The wars of the past few years have taught the world’s militaries some uncomfortable lessons, and Australia’s has been paying close attention. The Australian Defence Force has now set out the technologies it believes will shape the battlefields it may one day have to fight on, and the picture it paints is far removed from the tanks-and-troops imagery of the twentieth century. Cheap drones, energy weapons that fire at the speed of light, and artificial intelligence that can sift a flood of sensor data are all near the top of the shopping list.
According to reporting by 7News, the ADF has identified six priority technologies it wants to develop, buy and integrate, drawing on what defence planners have described as hard-won lessons from conflicts across the globe. Drones, directed-energy weapons such as lasers, and AI feature prominently among them. The thread running through the whole list is speed: the ability to sense, decide and act faster than an adversary, at a cost that does not bankrupt the budget in the process.
Why the wishlist looks the way it does
The trigger for much of this rethink sits in the conflicts of recent years, above all the war in Ukraine and the exchanges of fire across the Middle East. Both have shown how a two-thousand-dollar quadcopter can disable a multimillion-dollar armoured vehicle, and how swarms of cheap loitering munitions can overwhelm defences built for a smaller number of expensive threats. That economic asymmetry has forced a hard question on every modern military, Australia’s included: if the enemy can throw a hundred cheap drones at you, defending against them with missiles that cost more than the drones is a losing proposition.
This is where lasers and other directed-energy weapons enter the conversation. A laser does not run out of expensive interceptors in the way a missile battery does, and each shot costs a fraction of the projectile it is trying to stop. For a force that has to defend ships, bases and forward positions against saturation attacks, the appeal is obvious. The technology is still maturing, and turning laboratory demonstrations into rugged, deployable systems is genuinely difficult, but the direction of travel is clear enough that the ADF wants it firmly on the agenda.
Artificial intelligence sits underneath almost all of this. Modern platforms generate more data than any human crew can process in real time, from radar tracks and signals intelligence to full-motion video from dozens of drones at once. AI is what promises to turn that torrent into something a commander can actually use, flagging threats, suggesting targets and helping coordinate the machines doing the fighting. It is also what makes autonomous and semi-autonomous systems possible in the first place, from uncrewed aircraft to robotic ground vehicles.
The case for caution
Not everyone is convinced that faster and more automated is straightforwardly better. Arms-control advocates and a growing number of academics have warned for years about the dangers of handing lethal decisions to software, particularly systems whose behaviour can be hard to predict and harder to explain after the fact. The concern is not science fiction so much as accountability: if an autonomous system makes a mistake, who is responsible, and can the chain of reasoning even be reconstructed? Australia has so far taken the position that a human should remain meaningfully in the loop on the use of force, but the pressure to automate grows as the tempo of conflict speeds up.
There is also a hard-nosed industrial argument buried in the technology debate. Australia has a long and unhappy history of large defence projects that arrive late, cost far more than promised and deliver less than advertised. A wishlist heavy on fast-moving technologies like drones and AI raises the risk of buying kit that is obsolete by the time it enters service, or of becoming dependent on overseas suppliers for the software that makes the hardware work. Sovereign capability, the ability to build, sustain and upgrade these systems onshore, has become a recurring theme in Australian defence policy for exactly this reason.
What it means for Australia
For a country with a small population, a vast coastline and a strategic environment that its own government now describes as the most challenging in decades, the logic of the ADF’s list is compelling. Australia cannot match larger powers ship for ship or soldier for soldier, so leverage has to come from technology and from being smart about where it is applied. Cheap, attritable drones and AI-enabled coordination offer a way to project presence across the northern approaches and the maritime spaces around the continent without an unaffordable increase in crewed platforms.
The push also lands squarely on Australia’s technology sector. Local firms working in autonomy, machine vision, sensor fusion and secure computing stand to benefit if the government follows through on its stated preference for domestic capability, and there is already a cluster of Australian companies chasing defence work in exactly these areas. The AUKUS partnership, whose second pillar covers advanced capabilities including AI, autonomy and hypersonics, adds another channel for collaboration with the United States and the United Kingdom. Whether that translates into durable Australian industry or simply into buying finished systems from allies is one of the central questions the wishlist quietly raises.
There is a workforce dimension too. Building and sustaining AI-enabled defence systems needs engineers, data scientists and cyber specialists, and Australia is already competing hard for that talent against banks, miners and the big technology platforms. A defence sector that wants to be at the frontier of autonomy will have to make a compelling case to the same graduates that Sydney and Melbourne’s tech scene is trying to hire.
What is next
Naming priorities is the easy part. The harder work lies in funding them through the budget cycle, running the procurement without the delays that have dogged so many past programs, and settling the ethical and legal framework for how much autonomy Australia is willing to accept in systems that can take a life. Expect the six technologies to reappear in future budget announcements, in the next round of AUKUS pillar-two projects, and in tenders that local industry will be watching closely. For now, the ADF has made plain where it thinks the battlefield is heading. The debate over how fast Australia should follow, and how much of the capability it should build for itself, is only beginning.
Sources: 7News.
