Mass without depth is brittle
Last week the Sir Richard Williams Foundation took up a question Australia's air power debate often skips. What does sufficient air combat mass and depth look like for the Indo-Pacific, and is the country building it? By Robbin Laird.
For eighteen months the Foundation's seminars have focused on "fight tonight," the readiness to compete this afternoon and win tomorrow, with 2027 as the planning milestone. This seminar stepped back to first principles. Readiness tells you what a force can do now. Mass and depth tell you what it can keep doing once the fight is no longer short, and once the adversary has had a vote.
The debate usually turns to the Middle East or Ukraine. As Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin (Retd) noted, those theaters offer lessons but are not the Indo-Pacific. He pointed to George Kenney's wartime reports instead. The technology has changed, but the basics are still there: distance, logistics, basing and unforgiving geography.
Wing Commander Sally Knox, Commanding Officer of No. 6 Squadron, framed the day. Her point was that this is "not simply a conversation about whether air force needs more aircraft." Combat mass is a whole system: platforms, weapons, people, training infrastructure, logistics, ISR and space. Her closing conclusions were:
Mass is much more than numbers of aircraft.
Technology will change how mass is generated, but autonomy does not exempt anyone from logistics.
"Technology does not equal strategy."
Aircraft counts are easy to publish and compare. Weapons stocks, trained people, resilient bases and industrial depth are harder to see and slower to build, which is why they get undercounted. A large fleet that can't be sustained, or a cheap uncrewed one that can't be based, supplied and protected, offers the appearance of strength rather than the substance.
My own takeaway is that the seminar pointed to a different view of next-generation airpower. Rather than a sixth-generation platform, the focus was on a recrafted airpower enterprise. I call it regenerative airpower: a force whose strength lies in its ability to absorb loss, recover, reconstitute and keep generating combat power, and not merely in what it can put in the air on day one.
The next generation of airpower is an enterprise, not a platform. That is harder to procure, announce and photograph. It is also what determines whether a force still counts in the fourth week of a conflict.
The question is not how many aircraft a force can field. It is whether the system behind them can keep operating through disruption.
Read the full analysis at Defense.Info
