Reading the 2026 Defence Industry Development Strategy: What It Means for the Governance of Complex Projects

Jul 12
5 min read

The 2026 Defence Industry Development Strategy does something we haven't seen a Defence industry policy document do before. It treats project management, program management and commercial capability not as supporting functions that sit beneath the “real” work of building ships and aircraft, but as strategic national capabilities in their own right.

That is a meaningful shift. For years, the conversation about defence delivery has been dominated by platforms and technologies — what we build, and how much of it we can build here. The 2026 Strategy keeps all of that, but it adds something: an explicit recognition that the ability to govern and deliver complex undertakings is itself a sovereign capability, and one that has to be deliberately grown. You can see it in the detail — continuous capability development, minimum viable contracting, adaptive assurance, and a new Defence Delivery Agency built around clearer accountability. Read together, these are not equipment-buying reforms. They are an admission that national capability now emerges from connected systems of systems, not from discrete, well-bounded projects.

We think that recognition is right. It also opens up a question the Strategy raises but doesn’t quite answer — and it’s a question worth sitting with, because how we answer it shapes what “capability” and the governance that underpins it actually mean over the next decade.

The reflection: tensions are not always risks

Here is what stands out when you read the Strategy through a governance lens. It is full of forces pulling in opposite directions.

Speed versus assurance. Move fast enough to matter, but certify thoroughly enough to be safe. Requirements versus cost and schedule — the ambition of what we want against the reality of what we can afford and when. Standardisation versus domain-specific need. Self-reliance versus alliance dependence. Continuous evolution versus the stability that lets people plan. The Strategy does not hide these; it is built on them.

The conventional instinct is to treat tensions like these as risks — problems to be resolved, closed out, engineered away. Pick a side, settle the trade-off, move on.

We would offer a different reading. In genuinely complex environments, these tensions are not defects in the plan. They are permanent features of the terrain. A program that appears to have “resolved” the tension between speed and assurance has usually not resolved it at all — it has simply pushed it out of view, where it stops being visible until it resurfaces as a failure. The tension did not go away. The early warning did.

This is the shift we think matters most. Governance tensions are better understood as signals than as risks. A live, unresolved tension between two legitimate goals is information — it tells you where the environment is changing, where assumptions are under strain, where a decision made twelve months ago may no longer hold. Governance that stays sensitive to those signals adapts earlier than governance that suppresses them in the name of a clean plan.

What this asks of capability

If tensions are signals rather than defects, then the capability question changes shape.

The Strategy is right to ask how we grow project and program management capability. But the harder question sitting underneath it is not whether we can manage projects more efficiently and whether governance can hold two competing goals in view without prematurely collapsing one into the other, and act when the balance shifts.

That is a different capability from the one most project training develops. Traditional project management is very good at controlling: defining the scope, baselining the plan, tracking variance, and closing the risk. Those disciplines remain essential, and nothing here replaces them. But they are built for environments where the destination is known and the path can be specified in advance. The environment the Strategy describes is not that environment. It rewards a different posture: reading interdependence, sitting with ambiguity, and adapting as the system reveals itself.

This is the capability gap the Strategy implies without quite naming. Not a shortage of technical project managers. A shortage of people and governance structures capable of leading through paradoxes.

A capability that can be built

None of this is innate. The capabilities the Strategy reaches for — diagnosing complexity, reading feedback loops and interdependencies, working through ambiguity rather than around it — can be taught, and we spend a good deal of our time teaching them. Our capability-building arm sits at the centre of these critical needs. Topics and training programs focused on complex project management, systems thinking, and project governance, designed for practitioners who will lead in environments where traditional linear approaches are insufficient. The consistent lesson is that the hardest capability to develop is not technical. Most practitioners can already build a schedule and run a risk register. What takes longer is learning to diagnose root causes rather than symptoms, and to treat surprise as information about the system rather than as a failure of the plan.

That is the capability the Strategy implies without quite naming, and it is one the defense industry needs.

Built with a community

Our thinking is never done alone. It is shaped by a community of organisations contributing to the practice of complex project governance. We acknowledge the remarkable work done by everyone in this community, and specifically those operating within our ecosystem — ICCPM, Realising-Potential, P3GQA, Round Table Consulting, and ASC Training & Development among them — alongside the universities, professional bodies and practitioners advancing the same questions. Each brings something distinct to a field that no single organisation defines.

The next step

The 2026 Strategy has done something genuinely important. It has identified project, program, and commercial capabilities as strategic, and it has accurately described an environment defined by complexity, interdependence, and continuous change. What it stops just short of saying is what that environment asks of us: not simply better project management, but governance and leadership able to stay steady when the plan and the reality diverge.

That is the door the Strategy has opened. Walking through it is the work of the coming decade.

About the Author

John Al Khateeb is the Founder and Managing Director of INMAA Advisory, a research-led company helping organisations strengthen governance, navigate complexity, and equip their people to manage complex projects with greater confidence and rigour.

With more than 20 years of experience across project delivery, program leadership and management consulting, John has worked with clients across a wide range of industries, including defence, engineering, retail, manufacturing, and education.

John is an active member of multiple prestigious and professional organisations, including the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD), the Project Management Institute (PMI), the International Centre for Complex Project Management (ICCPM), and others in the field of complex project governance, management, and systems thinking, and their application.