Australia's military needs to be ready to fight large-scale conventional land wars across a world that "surprises us and sees us in environments which we might not have expected", army Chief Angus Campbell says.
Despite the trend of the past two decades in which the army's work has been dominated by counter-insurgency, peacekeeping, training of local troops and heavy use of special forces for combat, Lieutenant-General Campbell has said it would be "incautious" to think there won't be larger conflicts in future.
In one of his first interviews since taking up the role of Chief of Army five months ago, the government's former border protection supremo also predicted the mission in Iraq will evolve and that "we're going to be there for a little while yet".
General Campbell, who has taken command as the world eyes a number of flashpoints warily, said that with Australia's broad interests and engagement across the globe, its defence force needed to be ready for a variety of missions.
"Where might we be in the future? … I think that each time we try to predict a narrow definitional space of where the army will operate … we are surprised by the way in which life and the world surprises us and sees us in environments which we might not have expected," he told Fairfax Media.
"We have in the past and I think it would be incautious to believe in the future that we won't be involved in more substantial conflicts."
On the mission in Iraq, where Australia has more than 300 regular army troops training local forces and about 80 commandos advising and assisting, General Campbell said the mission could evolve as it has in Afghanistan, where Australian troops remain 14 years after the US-led invasion in 2001.
"I'm going to acknowledge we're going to be there [in Iraq] for a little while yet. The form might modulate and that form [will be] driven by the nature of the operational environment, the coalition setting … and Australia's government and people's view of how we might support [the Iraqi government]," he said.
"If you look from the start of our presence in Afghanistan to today, you see evolutions of that form."
Many analysts regard the current period as the most dangerous in decades, with the Middle East disintegrating, heightened maritime tensions in Asia and an emboldened Russia, to name just a few flashpoints.
General Campbell said his job of raising, training and sustaining the army, in conjunction with the navy and air force, was to give the government the best future options in how it deploys force.
His major priority in modernising the army for all possible future conflicts was to ensure it was "digitised in a networked force" in which high-tech communications mean soldiers can see everything around them and talk to comrades and allies anywhere in the battlespace.
"Our soldiers are more aware, more able to protect themselves and more able to be effective on their missions."
This will be seen most potently in the Land 400 program, a planned new fleet of armoured fighting vehicles that will be highly computerised and connected to other high-tech defence hardware.
General Campbell's predecessor, David Morrison, expressed concern that army programs such as Land 400 could get squeezed between big-ticket items such as the navy's new submarines and the air force's Joint Strike Fighters.
But General Campbell said he was "very comfortable that the army is resourced for its needs and that more broadly the ADF has a very exciting modernisation pathway".
