The Siege
No landing craft on Bondi. The credible threat — the one Defence's own Strategic Review plans for — is a siege: strike the northern bases, swarm the approaches, and strangle the trade and fuel coming down both coasts. Here's how it unfolds, and what Australia has to fight back with right now. Scroll.
It doesn't need an invasion
Forget tanks on the beaches. Australia's own Defence Strategic Review calls invasion 'only a remote possibility' — the ocean is still too wide to land and hold an army across. But the DSR's point is sharper: distance no longer protects you. In the missile age, an adversary doesn't need to set foot here to bring Australia to its knees. This is the scenario Defence actually plans for.
The north goes dark
First, the bases. Long-range precision missiles — China's DF-26 already ranges northern Australia, the DF-27 the entire continent — crater Tindal, Darwin and the bare strips the ADF would disperse to. And there is almost nothing to stop them: ASPI says base-hardening is going 'slowly,' and Australia fields two NASAMS batteries and essentially no ballistic-missile defence.
The approaches, swarmed
Then the sea-air gap — the archipelago to Australia's north that was always the 'strategic moat.' Submarines and naval task groups contest it: persistent presence, missile tests within signalling distance, forces loitering just outside the EEZ. The exact thing the DSR orders the ADF to be able to deny — and the exact thing it currently struggles to.
Both coasts, choked
But the real weapon isn't a strike — it's a stranglehold. Australia is an island that imports about 90% of its fuel and ships the bulk of its trade through three Indonesian chokepoints. Cut them, picket both coasts with submarines, and you never need to land a soldier. Australia holds roughly 30 days of fuel, has breached the IEA's 90-day standard every year since 2012, and owns no international tankers of its own. The siege does the work.
What Australia has to answer with
This is the 'strategy of denial' — hold the adversary at risk in the approaches with long-range strike, submarines and surveillance from the northern bases. On paper, a capable high-end force:
And here's what 'unprepared' costs
Now run it forward unprepared — the scenario this whole project exists to prevent. The missiles run out: Australia made no guided weapons of its own until late 2025, and the US empties its own magazines in under a week. The fuel runs out in weeks. The bases can't be defended. The surface fleet — nine hulls, the smallest since the 1950s — can't be everywhere. And the submarines that are the heart of denial? Six ageing Collins boats, with AUKUS submarines more than a decade away. The DSR's own verdict on the force today: 'not fully fit for purpose.'
This is the scenario — and the warning
The siege is what Australia must be ready for: not a landing, but a strangling. And the gap between the force that could deny it and the force we have is the cost of being unprepared — paid in the one currency the missile age no longer gives us: time. The DSR ended the assumption of a decade's warning. The Programme is what closing that gap actually takes.
This is the scenario the book defends for.
Not because an invasion is coming, but because a siege doesn't need one — and meeting it with a force that runs out of fuel, missiles and submarines is a choice we're making right now, by not closing the gap. The warning time is gone. The preparation can't wait for it.
Scenario framing: Australia's Defence Strategic Review 2023 (invasion 'a remote possibility'; the 'strategy of denial' and 'impactful projection'). Force figures: IISS Military Balance, ASPI, USSC, the 2024 Independent Surface Fleet Review, IEA/AIP fuel-stockholding data. A scenario built from Australia's own planning documents — not a prediction.