The Australian Army doesn’t own many of the systems that its future combat power depends on. Ports, fuel supplies, freight networks, telecommunications, electricity, cloud computing, satellite services and skilled workforces sit largely beyond the Department of Defence’s command. A failure outside Defence’s direct control could immobilise military capability without destroying any platforms.
The Northern Territory should become the test case for a new approach, with Defence and the territory government jointly stress-testing the civilian and military systems the military depends on.
Force structure alone is an insufficient measure of land power. Australia must also assess the operational ecosystem that generates, sustains and adapts combat power: the interconnected military, governmental, commercial, community and physical systems that a force operates through.
This is especially relevant to land power because it is embedded in territory. Armies must move through, draw on and maintain relationships with the economic, social and physical systems of the places from which they operate. Traditional preparedness asks whether each organisation can perform its assigned function. An operational-ecosystem approach asks whether those functions can be recombined as conditions, priorities and constraints change.
The Northern Territory is Australia’s clearest test of this approach. It combines expanding Australian Defence Force capabilities, United States force posture initiatives, strategically important ports and logistics corridors, energy and critical-minerals developments, space activities, northern agriculture and geographically dispersed communities. Distance, extreme weather, limited redundancy and long supply chains magnify the consequences of disruption. About 48 percent of the territory’s land mass and 80 percent of its coastline is Aboriginal land. Indigenous partnerships are therefore fundamental to access, infrastructure and environmental management, not an engagement activity added after decisions have been made.
Defence investment already reflects this interdependence. Infrastructure supporting Australian–US force posture initiatives extends across Robertson Barracks, the Royal Australian Air Force’s Darwin and Tindal bases, and northern training areas. RAAF Base Darwin, one of Australia’s main forward mounting bases, shares a runway with Darwin International Airport. Protected fuel storage at Tindal expands operational reach, but its continuing utility depends on civilian construction, transport, energy, utilities and maintenance workforces. Military infrastructure may sit inside a base while remaining operationally dependent on systems outside it.
Darwin Port, including its East Arm and proposed Middle arm logistics precincts, extends the same logic into the maritime and industrial domains. These are principally commercial assets and developments, not military installations. Yet their capacity, accessibility and resilience will influence Australia’s ability to receive, sustain, repair and reinforce forces across the north. Middle Arm remains proposed and contested, and its final industrial composition is unresolved. Its potential strategic value lies less in any single project than in the common-user infrastructure, workforce and industrial capacity that could connect commercial activity with national preparedness.
Mapping what Defence depends on is only the first step. Australia must then identify who controls those systems and, hardest of all, whether those actors can change priorities together under pressure. A port, power network, telecommunications provider and military base could each be individually resilient yet collectively fail. They might restore their own operations while competing for scarce fuel, labour, transport or electricity. Australia could protect every component and still lose the military effect that the whole system produces.
Resilience and adaptation aren’t interchangeable. Resilience restores an existing operating model after disruption. Adaptation changes the model when previous assumptions no longer hold. The Northern Territory must be prepared for pressure that is continuous, concurrent and cascading across military and civilian systems. A cyclone, cyberattack, regional deployment and commercial supply disruption may alter freight flows, workforce availability, energy demand and operational priorities simultaneously. Returning each organisation to business as usual could reproduce the vulnerability.
Not every dependency warrants government intervention, and operational requirements cannot displace commercial rights, environmental standards or Indigenous consent. The task is to identify where fragmented decisions create national consequences that no participant can manage alone. The state’s role isn’t to own or command the ecosystem, but to orchestrate the relationships needed to keep it functioning and adapting.
Defence and the Northern Territory government should jointly conduct a recurring Northern Territory operational ecosystem stress test. Defence should define the required military effects and demand assumptions. The territory government should convene the infrastructure operators, industry, land councils, Indigenous organisations, local governments and emergency services needed to test whether those effects can be delivered.
The test should begin with operational demand, not a generic catalogue of assets. It should ask what military effects the territory could continue generating, at what scale and for how long, if several enabling systems failed concurrently. The test should identify critical dependencies, minimum operating thresholds, authorities for reallocating scarce resources, unresolved coordination problems and investments whose resilience value cannot be captured commercially. Exercises should test decisions and relationships, not merely whether individual assets survive.
Defence has never generated military capability alone. What has changed is the depth of its dependence on systems it neither owns nor controls, and the speed with which failures in one can disrupt the others. The Northern Territory should become the first Australian region deliberately governed, tested and developed as an operational ecosystem. Its critical defence capability is not infrastructure alone, but the collective capacity to reprioritise and adapt that infrastructure under pressure. Australia needs the ability to turn the Northern Territory’s separately controlled systems into a continuously adaptive source of combat power.
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