The 2025 Lowy Institute Poll asked a question it has never asked this year: If Australia were attacked directly by the military of another country, and you were physically capable of doing so, would you be willing to fight to defend Australia?
More than half (52%) of Australian adults say that they would. One-quarter (24%) say they would not, while another quarter are undecided. Younger Australian adults (37% of those aged under 45) are far less willing to defend the country if attacked than their older counterparts (65% of those aged over 45).
This figure is not emblematic of some putative crisis of patriotism, as some argue. The roots of the recruitment shortfall for the Australian Defence Force are deeper and more serious. There is a tension between the ADF’s missions and how they are explained to Australian society. Resolving this tension is critical to the ADF being able to achieve those missions. As is so often repeated, the ADF’s personnel are its most important capability. If the ADF cannot recruit and retain personnel, it will be unable to achieve its objectives.
According to the 2024 National Defence Strategy, the ADF’s overarching strategic objectives are to deter actions against Australia’s interests, shape its strategic environment, and respond with credible force when required. The keen-eyed observer will notice that only one of those missions involves the prospect of actively defending Australia if attacked. By definition, deterrence is a peacetime operation – a negative peace, perhaps, but peacetime nonetheless.
Successive governments have failed to adequately explain why peacetime service actively benefits Australia. Nor have they explained why it is worth doing when there is always the possibility that it may transition to wartime service, the most difficult thing a society can ask of its members.
It is difficult to argue that any ADF deployment since – or perhaps including – Vietnam has been in the direct defence of Australia. This is not to say that these deployments were not important or useful. It is to note that the vast majority of Australian military deployments since the end of the Second World War have sought to promote Australian security from indirect threats, through indirect means.
This is because it was understood that Australia’s security was underpinned by a deterrence structure led by the United States. In order for deterrence to be effective, an adversary must be convinced that retaliation will take place. Since Australia has, historically, been unable to deter, shape, or respond to events wholly alone, we have sought to fit into the strategic structures of another power. This has served Australia well in the past. It no longer appears fit for the future.
It is hard to see shared values with a country that threatens to annex its neighbours, cracks down on free expression, and sends armed plain-clothes officers to disappear migrants off its streets.
A career in the ADF can readily provide people with what they seek in their employment. But if its principal role today is deterrence, the government must explain what exactly it is seeking to deter, what price Australians would pay if deterrence fails, and convince Australians that this price is indeed worth paying.
There is a truism permeating conversations about Australia’s situation today, that we face the most challenging set of strategic circumstances since the Second World War. The assumption behind this is that the rise of China threatens the established power of the United States, and that this will lead inevitably to war – Thucydides’ so-called trap.
This is a partial reading of Thucydides. It excludes the idea, the increasingly inescapable fact, that the established power has little desire to maintain its role in the world or bear the costs of deterring major conflict, and that it faces major domestic political challenges.
The future of the ADF is necessarily tied to Australia’s youth. Young people today desire careers give them purpose, happiness, and align with their values. If all the Australian government can say in those terms to justify fitting into US strategic architecture is that we share values, this is a losing argument. It is hard to see shared values with a country that threatens to annex its neighbours, cracks down on free expression, and sends armed plain-clothes officers to disappear migrants off its streets.
A conversation about recruitment which posits a supposed lack of patriotism for very real shortfalls is not a serious one. Military service is not like other jobs. It is, at its core, a career in which people are ultimately expected, if necessary, to kill or facilitate the killing of others.
Australia exists in a set of circumstances in which threats to our prosperity are unlikely to be direct, but are no less severe for it. This makes a clear articulation of the ADF’s purpose more important than ever. Platitudes about patriotism are an unhelpful misdiagnosis of a much more serious problem. If events reach a point where a direct attack on Australia is imminent, this constitutes a complete failure of policy. Let us recall that the last time a foreign military force landed uninvited on Australian shores, 1788, the continent’s history was inexorably changed.
Explore the 2025 Lowy Institute Poll and 21 years’ worth of data on our interactive website: https://poll.lowyinstitute.org/
