Australia’s strategic thinking, increasingly focused on deterrence, has yet to distinguish the conditions that make deterrence effective from the framework through which Australia intends to implement it. While a 6C-4D deterrence framework is memorable, many of the words in it are already established in deterrence doctrinal use in the US, Britain and NATO, and these allies and partners do not group them as a single construct because they address fundamentally different functions of deterrence implementation. The four Ds address a third analytical component of deterrence: the military power that can be brought in support of deterrence effects. This analytic clarity is critical for future implementation of a deterrence framework. Deterrence is an imprecise concept, and denial lacks universal agreement – and the same goes for collective deterrence.