The 2026 Defence Industry Development Strategy (Australia) sets out seven sovereign priorities; from shipbuilding and munitions to autonomous systems and battlespace awareness; backed by an expanded $250 million industry grants program and a new Defence Industry Hub for small and mid-tier suppliers. That sovereign ambition reaches into ICT too: Defence's own Digital Strategy names a thriving sovereign ICT industrial base as one of three enduring priorities, alongside a best-in-class workforce and best-in-class global platforms. But growth is colliding with some constraints.
Australia's Defence Digital Strategy and Roadmap 2025 commits to a rolling three-year, cloud-only transformation of its Protected-and-below ICT estate: multicloud migration across hyperscalers, a Zero Trust identity model, and an enterprise-wide ERP rebuild. Generative and agentic AI adoption is now on that roadmap too, moving from pilot to embedded use.
None of this happens without industry though: modernising a technology estate this large, this fast and this securely depends on partners who can deliver digital and data modernisation, secure system integration and cleared delivery capability at Defence's pace - not as a back-office function, but as core to whether capability lands on time and on budget.
