Speed and Sovereignty: AI, Autonomy and Australia's Defence Transformation

Australia's defence posture is undergoing its most consequential transformation in a generation. Declining strategic warning times, an increasingly contested Indo-Pacific, and the accelerating maturity of artificial intelligence, autonomy, and advanced networking have converged to reshape how the Australian Defence Force plans, builds, and fights. This report, Speed and Sovereignty: AI, Autonomy and Australia's Defence Transformation, examines that convergence across six critical fronts.

It explores how AI is compressing the OODA loop and becoming a new source of command advantage; how autonomous mass — from the MQ-28A Ghost Bat to the Ghost Shark XL-AUV — is redefining force structure; how multi-domain integration is turning isolated platforms into a connected kill web; how cyber, electronic warfare and information operations are extending the battlespace into the digital and cognitive domains; how sovereign industrial capability is becoming as strategically vital as the platforms it sustains; and how data itself has emerged as one of Defence's most valuable — and most under-recognised — strategic assets.