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Combat Depth, Not Just Mass: Collaborative Combat Aircraft and the Australian Industrial Base

Oct 14
2 min read

“In 1937, John Curtin argued that Australia’s defence must lie in aviation. Ninety years later, the country is having the same conversation with different technology.” By Robbin Laird.


At the Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar in Canberra on 1 October, a panel on collaborative combat aircraft and Australian industry made an argument that cuts against the popular debate.


The popular picture is simple. Buy large numbers of cheap uncrewed platforms because you expect to lose many of them.


It is not the movie Australia is in.


My latest analysis follows the panel’s reasoning from John Conway, WGCDR Chris McInnes and Jeremy Feldhahn of Boeing Defence Australia. Their position is that CCAs, or autonomous collaborative platforms, are valuable as combat depth, not disposable mass.


Australia’s strategy is denial. It calls for persistence, options for commanders and coverage across an archipelago with a vast sea and air volume to defend. The panel proposed a different vocabulary:

  • Reach, not just range: how fast a force arrives and what it delivers on arrival.

  • Coverage: reach sustained over time. A strike off the east coast on Monday is something several parts of the ADF can manage. Repeating it in the Indian Ocean on Wednesday is something only air power can do.

  • Cost per effect, not unit price: a multi-million-dollar platform that protects a crewed aircraft worth a hundred million, and achieves the effect, beats a cheap drone that achieves nothing.


CCAs are additive. They replace nothing. So the real constraint is not whether the technology works. It is whether institutions can absorb something new, and whether an industrial base can design, build and adapt these systems at speed.

The industrial argument was the most developed of the session. Nobody argued for a standing aerospace army funded in peacetime. The argument was for a kernel: the skills and people who can scale when it counts. Australia built about 2,500 combat aircraft in the Second World War with a largely untrained workforce. MQ-28 now has at least 125 active suppliers, roughly 70 per cent of investment staying in Australian industry, and several suppliers who had never worked in aerospace.


The principle is to choose your dependencies rather than have them chosen for you. The unresolved problem is that Australian practice funds acquisition and sustainment but has no real R&D line. Without one, the depth the panel wants is hard to build or renew.


The question is not how many platforms Australia can buy.


It is whether Australia is building the enterprise behind them.





 
 
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