ASPI Defence Conference: Considering warfare beyond war in the 2026 National Defence Strategy
Australia’s next National Defence Strategy (NDS) statement, expected in early 2026, will focus on strengthening the Australian Defence Force’s ability implement a military strategy of denial. This will likely include requirements for more capability development and defence spending. However, as highlighted in a panel at ASPI’s Defence Conference in June, ensuring national preparedness and resilience against a broad spectrum of threats, not just high-intensity kinetic warfare, should be seen as equally important to debates about new capabilities, force posture and resourcing.
The final panel session of our conference explored these broader dimensions of Australia’s strategic outlook and how they related to shaping the 2026 NDS. It sought to examine the NDS against a context of growing global instability, with ASPI’s executive director, Justin Bassi, asking the panel how the NDS can best respond to this instability.
Three speakers contributed to the discussion, including former director-general of the Australian Signals Directorate, Rachel Noble; Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia and New Zealand, Vasyl Miroshnychenko; and General Emmanuel Batista, former chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.
The discussion covered the breadth of this complex operational landscape, including the changing cyber threats facing Australia, how Ukraine built resilience against Russian hybrid threats, and China’s on-going grey-zone warfare against the Philippines in the South China Sea.
It began with a discussion on warfare in cyberspace, with Noble mentioning adversaries such as China ‘pre-positioning cyber weapons on critical information infrastructure, for the purpose of degrading or destroying that infrastructure.’ She talked of the concept of states, or non-state actors such as criminal organisations working on behalf of states, placing ‘cyber dynamite’ under ‘bridges’—the equivalent of key supply chains—months or years ahead of an actual attack. The goal would be to disrupt an adversary’s society by attacking its critical infrastructure in operations that are extremely hard to detect without government and the private sector working together.
Miroshnychenko examined how Russia sought to undermine Ukraine’s resilience between the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He made clear that, in the eight years between these two events, Ukraine saw a change in national attitudes towards the threats posed by Moscow, which included a concerted proxy-war campaign in the Donbas and Russian disinformation operations against Ukraine more broadly.
Ukraine countered disinformation, part of Russia’s broader hybrid warfare strategy, and reinforced its national identity. This prevented Russia from replicating its 2014 seizure of Crimea on a larger scale in 2022, and derailed Putin’s preferred strategy of politically seizing Ukraine without conflict. As Miroshnychenko noted ,‘if you are facing a bigger enemy, you need to know how to do asymmetric warfare’. He believes that Ukraine can help Australia prepare for the sort of non-traditional threats shown by Russia against Ukraine; threats that Australia could face in a future conflict.
Finally, the Philippines faces on going grey-zone aggression from China against its territories in the South China Sea. Batista outlined how Manila was responding to this persistent threat, noting that China’s operations combine military aggression with political influence operations. China is practicing its concept of ‘three warfares’ against the Philippines. These include political warfare and psychological operations, together with media operations, and military operations at a level below that which would generate a military response, but which seek to challenge Manila’s legal claims over its own territories and exclusive economic zone.
To counter this, Batista stressed the need to respond to and defeat China’s grey zone operations. He said, ‘We need to push back and not necessarily militarily alone, but across the spectrum of instruments of national power’, noting the importance of winning ‘the battle of the narrative’ in meeting China’s challenge to the rules-based international order. Batista underscored the difference between what is and is not seen in the South China Sea, saying:
Right now what we see are coercive actions in the West Philippine Sea, illegal, coercive, aggressive actions. What we don’t see are the influence operations in the realm of economic, political, social, influencing outcomes of elections, exploiting fissures in society and breaking national cohesiveness.
The key implication of this discussion for the ADF and Defence in preparing the 2026 NDS is that a failure to respond to non-traditional threats such as unrestricted warfare, hybrid attacks and grey-zone operations would see Australia unprepared for a radically different type of warfare alongside the military operations that encompass a traditional understanding of war.
The panellists made clear that the West’s understanding of warfare is not the same as how our authoritarian adversaries understand and use it against us. It also implies that a new NDS may be insufficient to meet a broader spectrum of risk. One way of addressing this poorly understood multidisciplinary threat would be for the Australian government to release a new NDS that encompasses not just a whole-of-government approach to national defence and security, but a whole-of-nation spectrum to defence that better addresses the complexity of warfare in the twenty-first century.
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