Summary: This article argues that Iran’s success in denying access to the Strait of Hormuz through cheap, autonomous systems exposes a strategic lesson Australia cannot ignore. Like Iran, Australia is a middle power whose security depends on controlling complex littoral waters and chokepoints, yet it relies heavily on a small number of expensive, alliance‑dependent platforms. This creates vulnerability, slow adaptation, and limited resilience. The piece contends Australia needs sovereign, scalable autonomous maritime capabilities to secure its northern approaches and achieve genuine strategic autonomy rather than deferred dependence.

Australia's Hormuz Moment.

Iran's asymmetric playbook in the Persian Gulf holds a mirror to Australia's strategic geography – and its strategic choices.

Iran and Australia share almost nothing in culture, politics, or bilateral ties. However, they occupy a surprisingly similar geostrategic position. Both are middle powers with considerable regional influence, both have extensive maritime geography, and thus both have a deep interest in controlling the maritime approaches to their territory. Both face the potential of conflict against a great power adversary that holds conventional military advantages neither can directly counter. And both are realising, or should be realising, that autonomous maritime systems provide an effective solution to their common strategic challenge.

The difference is that Iran has made its choice and demonstrated the results. Australia is still deciding.

A Middle Power in a Contested Ocean

Australia's strategic geography is remarkable. Our island continent is surrounded by oceans, sits astride some of the world's most important maritime chokepoints, and has jurisdiction over an Exclusive Economic Zone larger than the continent itself. Its northern approaches span an archipelagic environment of incredible complexity: thousands of islands, shallow seas, and narrow waterways. These features are both Australia's greatest defence asset and its biggest surveillance challenge.

Ninety-nine percent of Australia's international exports by volume are transported by sea. The same percentage of its internet traffic also travels through undersea cables. The country's economic survival relies entirely on freedom of navigation in its surrounding waters – yet, throughout most of the post-war era, Australia has largely outsourced the defence of those waters to the US Navy and the assumptions underpinning the ANZUS alliance.

That assumption is under serious stress. The Indo-Pacific strategic environment has evolved more rapidly than Australian defence policy has adapted, with great power rivalry transforming the region in ways that seemed fanciful a decade ago. Washington's strategic focus is contested across multiple theatres, and domestic politics have introduced variables into alliance reliability that would once have been unthinkable. Australia's 2023 Defence Strategic Review named 'strategic autonomy' as a national objective for the first time, explicitly recognising that reliance on alliance support as a substitute for sovereign capability is no longer a viable strategic position. It is worth asking, with urgency, what strategic autonomy actually requires.

The Cost of Exquisite Capability

Australia's current approach to maritime security relies on what might be called 'exquisite irreplaceable capability' – highly sophisticated, extraordinarily expensive military hardware, produced in limited numbers, and almost entirely dependent on the US for technology, supply chains, intellectual property, and political will to operate and maintain. The AUKUS nuclear submarine programme is the clearest example: a genuinely transformative long-term investment, but one that will not produce operationally meaningful numbers until the 2040s at the earliest, built around platforms costing tens of billions of dollars each, with core technology remaining under US control at every stage of the programme.

This isn't an argument against AUKUS – nuclear submarines offer a level of deterrence that no other platform can match. However, it is a discussion about strategic balance and risk. A defence posture reliant on a small number of sophisticated, US-dependent platforms have inherent vulnerabilities that are precisely the kind Iran has learned to exploit. Losing even one platform would be a significant strategic blow. Small fleets lead to inevitable capability gaps and put intense pressure on maintenance schedules. Long acquisition cycles mean the force is tailored to meet threats from the past, rather than current or future challenges.

Iran, by contrast, has chosen to invest in mass, resilience, and redundancy. Its distributed approach disperses capability so broadly that no single strike can decisively degrade it. Its autonomous systems are inexpensive enough to lose, numerous enough to overwhelm defences, and simple enough to be produced domestically without foreign dependency. When the US claimed it had ‘literally obliterated’ Iran's navy, Iran's asymmetric maritime campaign continued unabated. The capability that mattered had not been affected, because it is the kind of capability that conventional strike packages are not designed to target.

Australia's Northern Approaches

Consider Australia's strategic geography through the same lens as Hormuz. The Torres Strait – 150 kilometres wide, shallow, dotted with islands – is Australia's most constrained maritime chokepoint. The Timor Sea, the Arafura Sea, and the intricate archipelago to Australia’s north make up a vast, shallow, and mostly undersurveilled littoral zone stretching across thousands of kilometres of Australia's most critical maritime approaches.

Now, consider the urgent question that the Hormuz conflict raises: if Australia faced a hostile maritime power trying to challenge these waters – or simply trying to pass through unnoticed – what ongoing awareness and asymmetric response capabilities does Australia have? What means are at Australia's disposal to impose costs, sow uncertainty, and make access to its approaches strategically costly for a potential adversary?

The honest answer, for now, is quite limited. Australia definitely has some of the best-trained maritime personnel in the world and a troublingly small number of capable conventional platforms. However, what’s lacking is the kind of coherent, distributed, autonomous, persistent, sovereign-built littoral capability that Iran has shown can achieve strategic denial at a fraction of the cost of the conventional systems that currently dominate Australian defence spending. ‘Pound for pound’, Australia’s capabilities might be world class, but quantity still has an undeniable quality all of its own.

The Sovereign Capability Imperative

There is a deeper issue here than just operational capability choices. It concerns the very nature of sovereignty. Any nation that relies solely on an ally for its technology, supply chains, and intellectual property to support its defence capabilities is effectively surrendering its sovereignty. In Australia’s case, if our ally’s priorities change – if, for example, Washington decides the Indo-Pacific must compete with other urgent demands, or that technology transfer should be limited for domestic industrial or political reasons – Australia's defence capability becomes dependent on decisions made in foreign capitals by other governments accountable to different electorates. The answer is not to abandon alliances. They remain strategically valuable and should be deepened where they genuinely serve Australian interests. The answer is to build a genuine sovereign foundation beneath our alliance network that compliments it. Australian-designed, Australian-built, Australian-sustained capability that Australia controls entirely; capabilities that Australian industry understands, that can be scaled and adapted by Australian decision-makers.

In the autonomous maritime domain, this is not only achievable with mature and commercially proven equipment, that equipment is currently available. What has been lacking is the strategic will to prioritise sovereign autonomous capability at scale, and the decision to collaborate with Australian companies capable of delivering it.