Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics, General Omar Bradley once said.
You can buy all the frigates, F-35s and Ghost Shark submarines you like, but none of them move without fuel, and Australia doesn't have any resilience here, as we've seen play out. Roughly 90% of Australia's liquid fuel demand is met by imports, down from near self-sufficiency in 2000 when eight domestic refineries supplied 98% of demand. Today, just two refineries remain, covering 17 to 20% of consumption. Current stockholdings sit at approximately 30 days, still largely below the International Energy Agency's 90-day benchmark we routinely flout. Australia is the worst positioned of the IEA's 27 net oil importing members, who average 141 days of cover.
The ADF itself is not insulated, it draws from the same commercial import chain. Historical consumption figures are sobering: the first five months of INTERFET operations in Timor-Leste burned 2.79 million litres of jet fuel and 3.72 million litres of diesel, a single 2015 Australian Army brigade exercise consumed roughly 40,000 litres per day, and RAAF estimates put a single combat aircraft squadron at roughly 5 million litres over three weeks of high intensity operations. Meanwhile, ASPI has warned RAAF Darwin holds just 12 million litres of jet fuel and RAAF Tindal 14 million, days, not weeks, of sustainment under pressure.
Here's the quiet part out loud: an adversary doesn't even need to fight us. They need to make a few phone calls. Lean on a few Asian refiners, spook a few oil tanker insurers, or conduct some interference operations in strategic areas, and the tankers simply don't sail. Within weeks the fuel gauge on the entire country, hospitals, supermarket freight, and every jet on the tarmac ticks toward empty. The National Defence Strategy answers this existential chokepoint with A$4.8 billion for fuel resilience inside a A$425 billion headline. That's roughly one cent in the dollar to insure against the one scenario that renders the other ninety nine cents inert.
In the strategic board game of Risk, Australia is in a very precarious position indeed.
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