7 October 2026
The Honourable Matt Keogh MP, Minister for Defence People and Veterans’ Affairs, Ministers and Members of the Australian state and federal parliaments, your Excellences, Chief of Defence Admiral Mark Hammond, fellow Army Chiefs, Heads of Delegations, senior enlisted leaders, the Junior Leaders’ Fellowship, industry leaders, honoured guests, friends and colleagues, Team Army … welcome!
How good are our people? We are mission ready, people always.
That wonderful video is just a snippet of a forthcoming documentary tracking the experience of Australia’s soldiers as we celebrate 125 years of defending our nation.
Seeing our soldiers doing what they joined to do, with those amazing and large smiles, fills my cup as Chief. There is much more to come, so keep a close eye out for it.
I want to start by acknowledging the tragic vehicle accident that took place in Darwin on Monday.
We mourn the loss of Corporal Brendan Hannam. We send all strength to his loved ones, his mates, and his unit.
Our commitment to them, and to his memory and sacrifice, are now never-ending.
Lest we forget is more than a promise, it is an epitaph.
Our focus is also on our five injured soldiers. I can let you know that they are recovering well.
Our duty now is to care for them, to make sure they have a fulsome recovery, and that their families are supported throughout.
This is a profoundly sad time for the Army.
But we are a strong team, and we will pull together to look after all of our soldiers and our families.
Thank you to Aunty Di Ryder for her heartfelt ‘Welcome to Country’.
I too acknowledge the Whadjuk Nyoongar people, and their elders past, present and emerging.
I pay my enduring respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women who have served our country, and continue to serve our country, in times of peace of war.
It is my pleasure and privilege to open the 2026 Chief of Army Symposium.
We gather at an important moment in history. The old order is in flux, and a new one is emerging.
Many changes are sobering. For some nations, violence has re-emerged as an acceptable tool of politics.
Long standing norms have long moderated war, and are weakening at an alarming rate. Cities and civilians are being deliberately targeted.
Hard power is back.
Global defence spending grew by 2.9% last year, and is escalating.
For the first time in 80 years, there is no agreed arms control regime to limit the growth of nuclear weapons.
Our world is re-arming.
This is serious, but we must rise to the challenge.
I remain an eternal optimist, and change always brings opportunity. We must find it, and seize it. And we are.
For the Australian Army, the opportunity lies in what is underpinning this new global order … the remarkable emergence of advanced technologies.
These are having a profound effect on the character of war and warfare.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces - who we support wholeheartedly in their fight - are a good case in point.
Just five years ago, Ukraine’s military was a largely Soviet-era force of around 200,000, with legacy equipment.
Today, their transformation is nothing short of remarkable. Ukraine now fields a battle management system that fuses drone, satellite, radar and frontline reports into a single common operating picture.
Unique formations operate tens of thousands of autonomous and remote systems … with a sensor to shooter ‘kill web’ sometimes measured in as short as minutes.
Sea control achieved entirely through sensors, land-based long range strike, and autonomous systems.
Operation Spiderweb, and deep precision strike at thousands of kilometres.
And, most recently, the training of military AI using one of the largest datasets of drone footage in the world - half a million hours.
War has always been a brutal battle to adapt, and Ukraine still has challenges.
But their efforts are heroic. It is not too bold to say that their capacity to adapt has been the saviour of their nation.
The Australian Army is taking a central lesson from Ukraine, and the other wars around the world.
The ability to adapt is now the most important trait a modern Army can have.
Change is no longer enough. You have to be hardwired to adapt.
It must colour every aspect of your military.
Like electricity, adaptation must flow seamlessly from the nation to the front line, and back again.
There can be no circuit breakers if we want to achieve and maintain a position of advantage over an adversary.
This is what we are now striving for, and demanding.
I take confidence from the fact that this is not our first rodeo.
The Australian Army has a proud history of adaptation in the face of grave threats to our nation.
In 1914, we were a militia Army, most of whom had never fired a shot in anger. We existed mostly on horseback.
When the 1st Australian Division was raised in 1914 it had just 26 machine-guns … and eight motorcars.
Command and control moved at the pace of the despatch rider, or the man on foot.
Just four years later at Le Hamel, General Sir John Monash led an Australian Corps in one of our history’s first fully-orchestrated combined arms assaults … creeping artillery, tank / infantry integration, aerial surveillance, all commanded through wireless communications.
An Army transformed under the relentless pressure of world war.
Leap forward to 1941 and you will find an Australian Army optimised for desert warfare, with tactics familiar to Monash.
But the bombing of Darwin demanded the defence of the homeland, and yet another adaptation.
By 1942, a whole new Australian Army was fighting on the Kokoda Track, described by one veteran as ‘a hundred miles of hell crammed into fifty’.
The transformation was absolute: concepts, command and control, capabilities, and culture … all new and previously unused.
By 1945, that transformation was complete, with 33,000 battle-hardened troops landing at Balikpapan in Australia’s largest combined and joint amphibious operation.
We have done it before - more than once - and if asked we will do it again.
The difference today is that time is against us.
In each past case, transforming our Army took two costly years … from Gallipoli to the Western Front, and from North Africa to the Pacific.
There is no such luxury today. As the Government’s National Defence Strategy makes clear, warning time is a thing of our past.
Australia’s own security environment in the Indo Pacific is unique. The region comprises over 52 per cent of the world’s surface.
It is home to half the world’s population, five of the world’s largest militaries and six nuclear powers.
Two thirds of global GDP, nine of the ten largest ports, and the busiest sea-lanes on the planet.
Conflict in our region would have an immediate and an unavoidable impact on Australia.
It might demand an immediate response. We must be ready tonight to defend the nation.
This challenge is why the theme for this year’s theme for the Symposium is ‘Hardwired for Adaptation’.
Over the next day and a half, a remarkable range of speakers will pull apart this tricky problem.
This morning we consider ‘Why Adaptation’, hearing from the world-leading thinkers and military leaders who will give us strategic context.
We are delighted to be joined by the Acting Prime Minister and Minister for Defence, alongside our Chief of Defence, who will give us the view from the very very top!
This afternoon we examine the ‘myths and realities of contemporary war’, hearing from practitioners who have seen today’s wars … and who know the truth from the noise.
We’ll also hear from Australian defence industry – leaders delivering adaptation to our Army, across all five warfighting domains.
Finally tomorrow we’ll finish strongly by looking at the ‘how’.
We’ll access the voices of soldiers, senior military leaders and even an astronaut on what we need to do now to get this right.
Success will be if our views on adaptation are truly challenged over the next two days.
But I want to offer my own three ‘teaser’ thoughts upfront.
The first is to see military adaptation as a battle.
This is really valuable.
Battles - like wars - are inherently adversarial. Adaptation demands that same mindset.
It is not about adapting as fast as possible, which could be a wasteful path to irrelevance.
It is about adapting faster than our adversary, and with more relevance.
Pace matters: not too fast, but never too slow. But we must also accept risk!
Battles are also layered, with a close, rear and deep fight. Again, I think adaptation is the same.
A ‘close fight’ in the trenches, a ‘rear fight’ in the Army, and a ‘deep fight’ in the nation.
Adaptation must switch seamlessly from the nation to the trenches, and back.
Secondly, adaptation in one domain is irrelevant unless integrated with the others.
Ukraine’s most successful adaptations are those that integrate domains, concentrating military power.
Land operations today, for example, rely on assured access to … and resilience within … the space and cyber warfighting domains.
We are in the fight now in the cyber domain. And to have a good offence, you must have a good defence!
These are the domains of the first mover, and the ones where we are unlikely to hold first mover advantage.
As an Army we must be ready and resilient to endure first strike, to adapt to the realities of war, and leverage second mover legitimacy.
We cannot do this any of this unless we are integrated: across the ADF, with our allies and partners, and increasingly even more with industry and academia.
Adaptation is a vital expression of national defence. We all know that militaries win battles … but nations – and most often coalitions of nations – win wars.
Third is the risk of learning the wrong lessons, or adapting too early … what we would describe as ‘maladaptation’.
Some argue that advanced technologies - and particularly the ‘drone revolution’ - can replace all of our conventional equipment, from tanks to landing craft.
We should, they argue, just copy the impressive adaptations of those fighting wars today.
This is not correct. In military adaptation, context is king.
The archipelagic battlespace of our region could not be more different from the steppes of Eastern Europe, unless it was in space.
25,000 islands, 25,000 kilometres of waterways, and 740 million hectares of unforgiving jungle. Salt, shoals, beating sun, endless rain … sometimes all at the same time!
This context is why imitation is not always the finest form of flattery.
The hard truth is that we cannot truly predict what a major war in our region would look like. The only thing that is certain is that war is wholly unpredictable.
We cannot simple copy others. We cannot adapt too much, too soon.
We must instead focus on becoming adaptive, like a chameleon, ready to adjust to the realities of war should it come.
We are thinking hard about context in Army Headquarters, and it is worth sharing some of this with you as we step here into the Chief of Army’s Symposium.
I will come back to it in my closing remarks as well.
Our wargames and whiteboards, and our discussions at our Army Command Board, are increasingly coalescing around one central idea … a theory that defines how we fight: Archipelagic Warfare.
It tells the story of a future Army optimised to campaign across an archipelago, alongside allies and partners, to achieve a vital outcome … military advantage for the ADF and the nation.
A resilient Army – enabled by advanced technology – that wins on the land, beaches, rivers and jungles … but only ever in the context of the five warfighting domains.
An Army ready to fight tonight, tomorrow and together.
So, let’s get into the thick of it. But first, a final challenge for your time here at CAS.
The changing character of war is most often portrayed as a threat to us and our armies.
What if we flip the axis though, and see advanced technologies as an opportunity for our Army, rather than an inescapable threat?
Let’s imagine …
What if robotics and autonomous systems could replace the shortfalls in mass that have always challenged armies?
What if very-long-range, land-based strike could help secure Australia’s archipelagic approaches, for ourselves and allies and partners, at remarkably reduced cost?
What if we can genuinely partner with AI to know more, to decide faster, and apply force with even more precision and lethality?
That is my challenge to you: to see adaptation and technology as a chance to amplify our fighting power, rather than be its nemesis.
So, welcome to Perth, welcome to the Chief of Army Symposium. Thank you again to our amazing speakers.
Thank you to everyone in this room for the energy you will bring this next couple of days. We are in this together.
I look forward to wrapping up at the close, where I will lay out the next steps in Army’s quest to be hardwired for adaptation … ready to fight tonight, tomorrow, and together, with allies and partners, across five warfighting domains.
Team Army, Soldiers for Life. Thank you.