When Necessity Outpaces Governance: Lessons from Kokoda for Cyberspace.

Kokoda offers more than reflection – it offers a warning. The campaign of 1942 unfolded at a moment when Australia’s strategic circumstances were defined by acute uncertainty, constrained choice, and the urgent need to hold ground while the nation mobilised for a wider war.

Situated along a narrow and muddy track through Papua New Guinea’s Owen Stanley Range, Kokoda was never intended to become a decisive battlefield. Yet, in the absence of preferred forces and ideal conditions, the defence of that approach fell initially to under-strength and poorly equipped Militia units – most notably the 39th Battalion, later reinforced by elements of the 53rd Battalion. Operating with limited preparation, inadequate logistics, and scant situational awareness – and in spite of early failures in preparation, sustainment, and command clarity – these citizen-soldiers absorbed pressure, adapted rapidly, and bought critical time until the arrival of Australian Imperial Force formations from the battle-hardened 21st Brigade, recently returned from the Middle East via Australia.

The Japanese decision to advance overland toward Port Moresby was not accidental. It followed the failure of their seaborne invasion after the Battle of the Coral Sea, which denied them maritime access and forced a northern approach across the mountains. Australian and Allied actions – including early deception and denial measures in the Goodenough Island area – further contributed to Japanese uncertainty regarding Allied intentions and dispositions. These measures did not determine the campaign, but they reinforced friction and delay at a critical moment, amplifying the effects of terrain, logistics, and time.

Doctrinal perfection or mature governance did not shape the Australian response. Born of necessity, it rested instead on small units demonstrating resilience, exercising initiative, and operating effectively in ambiguity. Kokoda was endured not because the system was optimised, but because junior leaders and soldiers acted within intent while formal structures lagged reality.

What Kokoda illustrates is not simply the overcoming of adversity, but a broader professional dynamic that recurs across time and domains. When faced with existential threat and constrained options, military organisations demonstrate a remarkable capacity for flexibility. They tolerate deviation from preferred structures, privilege judgement over process, and accept improvised solutions in the service of survival. Once the immediate pressure eases, however, there is a natural tendency to revert toward familiar models of organisation, control, and assurance – seeking to normalise bureaucratic structures as a means of restoring order.

This reversion is neither malicious nor irrational. It reflects a desire to restore predictability, accountability, and coherence. Yet in doing so, organisations can unintentionally obscure – or undervalue – the very initiative and adaptability that made stabilisation possible. The risk is not that risk is removed, but that it is denied, mistaking the restoration of process for the restoration of capability.

A contemporary parallel can be found in Ukraine’s initial response to Russia’s 2022 invasion. While Ukraine’s circumstances are not directly transferable to the ADF, they provide a useful klaxon without us having to endure the same pain. Facing a materially superior adversary, Ukraine did not wait for settled doctrine, fully harmonised governance, or optimised force design. Instead, it employed asymmetry out of necessity – adapting commercial drones for reconnaissance and strike, decentralising decision-making, exploiting open-source intelligence at speed, mobilising civilian expertise into organised resistance, and integrating information effects directly with battlefield action. These measures were not the product of institutional completeness, but of urgency. They bought time, imposed disproportionate costs, and shaped international perception while more formal structures caught up. As with Kokoda, effectiveness preceded assurance; adaptation came before optimisation.

This dynamic is particularly evident in emerging capability areas such as cyberspace and the information environment, where uncertainty is not episodic but persistent. These domains are characterised by rapid technological change, contested narratives, compressed decision cycles, and the absence of settled doctrine or mature governance frameworks. Capability is often advanced through limited pilots, informal networks, and practitioner judgement well before workforce models, assurance mechanisms, or formal command arrangements are fully established.

This is not an Army-only challenge, but one shared across the ADF. For the Australian Army, whose core competence remains the close and contested application of force, the lesson is particularly stark: manoeuvre in the information environment – shaping perceptions, protecting decision-making, and influencing behaviour – increasingly occurs alongside physical manoeuvre, and often at the small-team or practitioner level before it is fully codified in doctrine or structure.

This tension is most visible where capability is still forming – where pilots, trials, and practitioner-led innovation must operate ahead of the frameworks intended to govern them.

During periods of ambiguity, Defence draws heavily on this adaptability. As confidence grows and attention shifts toward consolidation, however, the impulse to reassert process and normalise structures can arrive faster than the organisational understanding required to preserve what enabled progress in the first place. Adaptation is absorbed; discretion is constrained; initiative becomes something to be justified rather than enabled.

As emerging capabilities begin to stabilise, the challenge shifts from adaptation to governance. This transition is necessary – but it is also fraught. Governance frameworks, assessment boards, interdepartmental committees, and assurance processes frequently lag behind the realities they are intended to regulate. When this occurs, there is a risk of mistaking procedural activity for progress, particularly where decision pathways and accountability remain unclear. Stability is mistaken for readiness; structure becomes a proxy for capability.

The challenge is not to reduce governance, but to ensure it remains proportionate, adaptive, and anchored to operational effect – protecting initiative rather than displacing it.

In the absence of immediate threat, Defence risks allowing administrative systems designed to support the profession of arms to invert their relationship with military judgement, subtly mediating – and at times constraining – necessity through peacetime models of assurance, compliance, and risk avoidance rather than the demands of contested reality and deterrence. These effects are rarely the product of intent, but of accumulation.

The consequence, if unmanaged, is a quiet erosion of trust. Initiative is consumed but not protected. Effort is repeated without confidence that outcomes will differ. Discretionary labour is expended into processes whose pathways remain opaque. Experienced practitioners learn to ration their effort – not from a lack of commitment, but from professional self-preservation. The force remains functional, but less adaptive, and increasingly reliant on compliance rather than judgement.

History offers cautionary examples of what occurs when peacetime normalisation proceeds unchecked. In the interwar period, the United States Navy progressively replaced experienced submariners with officers selected more for conformity to peacetime career models than for warfighting judgement. Submarine operations became safer, more administratively tidy, and more predictable – but also less innovative. When war returned, capability had to be relearned under fire. The failure was not governance itself, but the subordination of professional judgement to systems designed for steadiness rather than contest.

Australian naval history offers a useful counterpoint. When HMAS Sydney, under Captain John Collins, arrived unexpectedly at the Battle of Cape Spada in 1940 – a presence that decisively shifted the engagement – Admiral Cunningham later asked how the ship had come to be at the right place at the right time. Collins replied that Providence had guided him. Cunningham is recorded as smiling and responding that, in future, Collins could continue to take his orders from Providence.

The exchange mattered not for its wit, but for what followed – or rather, what did not. Cunningham did not seek retrospective justification, tighten control, or constrain future initiative. He recognised that judgement exercised within intent, once validated by outcome, required no institutional correction.

The lesson from Kokoda, and from moments such as Cape Spada, is not that governance is misguided, nor that consolidation should be avoided. Risk must be managed; capability must be assured. But mature military organisations are distinguished by how deliberately they manage the transition from necessity to normalisation – accepting friction and setbacks as inherent, adjusting rather than over-correcting, and preserving the initiative that enables learning under pressure.

For contemporary defence organisations operating in cyberspace and the information environment, this lesson is particularly salient. These domains are enduring arenas of competition, where manoeuvre is cognitive as well as physical, and where deterrence often rests on credibility built through action rather than the appearance of control. Forces do not fail because they forget how to adapt in crisis; they falter when peacetime habits erode the judgement, trust, and initiative upon which credible deterrence ultimately depends.

Kokoda reminds us that those operating outside an organisation’s preferred model often do holding the line. The enduring question is whether the profession of arms remembers that lesson – and acts upon it – before necessity removes the luxury of choice.