Adaptability is crucial if Western military theoretical and procedural frameworks are to keep up with the burgeoning challenges of contemporary political warfare.

The world is not neat. International competition is intensifying across all elements of national power including multi-instrument statecraft below the threshold of war. We need mental models to think simply about complex challenges, but that do not make us lose sight of our multi-faceted and changing world.

Mental models help our thinking to creatively apply force and craft durable and comprehensive strategies. We need to lift our thinking, and our doctrine, out of the peace-war mental model and into one that acknowledges constant competition and its temporal conditions of cooperation and conflict.

The purpose of this task was to encourage students to consider ethical themes throughout the package, engage in focussed debate with their syndicate group and synthesise their discussions into a concise, peer reviewed argument.

This paper considers the importance of governance to the ability for the ADF to conduct mission command based operations. This examines the criticality of trust to the success of this operational concept and therefore the role governance will play in establishing trust in autonomous systems.

Our fundamental ideas about mobilisation are being challenged under the impact of the IT revolution. Impacting all of us, this is an area deserving our close attention.

As technological advances increasing automate the control of weapons, it is timely to review the skills we need in our warfare professionals. Their core skills will increasingly be maintaining SA and making decisions in confusing and evolving circumstances. We need to ensure the ‘science’ and ‘art’ of warfare are balanced.

Over the last few years, the subject of gaming has returned to the mainstream of professional military education around the world. Here, Darren Huxley reflects on how the Australian War College is using a common commercial board game, Diplomacy, to deepen its student's pursuit of strategic acumen.