The future is uncertain but not completely. A major certainty is that, as in earlier times, Australia will fight its future wars with a mobilised defence force and not the current peacetime, business-as-usual one. Today’s armed force is at best a core, only partly related to the wartime mobilised force. Ukraine and Russia now both understand this very well.
Importantly, the new Strategic Defence Review also understands. Its’ terms of reference declare the review “must outline the investments required to support Defence… mobilisation needs to 2032–33.” This push is made more urgent given that geostrategic change is accelerating and Australia can no longer plan on an extended lead-time to prepare for conflict.
Mobilisation involves purposefully using a society’s resources to support achieving national objectives in time of war, crisis or disaster. In the case of war, mobilisation will usually focus on enhancing the nation’s defence forces including increasing their capabilities, size and ability to generate higher activity levels. The additional workforce, money and material needed for these changes to the armed forces generally comes from the civil sector of society.
Mobilisation consciously shifts the boundary between the defence and civil sectors in favour of the former. The amount the boundary shifts varies with the context. Different strategic circumstances and the different strategies nations adopt will result in different national mobilisations as regards scope, nature, scale and duration. There are however, specific mobilisation principles derived from earlier defence mobilisations that can inform and shape the Review’s conclusions and the investments it will need to outline.
Mobilisation Principles
Mobilisation considers all national resources. The intent behind a mobilisation is the effective and efficient use of all resources available to the nation. The key mobilisation question political leaders must answer is: how much of the civil sector’s resources should be reallocated to the war?
These resources could include workforce, transportation, equipment, health support, infrastructure, the industrial base, skills training, communications, legislative issues and funding. The type and quantity of such resources allocated will vary depending on high-level decision-makers’ assessments of the problem.
During a mobilisation, the nation to the extent necessary comes under the direction and control of the central government. In Australia’s case, the most well-known, and the greatest national mobilisation came in the middle of World War Two. On 18 February 1942, the day before Darwin was struck by Japanese air raids, Prime Minster Curtin publicly declared ‘total mobilisation’. This meant: “ everybody in this country who has anything, or is anything, can be ordered by the Government to do what the Government demands. All the possessions of all the people are henceforth at the Government’s disposal.”
This was an extreme case. While all mobilisations involve an increased degree of government control, the level varies with the war. Historically, the critical shortage in Australian mobilisations is people. In general, about 23% of the workforce (about 11% of the population) is the maximum size armed forces a country can support. Remaining with generalities, this leaves about a quarter of the workforce for defence industries with the remaining half of the workforce retained in the civilian economy producing food, clothing, and other necessities.
Mobilisation involves international resources. The international system is as much a potential source of mobilisation resources as the nation itself. The scale and sophistication of today’s vast global marketplace now gives all governments access to much greater workforce, money and materiel resources than any single nation can ever aspire to. However, using international resources does create certain dependencies on external entities. It may be unsafe to assume that even when operating within a coalition that the coalition partners will provide sustainment in a crisis if their needs are pressing.
Today, Australia contributes to building up other nations’ defence mobilisation bases, with the implicit assumption of being able to access these in a timely manner in war. A significant example of this is Australia’s considerable investment in US-produced military aircraft. Australian purchases of aircraft and spare parts helps keep these production lines ‘hot’, and available for surge production use by the United States and its allies. Accepting this, Australia has a vested national interest in these distant sources. Any economic downturns, civil disturbances or natural disasters in these countries that could impact Australian national mobilisation is of concern.
Such considerations also apply along the lines of communications between Australia and its overseas sources; these need to be reliable and robust. For example, military forces used to rely on ‘interior’ supply lines, all contained within the nation. Now these are complemented by essential ‘exterior’ supply lines, often manifested as a planet spanning web of complicated supply chain interconnections.
Mobilisation balances military and civilian requirements. In mobilisation, the defence and civil sector are both important. Neglect of either can imperil the other. This makes a major issue in national mobilisation one of coordination. The needs of the front line must be balanced against those of the home front but this is not a simple problem, as none of the factors involved remain static for any length of time. All are dynamic and constantly changing.
Mobilisation and military strategies are interdependent. A balance must be struck between the demands of the chosen strategies and the ability of the national mobilisation base to meet these demands. The application of military power and the building of military power are not simply opposite sides of the same coin but are instead mutually determining elements.
In a similar manner, mobilisation is a response to external events and is also shaped by them. Eliot Janeway noted of America’s Second World War mobilisation that: “the programmatic requirements of mobilisation, while all-important, were not set by [Americans]. They were imposed well in advance … by the kind of war our Allies and our enemies had begun to fight. [America’s] job was to adjust war production to the realities of combat, not to re-form those realities, except insofar as it budgeted for the momentum.”
If others shape strategic circumstances, it can be difficult to plan for national mobilisation. Given such uncertainty, national mobilisation plans should be both flexible and strive to create more flexibility.
Mobilisation must use flexible controls. To best allocate national resources governments can use a variety of direct and indirect controls ranging along a continuum from command to setting priorities to directive regulations to indirectly manipulating market forces. Such controls need to be flexible to meet the changing needs of national mobilisation as it evolves in response to changing strategic imperatives.
The problem is more complicated than it initially seems. National mobilisation requires different data types to those collected during peacetime, as the government now needs to base national production decisions on it, not simply monitor events. Coordination of the many activities across society cannot be left up to market forces. However, the statistical structure needed to control national mobilisation will depend on the control mechanisms used. The data necessary is likely to be more specific, require greater accuracy, obtained in greater detail and collected faster than is deemed necessary in peacetime. Until a suitable data collection regime is established, control of national mobilisation may be somewhat uncertain, confused and inefficient.
Mobilisation planning is always a deeply political issue. National mobilisation involves the allocation of scarce resources within a society. It is accordingly a deeply political process not just within government but also across government departments, the armed forces and the whole-of-society. National mobilisation is commenced and controlled by the nation’s highest political leaders but politics of many different kinds play out all the way down.
Immediately before the Second World War, the Department of Defence played a seminal role in pressuring other departments to begin addressing mobilisation issues that they would need to action in time of war. The other departments were busy delivering peacetime policy and services with little capacity for other tasks. Without this external pressure from the Department of Defence, mobilisation would have been delayed.
Mobilisation is an integrated activity. In bringing together whole-of-society and international resources, mobilisation requires an integrated planning approach. Rather than being conceived as a collection of individual elements, mobilisation should instead be an overall program that is internally coherent, where each element enhances the others’ impact and which exploits synergies to maximum effect. The intent is that the whole should be greater than the sum of its parts.
Accordingly, mobilisation planning needs to focus primarily at the system level not simply on maximising outputs from each of the separate components. How the various elements work together is the central question in devising an effective and efficient mobilisation plan.
Mobilisation must consider the pre- and the post- stages. Mobilisations start and finish. Planning may continue indefinitely across peacetime, but societies cannot stay mobilised forever. Conceptually mobilisation does not end when the event has finished but rather when society is returned to a “normal” state. Ideally, a nation would come out of a conflict better, not worse, off. This should be the government’s goal, driving policy and decision making and shaping how a mobilisation begins and is undertaken.
Shifting the boundary between the defence and civilian sector back so that the defence sector declines, perhaps precipitously, can be difficult for the people and industries involved. Having experienced the sudden societal and economic disturbances at the end of the First World War, many Allied nations in World War Two began planning to demobilise and return society to normal as soon as victory seemed assured, which for them was late 1943. Australia began demobilisation planning in 1944 and based its demobilisation planning on the war ending late-1946. The atomic attacks on Japan brought that forward a year. Australian demobilisation was a patchy affair with some successes and some failures; for example, some food rationing continued as late as mid-1950.
Australia’s future defence mobilisation needs are unsure, although these general principles highlight its shape and scope. For both the Strategic Defence Review and the ADF there is a certainty: when another war is fought, mobilisation to some degree will be necessary. This is a future that can’t be avoided. Time to get cracking.
Note: Dr. 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'.