armed Forces proved so well in the first 40 days of Russia’s invasion. The Australian Army’s capacity to persist is central to its ability to build relationships and to reassure over time, fortifying trust and confidence in the ADF—and in Australia. Relationships are arguably the most enduring contribution to the ADF’s integrated force. We know we will never fight alone.

Asymmetry. No military force ever seeks a fair fight. Instead, it seeks “asymmetry,” the ability to apply its strengths against enemy weaknesses, ideally in a way the enemy cannot respond to. Small, well-prepared army units in fortified positions can generate asymmetry against much larger forces. History has shown time and again that an adversary requires a high ratio of forces to dislodge even a modest defensive position, ratios that are only increasing with contemporary technology. Threats in the Indo-Pacific region are dominated by antiaccess/area-denial (A2/AD) systems. But these systems are optimized to attack ships, planes, and infrastructure. Land forces are harder to identify and target hiding in the clutter of the land domain.

The Australian Army—including world-class special forces—is optimizing to generate asymmetry and to offset A2/AD. We are increasing our capacity to move around the region quickly and with a low profile with the aim of creating multiple peripheral dilemmas for potential adversaries. By exploiting the clutter and friction inherent in the littorals, the Army’s low profile, survivability, mobility, and lethality at long range will allow it to deny hostile forces the ability to approach Australia.

Versatility. The so-called tyranny of distance dominates the prospect of conflict in the Indo-Pacific. The challenges from an Australian perspective alone would give pause to most logisticians. It is more than 5,200 miles from Darwin to Hawaii, a 13-day sail at economical speed. It is more than 1,800 miles by road or rail from the Port of Adelaide in Australia’s south to Darwin in the north. The most isolated Australian offshore territory, the Heard and McDonald Islands, lies 2,500 miles southwest of Perth. The scale of these distances and the challenges of re-equipping, resupplying, and regenerating forces demand military versatility. Land forces necessarily help secure the bases and logistics that form the backbone of combined and joint operations.

A well-designed army formation can fulfill multiple functions, shifting quickly among roles. This can reduce the requirement to return to a domestic station to re-equip for alternate tasks, providing multiple options for commanders. When land forces have the capacity to self-sustain through local or dual-use resources, including fuel and food, their versatility contributes to their ability to persist. Land forces can change the tenor of their operations—and, therefore, the tone of a conflict—rapidly and with minimal notice. Army units can escalate or de-escalate depending on the situation, adapting rapidly and continually to adversary action or a local situation.

The Australian Army’s evolution is as much about fostering an adaptive culture and mindset as it is about equipment—preparing our soldiers to deal with multiple challenges with little warning and in the most austere environments. This is nothing new to Australian soldiers. The Army has done this throughout its history, from the veldt of the Boer War, to the jungles of the Kokoda Track, and to the dust of Uruzgan.

Value. All this considered, land forces provide a significant dividend for a reasonable investment. The recently announced Australian Government Integrated Investment Program will allocate 16 percent of planned defense expenditures in the coming decade to land capabilities.⁵ This modest proportion will generate a modern, integrated land C4 system; a world-class, amphibious-capable combined-arms fighting system that includes intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, self-propelled guns, and bridging and breaching systems; multiple batteries of land and maritime strike systems with ranges in the hundreds of kilometers; land-based integrated air- and missile-defense systems; Australia’s largest littoral watercraft fleet since World War II; attack and lift tactical aviation; a refocused, full-spectrum special operations capability; and a modest health and logistics system to hold it all together as part of a coalition. The scale and versatility of these forces should provide a lot of bang for the investment.

Underpinning this value is the flexibility and determination of the Australian soldier. We may be fewer in number than some, but we are a multiplier for combined forces, able to move swiftly among different roles, tasks, and equipment—easy to identify by our ever-present slouch hats and indefatigable attitude. Our soldiers are the foundation of our ability to generate land power, from competition to war.

Adapting for Today

The national consciousness of the Australian Army is rooted in Gallipoli. Almost every Australian (and many Americans) could tell you about the landings at the Dardanelles. But far fewer Australians know that the country’s first World War I operation was not in Ottoman Turkey; it was an amphibious operation to seize a German telegraph station in New Britain (now Papua New Guinea).⁶ The air and submarine attacks on Australia in 1942—which triggered the country’s commitment to the war in the Pacific—represented the gravest threat to the nation in its history so far. Yet our national knowledge of the hard-fought battles of the Pacific campaigns is shallow: few annual commemorations recall Operations Postern or Cartwheel, or the actions at Milne Bay or Sanananda.

The Australian Army today is rediscovering its amphibious and littoral-operation DNA. This is no surprise, given Australia is—as our national anthem puts it—a nation “girt by sea” that has always relied on a maritime strategy.

The transformation of the Australian Army is therefore an evolution, not a revolution. The weapons may be changing, but the archipelagic geography remains the same. In just a few short years, the Army will be well-suited to meet the demands of today’s dangerous environment by enabling Australia’s new strategy of denial. But, as has been true since 1942, we will do this best alongside our cousins in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps; a strategic land power partnership that only grows stronger. It is a journey that once again we will take together.