What if your country needs you one day?

Australia’s recent Defence Strategic Review warns the nation faces “the prospect of major conflict in the region that directly threatens our national interest”.

Unlike the posters noted, the review avoided tackling the issue of expanding Defence’s currently assessed “understrength” workforce if such an event occurred. The only suggestion was to rely on the 26,0000 part-time reserve personnel if a larger Australian Defence Force was ever needed.

However, in Australia’s two previous major conflicts (World War One and Two), the small number of what would now be called reservists proved grossly inadequate and very large numbers of people needed to be quickly drawn in from the wider nation. As an example, in 1942, some 1 million Australians became directedly engaged in the war effort, about a third of the nation’s total workforce of the time.

In the two earlier major conflicts, most of Australia’s military personnel were conscripts or short-service volunteers who generally had rushed and inadequate training as they were urgently needed at the frontline. Unlike today’s long-service professionals, they did not have time to develop deep experience and expertise.

This meant the citizen armies of World War One and Two needed careful handling to get the most from, especially when casualty rates were high.

Easing the leadership task, the fronts across which units operated during the major conflicts were generally small. The divisional front was about 1,500–2,500 metres in World War One and some 4,000–5,000 metres in World War Two.

Generals could often be seen and heard by those they commanded. In this, the soldiers involved expected their generals to have a deep knowledge about warfighting to make up for what the soldiers lacked in education and experience, and to command accordingly.

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Twenty-first century divisional operations are envisaged as very different, occurring across very large fronts in a non-linear battlespace involving well distributed forces employing joint precision fires across hundreds of kilometres.

Friendly forces will at times need to be able to act independently when communication systems are cut due to kinetic, cyber or electronic attacks. Moreover, the command headquarters will need to stay moving to avoid being located and quickly destroyed by precision guided weapons.

The contemporary concept of distributed, multi-domain operations is complicated and assumes most of the personnel concerned being long-service professionals.

It’s unlikely such a system could be made to function if the individuals involved had incomplete and hurried training and lacked the expertise necessary to independently handle unexpected combat situations in times of great stress.

Finding the numbers of well-trained and experienced personnel required will be hard. In a major conflict, many of the peacetime professionals will have been lost in early operations or sent rearwards to train the follow-on forces being hurriedly formed. The reserves are likely to be similarly quickly dissipated.

Indeed, the reserve’s training of “one night a week, one weekend a month or a few weeks a year” is unlikely to meet the demands major power conflict would impose from the start.

This reality has implications.

First, an expanded Australian defence force cannot be simply a larger version of today’s force designed and equipped for long-service professionals.

Instead, the design of a future expanded force will need to have considered and included the qualities and quantities of the people that will join it in time of crisis or war.

An expanded force would operate under different operational concepts, organisational structures, management styles and processes than the current peacetime one. In a very real sense, the new people joining will determine the nature of the expanded defence force.

Second, new people rushing to the colours in time of war are unlikely to have the same personal qualities of those of the earlier major conflicts.

Today’s young Australians that might arrive en masse in times of extremis are seen by Dr Cate Carter as “activist warriors”: educated, networked, socially aware, and entrepreneurially inclined.

They are unlikely to easily fit within the last century’s models of force expansion that tended to assume all were identical, compliant, and able to be easily slotted into traditional military force structures. The methods of expanding the defence force will need to be appropriate to the Australians on which it is based.

Lastly, if all this sounds strange, it is. The idea here is that a military force reflects its society, a famous old idea of a famous Anglo-Australian general. This is unlike today where civilians are moulded to fit into the military service they join.

The idea is also at variance with the Defence Strategic Review that used today’s defence force as the starting point for the future force.

This idea reverses this: looking at what a future expanded defence force might be and then working backwards to see how today’s military should be designed so it could be realistically expanded if demanded by a future major conflict.

The idea recognises, as the wisdom behind the old Irish joke has it, that if you wish to get to an expanded force, you can’t start from here.

Instead, you need to start from there.

Peter Layton is a visiting fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and the author of Grand Strategy.