Fifty years after Tange, service chiefs have lost too much authority.

Jennifer Parker | 6 March 2026

*Originally published in The Strategist on 6 March 2026

Image: Rodney Braithwaite/Department of Defence.

Fifty years after the Tange reforms created the modern Australian Defence Force, Australia faces a structural problem that few are willing to confront: steady erosion of the service chiefs’ authority.

Over successive reviews and reorganisations, the chiefs have kept responsibility for generating, preparing and sustaining the Royal Australian Navy, Australian Army and Royal Australian Air Force. But they have progressively lost the authority needed for this. In an era described by our leaders as the most challenging strategic environment since World War II, this dilution of authority risks leaving Australia less prepared for crisis or conflict.

If the government is serious about structural reform, restoring meaningful authority to the service chiefs must be part of the conversation.

Defence Minister Richard Marles told The Australian’s Defending Australia conference in June that structural reform was coming, insisting everything was on the table to ensure Defence was fit for purpose. The government delivered in December, announcing a new Defence Delivery Agency and calling it the most consequential defence reform in 50 years. It is indeed significant. But the most consequential change of the past half century has been the progressive centralisation of authority away from the services themselves.

It was half a century ago that the Defence Force Reorganisation Act implemented the recommendations of the 1973 review by defence secretary Sir Arthur Tange. That reform abolished the separate departments of Navy, Army, Air Force and Supply, created a single Department of Defence and consolidated the services under what is now the chief of defence force, forming the Australian Defence Force.

The next major shift came with the 1997 establishment of Headquarters Australian Theatre, now Joint Operations Command. It greatly improved joint operations but also moved operational responsibility from the service chiefs to a joint commander. The chiefs were left responsible for generating, training and sustaining their forces but increasingly without the matching authority.

Almost every review since Tange has deepened centralisation. Among the most significant was the 2023 creation of the Military Personnel Division, which shifted career management and broader workforce issues to a joint three-star role, leaving the service chiefs with limited influence over their own people.

Many of these reforms were driven by a peacetime search for efficiency. But Australia is no longer in a business-as-usual environment. The most challenging strategic circumstances since WWII demand a force that is effective, not merely efficient.

A lesson from the war in Ukraine is that over-centralisation can become a serious liability, while decentralisation is a major source of resilience and adaptability.

Australia learnt this the hard way at the outbreak of WWII. In 1939, the government was forced to create a standalone Department of the Navy because the existing Defence Department could not expand the RAN fast enough and support national coordination efforts. This model may not be viable in 2025, but our own wartime experience shows that excessive centralisation does not work when rapid adaptation is required.

Authority is dispersed across Defence, and accountability for preparing the services is blurred. This only deepens the challenge of preparing the ADF for the real possibility of conflict in our region and, as the chief of defence force warned in June, the prospect of fighting from Australian soil.

Each service must rebuild its culture, workforce, capability and preparedness to meet the prospect of potential conflict, or a military crisis short of it. Only the service chiefs can provide that.

There is an additional national responsibility. In a crisis, the services are critical in managing national requirements, ports, airspace, coastal shipping and more. Such tasks are too vast to be managed fully by Joint Operations Command. They also demand domain expertise and clear leadership, but the continued erosion of the chiefs’ authority leaves them unable to meet that obligation.

This is not a call to return to the pre-Tange era or to move away from joint operations, both of which have brought important benefits. There is clear value in commonality and in centralising some elements of capability and workforce, but common processes do not require removing overall control from the service chiefs.

This is a call to examine our Defence structure, as Tange did in 1973, and ask whether it remains the most effective model for the challenges ahead. Within that structure, we must determine what role the service chiefs should play as heads of profession in preparing their forces and in supporting the nation during a broader security crisis.

This should include serious consideration of restoring four-star rank to the service chiefs, subordinate by function to the chief of defence force but clearly positioned above other groups, to re-establish authority over the forces they are charged to prepare. This would be consistent with the structures used by many of our key partners.

The Defence Delivery Agency is not the most significant reform in 50 years, but the willingness to rethink Defence at the scale proposed above would be. If we are serious about preparing for the challenges ahead, any structural reform must restore real authority to the service chiefs so they can build and shape their forces to be ready to fight.