Mobilising Australia’s workforce for national defence in time of war

This document declares that national defence involves “a coordinated, whole-of-government and whole-of-nation approach”. It’s much more than just the Australian Defence Force (ADF) or the Defence Department.

For many, mobilising society for war suggests immense smoke-stack industrial complexes mass-producing tanks, aircraft and warships. There is some truth in such visions but they unhelpfully place the focus of mobilisations on material matters.

Stepping back, it’s readily apparent that people are essential across all types of mobilisation and in any context. People are a constant whereas the type of material required varies dramatically.

Over most mobilisation time scales, the Australian workforce is numerically stable with various skill sets distributed across it. Depending on the reason for the mobilisation, some sectors of civil society may be very busy, with others less so and perhaps, as during the pandemic, completely shut down.

Drawing workforce from busy sectors will cut economic output and may well reduce the civil domain’s capacity to contribute to the overall defence effort. The ideal would be to swing people from the idle sectors of a society into the now busy mobilisation parts.

Overlaying this is demographics. In Ukraine, there is a demographic bulge in the 35–50 age group, meaning recruiting or conscripting this age group had a lesser negative impact on the nation overall. Indeed, there is a marked shortage of people in the 18–25 age bracket. The intergenerational reports suggest similar demographics in Australia with the middle-aged female segment offering the sparest capacity.

National mobilisations in the 21st century may not necessarily be built around the mythical 18-year-old cannon fodder of an imagined Napoleonic era.

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Such considerations highlight that the key mobilisation workforce issue is allocating people to tasks. In this, any mobilisation will call for a diverse range of skills, some found in large uncommitted workforces immediately available, but many other skill sets will be much less so. To be able to move more people into the new mobilisation, areas will require them to receive optimised education and training. These matters will be particularly difficult when seeking to expand the ADF or the defence industry sector.

The expansion of an existing military force is generally accomplished through drawing people from the nation’s workforce in ways varying with the circumstances. Enlistment options include volunteer, universal conscription and selective service; however, the time available to bring in and train new people narrows down military force expansion possibilities. Enlisting large numbers of people may not, by itself, achieve a strategically useful force expansion on a meaningful timeline.

Expanding a peacetime army first requires growing its training capacity. Ideally, the army’s field force would shift to quickly scale up its training system. This means the combat force would initially contract before expansion and, consequently, the army’s operational activities might need to be sharply reduced. The rate of expansion of the training base is key to an expanded army’s later combat effectiveness.

The Ukrainian army expansion has been assisted by being able to use partner training resources; for example, Australians have trained Ukrainian soldiers in the UK (in passing, note that the oldest Ukrainian soldier Australia trained was 72).

The war’s demands have also led to sharp cuts in the training time new recruits receive down to just a few months. This is possible, if not desirable, as Ukrainians are joining for specific positions for the war’s length only. These recruits are not aiming for a career in the military but to be involved for as short as time as it can be.

Such streamlined training may not be sensible for naval and air force personnel operating and maintaining complicated platforms. In major wars though, the initial naval and air forces of middle powers are often quickly lost; new platforms may then take years to arrive as have Ukraine’s F-16s. Ukraine found a significant new wrinkle in mobilisation, that of moving to large-scale use of uncrewed vehicles. People can be quickly trained on them.

An aspect often overlooked is that the contractor workforce involved in supporting the ADF is now larger than the Army, Defence APS staff, Navy and Air Force, respectively. Any ADF expansion would need to also greatly expand the numbers of contractors.

This would involve retaining those in the contractor workforce when mobilisation begins, making the best use of the staff available and bringing in more from the wider society.

Mobilisations don’t happen by themselves. Governments are expected to provide the broad guidance, specific direction and the necessary controls to make mobilisations happen. As can be seen from this discussion, this is a task much bigger than Defence.

A start on this might be undertaken now by creating a part-time entity that looks across the whole-of-government and society. Initially this entity might:

• Assess Australia’s fundamental demographics from a mobilisation viewpoint.
• Estimate the Defence and defence industry workforce requirements in a time of war.
• Decide which occupations will be mobilised first and how to train them to meet the conflict’s needs.
• Consider how to shift people from their current occupations into critical wartime sectors.

Such assessments might begin by first running some national mobilisation scenarios to understand the nature and scale of the problems involved. Current mobilisation paradigms are overly material focused. It’s now time to move to a people-centred mobilisation framework.

Doing this now would yield outsized benefits in any future national mobilisations when time may be very short. Such thinking could bring significant benefits for very little investment. Let’s get moving.

Dr. Peter Layton is a visiting fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, the author of Grand Strategy and co-author of Warfare in the Robotics Age.