Strategic fitness: how the army can institutionalise rapid adaptation
The Australian Army’s workforce is more educated, technically proficient and connected to emerging technology than any previous generation. Its people challenge assumptions, experiment with new capabilities and increasingly recognise learning as a warfighting function. The defining question is no longer whether the army can innovate but whether it can institutionalise continuous adaptation before conflict compels it to.
The Land Forces 2026 theme, rewiring armies for continual adaptation, recognises that military advantage increasingly depends on an institution’s capacity to evolve. Yet discussion often defaults to technology, capability acquisition and organisational reform. These focus on what the army acquires rather than how it adapts.
Continual adaptation isn’t the inevitable outcome of innovation. It requires an institution designed to recognise change, interpret its implications, make timely decisions, implement them and learn from the results – what I like to call ‘strategic fitness’.
Strategic fitness is to a military institution what combat fitness is to a soldier. Combat fitness enables soldiers to employ their skills under physical and mental pressure. Strategic fitness enables an institution to generate and regenerate military advantage as its environment changes. Without it, doctrine becomes outdated, technology loses its edge, force structures become mismatched to circumstances and innovation remains episodic.
Military institutions have traditionally adapted at different speeds during peace and war. Peacetime generally rewards stewardship, governance, deliberate capability development and carefully managed risk. War creates stronger incentives for initiative, experimentation, delegated authority and rapid change.
From the Western Front to Afghanistan, the Australian Army repeatedly evolved under operational pressure. The usual lesson is that armies innovate during war. A more useful conclusion is that conflict alters institutional incentives. It compresses decision windows, increases tolerance for calculated risk, makes failure visible and allows operational necessity to overcome barriers that previously slowed change.
War doesn’t guarantee successful adaptation, nor should the army import wartime risk tolerance wholesale into peacetime. The task is to reproduce the conditions that enable useful adaptation – short feedback loops, delegated authority, rapid learning and visible consequences – while preserving lawful governance, professional judgement and accountability.
Australia’s strategic circumstances no longer conform to a rhythm of extended peace interrupted by war. Strategic competition, technological disruption, cyber operations, economic coercion, information campaigns and military modernisation exert continuous pressure without crossing the threshold of declared conflict. The environment has changed, but many institutional processes retain assumptions developed when adaptation could proceed deliberately in peace and accelerate after war began.
The task is to achieve wartime rates of adaptation within systems designed largely for peacetime governance.
A strategically fit army must shorten and improve its adaption cycle repeatedly, not merely accelerate isolated activities. Faster procurement and experimentation are necessary but insufficient. Strategic fitness emerges when strategy, doctrine, force design, capability development, professional military education, command, training and organisational learning operate as an integrated adaptive system. Insight generated in one part of the army must be able to produce change across the others.
AI may alter command and targeting while autonomous systems reshape force design, geopolitical competition disrupts supply chains and advanced manufacturing creates new sustainment options. These pressures interact and amplify one another.
Strategic fitness should therefore be treated as a dimension of preparedness. Defence traditionally measures preparedness through readiness, force structure and capability. These remain essential but largely describe today’s army. Strategic fitness asks a different question: how quickly can the army become the force Australia needs for a threat, technology or operating problem that it didn’t anticipate?
The army should measure that capacity. Indicators could include the time between identifying a change and authorising a response; the time required to convert successful experimentation into doctrine, training or capability; and the speed with which lessons produce revised decisions. These measures would expose institutional latency and show whether the army is adapting.
Responsibility must also be clear. Strategic fitness cannot be the responsibility of only specialist teams. Senior leaders should regularly test the institutional adaptation cycle against emerging problems, identify where decisions are stalling and assign authority to remove those barriers. Major exercises should test not only whether the force can execute existing plans but whether the institution can recognise failure, redesign its approach and implement change.
Potential adversaries are learning, observing Australian responses and attempting to disrupt decision-making. The army must adapt not only faster than its environment changes, but faster and more effectively than its competitors while complicating their capacity to learn.
For more than a century, armies have measured advantage through industrial capacity, force structure and technological superiority. All remain necessary, but none is sufficient. Advantage may depend increasingly on how quickly a land force can regenerate combat effectiveness after circumstances, technology or adversaries invalidate its assumptions.
The army has repeatedly demonstrated that it can adapt under the pressures of conflict. This generation faces the harder task of institutionalising that capacity before war. Strategic fitness is the measurable capacity to convert change into operational advantage – and it’s the foundation of a continuously adaptive land force.
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