Ukrainian drone strikes show up Australia’s out-of-date defences

Over the weekend, Ukraine provided a demonstration of something that has been largely misinterpreted by the many “pop-up” war experts that have emerged here and elsewhere in the past three years. What the audacious Ukrainian strikes showed was not a new way of war nor new drone capabilities. Both have been on display for more than three years – for those who have noticed.

Ukrainian troops prepare to launch a Kazhan heavy drone in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine.Credit: AP

What the Ukrainians actually provided on the weekend was a lesson that has two sides: On one side, they showed what can be done when politicians and military leaders take risk and free up their people to exercise creativity. The other side of the lesson is that Ukraine showed what happens to those who do not pay sufficient attention to the lessons of war, and whose learning and adaptation culture and systems are inadequate.

Unfortunately, the Australian defence department and its part-time minister have shown no indication they have learned the first lesson but have demonstrated a full measure of the second.

Australia’s defence force is slowly but surely being degraded in size and capacity by being denied funding, due to a focus on submarines that will arrive too late to deter China’s rapid military build-up and aggression. The 2 per cent of GDP being spent on defence has been recognised by every credible defence expert in this country as insufficient for normal defence needs, let along running a defence force and paying down the nuclear submarines as well as paying the exorbitant salaries of the hundreds of AUKUS bureaucrats who are travelling the world, writing briefs and producing nothing.

The Ukrainian drone strikes on the weekend are another “foot-stomp” moment for Australia. They demonstrated that taking risks and being innovative can result in the development of a long-range strike capability that does not just have to build on the small number of exquisite and expensive systems Australia is procuring. And unlike these big expensive systems, which once lost are gone forever, drones can be produced in mass quantities by Australian industry in case we are involved in a sustained war.

The expensive and exquisitely “focused” defence force we are building is designed for 20th century war. It will also take decades to deliver because of the zero-risk procurement policy of the defence department. We need to shift to a balanced force that balances crewed and uncrewed systems, expensive and cheap systems – designed for 21st century war. And we need to speed up and delegate down authorities to procure more relevant equipment that can be upgraded regularly.

Drones are not just an aerial asset – land and maritime drones have proven their utility in Ukraine and this has been ignored in Canberra. And with the latest developments, which include uncrewed naval vessels that carry strike drones and uncrewed aerial vehicles that carry smaller attack drones, Australia has an opportunity to learn from Ukraine and develop new kinds of high-tech deterrents to Chinese aggression.

The second lesson of the weekend is that those who are slow to learn and adapt pay the consequences. The Russians, who have had their airbases attacked regularly in the past two years, have been slow to upgrade their defences and paid the price on the weekend. Australian military bases and critical infrastructure are totally defenceless against these kinds of drone attacks. That has been clear from three years of war in Ukraine, and yet, this government has done nothing to protect Australian soldiers from such threats. Not only have budgets for drone defences not materialised, but an extraordinarily dense air safety bureaucracy has also prevented units from using drones and experimenting with new ideas like the Ukrainian military has throughout the war. Few soldiers see drones on training exercises these days.

I have seen how frontline Ukrainian units employ drones and how their Unmanned Systems Forces use them for long-range strikes. I have interviewed air defence commanders in Ukraine about defending against thousands of drone attacks per month and interviewed those who have developed world-leading drone interceptors. The Australian government has worked hard to ignore these hard-earned lessons and these cheaper military solutions, while building a dense bureaucracy in Canberra that innovative drone-makers in Australia cannot penetrate in any reasonable amount of time.

Every couple of months the Ukrainians deploy an entirely new class of long-range strike drone. The Ukrainians (and Russians) are adapting their drones weekly and monthly, a pace that is incomprehensible to risk-intolerant Australian public servants and politicians. As the Ukrainians demonstrated on the weekend, fortune favours those who take strategic risks with capability development and the employment of their forces. And as they also showed, failure awaits those who are too slow and too arrogant to learn and adapt.

The problem isn’t a shortage of innovative spirit among the people of the ADF or Australian industry. The problem is a government indifferent to defence issues, a lack of leadership from the part-time defence minister and a process-obsessed bureaucracy that pays no price for the inevitable military failures to come if we remain on our current path.

Mick Ryan is a retired major-general who served in the ADF for more than 35 years. He is the senior fellow for military studies at the Lowy Institute. He is the author of the 2024 book The War for Ukraine. He is also a strategic adviser to a number of defence and security companies, including a drone manufacturer.

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