Appointed aide-de-camp to the Governor-General of Australia in 2003, Stockings graduated from Deakin with a Master of Education the same year and in 2004 was reposted to ADFA as a staff officer.

[8] While nearing the end of his doctorate, Stockings left the army and, in 2006, was appointed a lecturer in history and strategic studies at the University of New South Wales, Canberra.

[4] Following a series of edited volumes—Zombie Myths of Australian Military History (2010), Anzac's Dirty Dozen (2012) and, with John Connor, Before the Anzac Dawn (2013)—that sought to challenge or dispel dominant misconceptions in Australian military history, Stockings' next major research project delved into the Nazi German invasion of Greece during the Second World War with colleague Eleanor Hancock.

[5][7] More recent projects include Britannia's Shield (Cambridge University Press, 2015), an analysis of British imperial defence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and work on the International Force East Timor (INTERFET).

[11] By 2016 Stockings was an associate professor of history and deputy head of the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of New South Wales, Canberra.

The budget for the East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq project is much larger than that afforded to previous histories, though as Stockings notes the timeline is also "extremely tight" and the series subject to "firm governance frameworks".

The remit Stockings received from Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on accepting the appointment of Official Historian was clear that the history be delivered "by July 2022".

The authors have five years to complete their respective volumes, with Stockings granted an additional twelve months to edit the series prior to publication.

[19] In November 2019 it was reported that Stockings had threatened to resign as official historian due to his frustration over the large number of changes requested to the first volume on East Timor by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.