Record breaking flooding and typhoons in Vietnam and the Philippines underlines a vital truth for Australia’s strategic community – that civil-emergency preparedness and national resilience are essential components of defence posture.
In central Vietnam, Hue City just saw a 23-day flooding and rainfall event, and in Hoi An, where one of the authors houses flooded (Melissa Jardine) due to waters reaching records not seen since 1964, the UNESCO-protected ancient town continued to see river banks breached with local shops and restaurants damaged.
Typhoon Kalmaegi’s death toll in the Philippines surpassed 200, and while Vietnam was somewhat spared by the storm with five deaths, the damage to infrastructure, agriculture and livelihoods is immense.
The episode is a reminder that a major civil shock-event can degrade infrastructure, overwhelm logistics chains, and disrupt command and control. If protracted, such events create exploitable vulnerabilities, particularly in grey-zone or conflict environments where resilience failure carries wider risk.
Australia’s 2024 National Defence Strategy locates “National Defence” firmly in the domain of whole-of-nation resilience, but in practice much of civil-emergency management still evolves separately from strategic defence. The ability to recover depends increasingly on bridging civil preparedness and strategic defence. Even though the Australian Federal Police have a presence across the Indo-Pacific and have a lead role in international crises, emergency management, especially disaster response, in Australia is largely the responsibility of the states and territories.
One of the key barriers to preparedness innovation in Australia is that much of the comparative literature has been drawn from Western systems (NATO, Scandinavia) which may lack relevance in an Indo-Pacific context. Regional practice could not only offer rich lessons, but also deepen platforms for collaboration.
The Vietnamese model could be particularly instructive. While Vietnam deploys constructive pathways to handle disaster management based on their experience since the 1970s, the specific legal framework – most notably Decree 08/2006/ND‑CP (January 2006) – embeds what is commonly called the “four on-the-spot” approach, with leadership, forces (or human resources), materials/means or logistics each at the site affected. This means local administrative units at province, district or commune level are directed to be self-sufficient and operationally ready in their own territory before external support arrives.
In July, on the back of numerous disasters in the first half of 2025, Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính announced the restructure of three response agencies, establishing a single entity, the National Civil Defence Steering Committee and framed disaster readiness as a key pillar of Vietnam’s national defence strategy. Civil and national defence agencies do cooperate in some circumstances, such as the deployment of the Air Defence – Air Force Service in the search for three men missing for two days during Typhoon Kalmaegi, later found alive 100 kilometres off the coast of Quang Ngai province.
If Australia is serious about “whole-of-nation” resilience, then its preparedness architecture must consider not just national and state- and territory-level responses, but how localities are empowered, connected and responsive.
When ASEAN disaster ministers met in Phnom Penh in October, the relevant architectures focused on the impacts of climate change and disaster readiness, with mostly indirect but recognised threats to risks of conflict. Shortly after, Australia continued to strengthen its partnerships in the region with the ASEAN–Australia Joint Leaders’ Statement on Conflict Prevention and Crisis Management which included non-traditional and transnational crimes, the purview of law enforcement agencies, along with commitments to stability and security through enhanced and preventive defence cooperation.
Yet, with the intensification of disasters in Asia and potential for conflict in the Indo-Pacific, there is a need for better understanding. This goes to questions about the interoperability of civil and national defence, and what it could mean for cross-jurisdiction cooperation when there are different models not only across the region, but within jurisdictions.
With Vietnam recently undergoing a national restructuring from a three to a two-tier local government model, Chính asked for reflections on how it affected disaster response and coordination. This has relevance for the types of questions that Australia and regional partners also need to consider, as well as:
- How regional and national institutional design choices affect agility and local-level resilience in a major-shock scenario, or in a protracted disaster event, such as the recent floods in central Vietnam where Hue City was affected for 23-days?
- What legal and operational frameworks enable Defence to interface with, but without over-securitisation, local governments, volunteers and community resources when the shock emerges from within rather than from outside?
- What societal assumptions underpin readiness (citizen expectation of mobilisation, local buffers of materials and skills, trust in government/local leadership) and how do they compare with Australia’s context?
If Australia is serious about “whole-of-nation” resilience, then its preparedness architecture must consider not just national and state- and territory-level responses, but how localities are empowered, connected and responsive. Can Vietnam’s “four on-the-spot” model offer any insight for decentralised resilience in practice?
Of course, there are many differences between Australia and Vietnam (geography, population density, legal system, political structures, etc) which means lessons cannot simply be transferred from one nation to another. A comparative study drawing insights from other regional examples among Indo-Pacific countries, such as Taiwan and South Korea, could analyse a range of alternatives to developing strategic postures and core resilience tasks towards flood-response, power-grid failure, cascading supply-chain breakdown or mass-evacuation scenarios.
Vietnam is reassessing not only what to do, but when and how to act to ensure that capability, institutional interfaces and analytic foundations are in place. It is critical to determine what are the best predictive models for responding to disaster and conflict convergence before they happen.
The ASEAN–Australia Joint Leaders’ Statement on Conflict Prevention and Crisis Management goes some way towards addressing this, but there is work to do to ensure localised disaster risk associated with climate change and civil preparedness is not left out of these critical frameworks in ASEAN countries and Australia.
