Beyond procurement: The industry transformation program inside the 2026 National Defence Strategy

The 2026 National Defence Strategy is often read as a buying plan — a refreshed Integrated Investment Program, an additional $53 billion over the decade, a longer list of capability priorities. Read that way, it misses the harder promise sitting underneath. The Strategy asks Australia to build a materially different defence industrial base in the same decade it expects to deliver from it. 

That is not procurement. That is transformation. 

Industry policy is security policy 

The 2026 Strategy elevates industrial capability to a strategic concern in language that leaves little room for interpretation. The opening line of its Defence Industry and Acquisition Reform chapter is unequivocal: industry policy is security policy. Defence industrial resilience now underpins National Defence, productivity, innovation and economic security. 

That framing is not rhetorical. The Strategy commits the Government to strengthening the resilience of Australia’s sovereign defence industrial base, building stronger and more diverse international industrial partnerships and weighting investment toward sovereign capabilities that can produce, adapt, sustain and replenish the most critical lethal systems and munitions. The war in Ukraine and conflicts in the Middle East have, in Defence’s own words, underlined the vast material requirements for modern warfare and the need for domestic industrial capability before the onset of a conflict. 

An industrial uplift at the scale of the strategy it supports 

The industrial targets match that strategic urgency. The Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance Enterprise is to scale domestic manufacture of munitions. A forthcoming 2026 Defence Industry Development Strategy will set Sovereign Defence Industrial Priorities and target the businesses and sectors most critical to producing them. The 2026 Naval Shipbuilding and Sustainment Plan will grow continuous shipbuilding and sustainment, and the conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered submarine enterprise has to be stood up end-to-end. The Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator and AUKUS Pillar II are to speed the translation of disruptive technology into operational capability. 

The export and co-production ambitions are just as substantial. Ghost Bat, Ghost Shark, the Heavy Weapons Carrier and the Jindalee Operational Radar Network have been named as key export priorities. In September 2025, Australia and the United States established a Cooperative Program Office to lead the Precision Strike Missile program, followed in October 2025 by a joint statement of intent with Lockheed Martin setting a pathway for co-development, co-production and co-sustainment of critical long-range fires and their component supply chains. The Global Supply Chain Program, the Australian Submarine Supplier Qualification Program and the Defence Industry Vendor Qualification Program are working to lift Australian small and medium businesses into the supply chains of major international primes. 

These are not acquisition line items. They are standing up new industries, reshaping existing ones and doing so in a national economy already competing for the same workforce, critical minerals and infrastructure. 

Transformation is not a procurement exercise 

The difference matters because the disciplines are different. A procurement succeeds when a contract is signed and a product is delivered to specification. A transformation succeeds when behaviour, capability and culture have shifted so that the new operating model is self-sustaining once the program closes. 

The 2026 Strategy’s reform agenda names the difference in so many words. It commits to reforming structures, processes, priorities and culture inside Defence, and underpins that work with three enterprise principles: simplification, workforce optimisation and digitisation. Culture is the tell. Any program that names culture explicitly has accepted that it is not only buying outputs — it is asking a system of organisations and people to work differently. 

Industrial uplift at this scale is a classic enterprise change program with unusual features: a national footprint, a long horizon and adversary-driven urgency. The 2026 Strategy is explicit that the lessons of Ukraine and the Middle East have been absorbed. 

A tripartite task 

The 2026 Strategy describes the delivery of Australia’s sovereign defence industrial base as a collaborative tripartite approach between government, industry, and workers and unions. That framing matters. It signals that the industrial transformation is an enterprise change exercise that sits across the economy, not a procurement exercise confined to the Defence portfolio. 

The practical consequence is that every major industrial program will cut across stakeholders well outside Defence. Primes, SMEs, state and territory governments, workforce and community groups, regulators and the Australian public all hold a share of the social licence industrial expansion needs. That licence is built deliberately, early and communicated consistently. It is not recovered cheaply once lost. 

 What enterprise change teaches us about industrial uplift 

Industrial uplift programs that endure share a small number of disciplines. Clarity of the target operating model — not just in capability outputs but in structure, accountability and behaviour — sits at the top. Segmented stakeholder engagement that maps audiences by consequence rather than demography is close behind. Then comes a benefits realisation approach that measures what actually changes in the field, not what was promised at contract signature. Sustaining all of it is a communication discipline that keeps a complex, multi-year story coherent across leadership transitions. 

These disciplines are not unique to Defence. What is unique to the 2026 moment is the combination of pace, scale and strategic consequence. That combination is what turns an investment plan into a transformation program. 

How Parbery can help 

At Parbery, our work across Defence, government and industry has focused on exactly this intersection — turning strategic intent into changed practice at scale. As organisations across the Defence enterprise scope the industrial transformation the 2026 Strategy now expects of them, we help clients: 

• Design the target operating model — translating strategy into structures, processes, governance and accountabilities that can actually deliver. 

• Lead enterprise change and transformation, embedding behavioural and cultural shifts alongside the technical uplift. 

• Embed benefits realisation, using toolkits aligned to the DTA’s Benefits Realisation Framework to measure and sustain outcomes rather than outputs. 

• Run stakeholder and communications strategy, building social licence across government, industry and the communities the transformation touches. 

• Provide project and program management with PRINCE2, PMBOK and Agile-certified practitioners who can hold complex industrial programs together end-to-end. 

If you would like to continue the conversation about building the capability to deliver the 2026 Strategy’s industry transformation agenda, email us at admin@parbery.com.au. 

An industry becomes a capability 

An industrial base is not a line on a balance sheet — it is a capability in its own right, and in the strategic environment described in the 2026 Strategy it is increasingly the capability on which all others depend. The question for leaders across the Defence enterprise is no longer whether the targets are ambitious enough. It is whether the transformation discipline is in place to meet them.