Unprepared: Australia in an Age of Chinese Power
Australia is entering the most dangerous strategic period it has faced since the Second World War. China is conducting the largest military buildup since 1945. The alliance that has underwritten Australian security for seventy years is under strain. And Australia, one of the wealthiest nations on earth, cannot fuel its own military for a month, cannot manufacture the missiles it would need to survive a week of serious combat, and spends less on defence as a share of its economy than almost any comparable nation facing a comparable threat.
Unprepared is the prosecution case for national transformation.
Written not as an academic survey or a policy paper but as a sustained argument addressed to the Australian public, the book begins with the threat and does not look away. It documents the PLA's expansion in specific detail. It makes the confronting case that Australian iron ore exports materially funded the military buildup now aimed at Australian sovereignty. It audits the Australian Defence Force with the unflinching honesty the institution deserves and finds a force built for somebody else's war.
From that diagnosis, the book builds a programme. A denial doctrine that makes Australia's northern approaches lethal to any adversary at costs no rational power would pay. A three-tier submarine force combining nuclear attack boats, eighteen to twenty-four conventional submarines, and hundreds of autonomous undersea vehicles. Twenty coastal missile batteries. A forward base at Manus Island and a Pacific Compact that permanently secures 4.5 million square kilometres of strategic ocean. An amphibious brigade capable of honouring the treaty commitments Australia has already signed. Defence spending at five per cent of GDP, funded through a Norwegian-style resource revenue architecture that captures the tens of billions Australia currently surrenders every year. Nuclear power. Sovereign refining. A rebuilt industrial base. A national service programme. And a pro-natal population policy targeting forty million Australians.
Every element is costed. Every element is tested against twelve divergent future scenarios from American withdrawal to artificial superintelligence. The programme is not a wish list. It is an integrated fiscal, industrial, energy, and military transformation designed to make Australia a credible major middle power capable of defending itself, sustaining itself, and setting the terms of engagement in its own region.
The window is closing. Delay is not neutral. This book is the argument for acting before the choices run out.
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