Five Aviators on the Way Ahead for Airpower
“If the platform is a node, the enterprise is the weapon.” By Robbin Laird.
At the Sir Richard Williams Foundation’s October 1 seminar in Canberra, three sessions on air combat mass and depth said more together than any one of them said alone.
Air Marshal Paul Lloyd spoke from the European theatre, where the RAF is resetting its combat air strategy around a war on its own continent. Air Commodore Jarrod Pendlebury and Wing Commander Chris McInnes made the national case for airpower. General Mark Kelly, former commander of US Air Combat Command, and Air Vice-Marshal (Ret’d) Steve Roberton took on what recent wars actually teach.
Each stood somewhere different. Each described a different layer of the same problem.
Read in sequence, they converge:
Control of the air is the foundation, but it is a means. Lloyd shows why airpower cannot be dispensed with. Pendlebury shows why its value to the nation exceeds the air battle itself.
Mass has to be affordable, and the economics are the strategy. A $6 million interceptor against an $80,000 drone is not a sustainable exchange. But as Kelly warns, cheap mass is getting better on both sides.
Range and depth are the same problem seen from two sides. “If it’s a 500 nautical mile tool for my 1,000-mile problem, I don’t need it.”
Connection decides who sees first. In a contested spectrum, autonomy is how a kill chain survives its own severing.
And Boyd’s order still holds: people, ideas, things.
What emerges is less about the next aircraft than about building an air force that can absorb loss, sustain tempo and regenerate combat power over a long fight across very long distances.
Airpower’s next generation will be defined less by a generation number than by whether it is an enterprise that can regenerate.
For Australia, that means hard questions. Can sustainment surge by an order of magnitude? Are crews trained for jamming and uncertainty before the first real mission? Can “more options, more places, more often” be turned into measurable requirements?
None of the three sessions claimed to answer them. Together, they made clear why they must be asked, and in what order.
Read the full analysis: https://defense.info/featured-story/2026/10/five-airmen-on-the-way-ahead-for-airpower/
