Origins
HTTP 308. Permanent Redirect. The old path doesn't work. We're the new one. 308 is led by people who have operated inside the environments we serve. Decisions are carried by the people closest to the build. That holds as the company grows.
Australians have a long history of expeditionary engagements, military and humanitarian. Disaster relief changed the way I see the world. Not through idealism, but through proximity to what happens when systems meet conditions they were never designed to survive.
I spent years watching organisations with overlapping mandates duplicate effort, undermine each other for funding, and perform for stakeholders instead of delivering for the people they claimed to serve. That wasn't cynicism. It was observation. And I couldn't watch any longer.
308 is an ecosystem for building and proliferating protective and defensive technologies, for people in and out of uniform, at home and abroad. The old structures were never going to produce that, so building an alternative wasn't a preference. It was essential for change that reaches further than any one company.
Everyone here builds.
308 stays small by design. Each person builds, deploys or runs something a client depends on, and there is no layer of people whose job is talking about the work. The company is founder-owned and pays its own way through delivery, so decisions stay close to the work and growth runs at the pace the work sets. Most of the people behind 308 are not published here, deliberately. Our people and partners operate where a name on a website carries real exposure, so names are shared where an engagement calls for them, in the room.
How PartnershipDNA worksWhere the thinking comes from.
Not endorsements. Sources. These changed how we build, and we expect you to have read some of them too.
“The greatest lesson of a nation’s history is that its fate lies in the sacrifice, held in the heart of its average men and women.”
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
1926–2022
“I and my people who have, ourselves, fought through many bitter years of struggle to maintain our freedom are deeply conscious of this, for we know from our own experience that peace must go hand in hand with freedom.”
Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said
1940–2020
“I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it’s because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, it’s because we all came from the sea.”
John F. Kennedy
1917–1963
“A democracy that concerns itself only with protecting and advancing individual rights will find itself in jeopardy, as rights will come into conflict with one another.”
Richard N. Haass
Former President, Council on Foreign Relations
“Rather than focusing on stability we should be focusing on resiliency — helping actors in the system develop tolerance for shocks from political, social, economic or security setbacks.”
David Kilcullen
Lieutenant Colonel, Australian Army
“I don’t believe you can see what’s beyond the edge unless you put your head over it. I’ve been doing that all my life — going over a boat or an inch away.”
Don McCullin
War Photographer
“Doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
Jim Mattis
26th Secretary of Defense