Building Mass with Industry: Industrial Capacity Is Combat Power

“It’s not an industry problem; it’s a combat power problem.” By Robbin Laird.

At the Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar on October 1, Air Vice Marshal (Retd.) Robert Denney of Northrop Grumman made an argument that cuts against how most air forces spend their money.

Denney spent 33 years in the RAAF, including as Head of Air Force Capability and Head of Force Integration. He says the tacticians, himself included in his day, have been optimizing the wrong part of the problem.

His case starts with history. Industrialization turned war from a contest of tactical brilliance into an economic contest decided by industrial output. Clausewitz wrote just as that shift began, so strategy inherited a blind spot.

The air domain is where this bites hardest. On land, a nation can hand a soldier a rifle and generate crude mass. An air force cannot improvise an airframe.

Denney’s diagram of a war looks like an ECG trace. There is an opening surge, then a long grind. In the grind, what sets your combat effect is industrial capacity: the rate at which you can replace what an enemy destroys.

The implication is uncomfortable. In a resource-constrained budget, investment in the peak is investment taken from the grind. Readiness is usually measured by the height of the peak. Denney says to measure the area under the curve.

For Australia, the reality check is stark. Replacing a modern, high-technology aircraft in a reasonable time frame is unlikely. Planners also should not count on allies having the capacity, the willingness, or the means to deliver replacements at scale.

My reading is that this complicates the “exquisite versus intelligent mass” debate. The case for lower-cost, more producible systems is not just about cost per aircraft. It is about what a national industrial base can regenerate under fire. A kill web that depends on a few irreplaceable nodes inherits their fragility.

A fleet is a snapshot. A regenerative enterprise is a rate.

The hardest part of the message is political: accepting a less sharp spear today in exchange for a deeper force later.

The question is not whether Australia can fight tonight.

It is whether it can fight night after night, week after week, month after month.

Read the full analysis: https://defense.info/featured-story/2026/10/building-mass-with-industry-industrial-capacity-is-combat-power/