What lessons has Australia's military planners taken from Ukraine?

Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Australian-made and supplied vehicles "performed masterfully". Footage of Ukrainian soldiers driving the now iconic equipment - to the Ukrainians at least - into shell-damaged towns in the south and east of the country has become an indelible image of Ukraine's offensive pushback and Australia's contribution to it.

Ukraine is not using them the way the vehicles were conceptually designed, says John Blaxland, professor of international security and intelligence studies and former head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at ANU.

"In a battlefield where you have 155mm artillery shells raining down on you, and you can survive the experience, you're going to be happy with the kit," he says, and that has given the Ukrainians confidence to operate at speed.

"In good weather during summer they were going at a breakneck pace down roads and surviving Russian shelling in a way that had they been travelling in an open truck would have been a scene of carnage."

The Bushmaster's unique V-shaped hull deflects blast and provides ballistic protection, and it delivers what it promises in certain conditions, primarily on-road and with some off-road capacity, and made more versatile by the ability to equip it with a remotely operated weapons system.

Professor Blaxland says it has proven effective as a truck, but can't do everything or go everywhere that a tracked or eight-wheeler can. Soldiers wouldn't want to drive it through muddy conditions in the middle of a spring or autumnal offensive where the ground gets sloppy and difficult to cross. For ground forces that presents a tactical challenge because they become channelled to existing roads.

For the defensive needs that Australia will face, its armed forces will want more options, he says, like the LAND400 infantry fighting vehicles. The decision of which design the government will commission in Phase Three has this month been delayed again, but both are substantially more powerful, with more powerful turrets and armour protection for a higher intensity conflict.

The types of scenarios that the authors of the Defence Strategic Review will be considering must include Australia being called to defend its neighbours to the north from forceful coercion, Professor Blaxland says. Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, or even Malaysia or the Philippines are conceivable as being vulnerable to pressure to make concessions.

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"They'll be testing the waters, or as a preliminary move to essentially cut us off at the pass before a total crisis," he says. "We have F-35s to deter a would-be aggressor, but if deterrence fails we have to win."

Bullied neighbours will ask Australia for aid and any possible additional deterrent capabilities that it can offer them. As adaptive as the Ukrainians were with the Bushmasters, Professor Blaxland says Australia needs to offer its neighbours more when asking them to stand against Chinese coercion.

Australia will want to deploy Air Force's F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. To be useful at an extended range and maintain a degree of stealth, they will need to lily pad through the airfields in the north of Australia. The government can't afford to throw away such expensive aircraft so it will need to defend those airfields.

Professor Blaxland says all the adversary needs is a few 120mm mortars with precision-guided munitions to take out Australia's entirely fleet of F-35s with a special forces detachment. He likened the risk of Australia trying to defend airfields with insufficient forces and equipment to the fall of Ambon in WWII, so a prepared defence would need to be agile and equipment enough to control about 10 kilometres around a 3km-long runway.

"That's a honking big chunk of land that you need to defend, and in my estimation you don't want to do that with barefoot infantry running around just getting by on their boots on Bushmasters," he says.

"It's not good enough to have something almost as good as the adversary. It has to be as good, if not better, otherwise don't show up."

Another significant lesson from the Russian-Ukraine war relates to preparing for more than just the first 100 hours to six days of a conflict, says Professor Blaxland.

Serving officers and government's policy advisors have, for the entire lifetime, never had to contemplate a serious, long-term industrial scale conflict.

"We have not been prepared thinking about the need for a sustained tempo of military conflict for generations, and we have allowed ourselves to operate on a just-in-time rather than a just-in-case basis. That has left us vulnerable," he says.

Australia's stockpiles of convention munitions and the availability of longer-range precision missile systems has flared in public awareness in part due to warning bells ringing in Washington DC. Local stockpiles are very small, with nothing long range.

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Much of Australia's defence industry was sold off by government in decades past, with contracted arrangements put in place that have not been tested or resourced to maintain large stockpiles of weapons for the just-in-case scenario that Professor Blaxland says is increasingly becoming more likely as time passes.

"The lessons from Ukraine are, in part, that you cannot rely on precision munitions and your war stockpile to achieve victory if you only have a week's worth of supplies," he says.

"Because the idea that every war is like the Six Day War in Israel, the Gulf War, or Gulf War II, where you fight and it's over in 100 hours, it's an extremely risky proposition to plan on that basis."

Would Australia be ready for a remarkable heavy weight, industrial scale national response anytime in the near future? Government needs to contemplate that, Professor Blaxland says, because that's increasingly what it will be required.

But having a capability also does not mean Australia would need to use it for it to aid in protecting Australia's interest with deterring an adversary, and taking specific equipment and tactical lessons directly from Ukraine could also be risky, he says. No one can know the future, and when one nation comes up with a capability, invariably, a counter capability is developed.

As the Defence Strategic Review looks closely at long-range strike capability, it will be risky for the authors to take the lessons from past conflicts too literally.

"What seems like the most obvious thing all we need to do is get long range strike, and we'll be safe, we'll be good. Well, guess what? Almost all of our neighbors have robust special forces capabilities who do not care about the range of long-range missiles," Professor Blaxland says.

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Special forces operate in such a way to avoid being detected until the job is done, so a focus on long-range missiles will miss the short fight with the soldier with a laser-guided precision technology that can sneak up and rendered that strike capability redundant.

It's happened before with the UK's SAS taking out Argentinian capability in the Falklands, and Australia should be preparing for a similar risk if it chose to operate its F-35s out of Ambon, at the request of Indonesia.

It's a hypothetical, but one informed by Australia's military history, he says, where China or an adversarial country would deploy special forces to disable Australia's capabilities, be the laser designator for a long-range strike, or verify infrastructure to facilitate a raid.

"There's a spectrum of scenarios, you've got to hedge your bets. That's why you need a versatile range of capabilities."