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Geostrategic Perspectives: Securing Australia in a Fractured World

Oct 8
2 min read

"Air power, like every other instrument of defence, is only as durable as the national will behind it.” By Robbin Laird.


Professor Rory Medcalf opened the Sir Richard Williams Foundation's October 1 seminar on air combat mass and depth by declining to start with the threat. He started with the public.


Medcalf, who heads the National Security College at ANU, drew on a two-year consultation that included representative surveys of more than 20,000 Australians. The findings are stark. 89 percent expect AI-enabled attacks within five years. 87 percent expect a critical supply chain disruption. And 80 percent judge that a foreign military attack would have major or catastrophic consequences, the highest consequence rating of any threat tested.


Australians already believe they are entering an age of polycrisis. They are right to.

It is also a challenge for defence planners.


Australian planning long rested on a tripod of comfortable judgements: distance would protect the continent, Australia would keep a qualitative edge, and there would be a decade of warning time. Each leg is now weakening at once. Cyber, quantum, AI and hypersonics erode the barrier of geography. Chinese military modernisation erodes the qualitative edge. Warning time, in Medcalf's blunt phrase, has evaporated.


The more subtle point is what Australia actually fears. It is not simply invasion. It is permanently compromised sovereignty in China's coercive shadow: blockade, economic coercion, interference, disinformation and infrastructure sabotage used in combination. That is why Australia studies Europe's experience of Russian hybrid warfare so closely. Europe is, in his word, a laboratory for what could be waged in the Indo-Pacific.


For air power, the implication is significant. A force designed for a continent protected by distance and warning time is a different force from one designed to operate, sustain and regenerate under fire from home bases.


Mass, depth and reach are not only air force propositions. They are national propositions. They depend on aircraft and munitions, and equally on infrastructure, industry, civil resilience and a public that understands why it is being asked to invest.


Fighting depth begins well outside the hangar.




 
 
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