Special Report: The Requirement for Air Combat Mass and Depth in the Indo-Pacific
“We keep asking what the next aircraft will be. The better question is whether the force can keep fighting on day forty.” By Robbin Laird.
For three decades, “generation” has been a word we attach to aircraft: fourth, fifth, now sixth. The label implies the next step forward is a better machine.
The Sir Richard Williams Foundation’s 1 October seminar in Canberra, The Requirement for Air Combat Mass and Depth in the Indo-Pacific, suggested otherwise.
It read less like a platform conference than a description of an enterprise.
The PLA has spent a decade building a targeting complex that treats fixed, forward and known bases as vulnerabilities. A planner does not need to shoot down a fifth-generation fighter. It is enough to hold at risk the runways, fuel, munitions and maintenance that put it in the air.
A small fleet of exquisite aircraft is an arithmetic problem, and arithmetic problems can be solved.
My special report on the seminar calls the answer regenerative airpower: the capacity of an air combat enterprise to absorb attack, replace losses, reconstitute degraded nodes and keep generating combat effects across a campaign rather than a single engagement.
The thing being regenerated is not an aircraft. It is the capacity to fight.
The seminar surfaced four elements:
Mass that can be replaced. Attritable systems matter not because you can afford to waste them, but because you can replace them, and only if an enterprise exists to build, supply, maintain and integrate them.
Depth that is designed. Geography becomes depth only when it is developed: distributed runways, fuel, munitions handling and repair, paid for before the war.
People who cannot be surged. Aircraft come from factories. Aircrew, maintainers and logisticians come from slow training systems.
Industry as the combat reserve. Production lines are regenerative capacity. Once they close, they are very hard to reopen.
The evidence is telling. A fleet funded around 16 flying hours a month per jet could be flown ten times that over Pacific distances. Weapons expenditure makes the headlines. Sustainment is what quietly runs out.
And in the May 2025 India–Pakistan air clash, the platforms were comparable. The enterprises were not.
For acquisition, this changes the test. A slightly better platform with a fragile supply chain may add less combat power than a less exquisite one embedded in a robust enterprise.
Platforms will keep arriving, and they will matter. But the winning advantage will belong to the side that can regenerate.
Download the report:
Read the full special report: https://defense.info/featured-story/2026/11/special-report-the-requirement-for-air-combat-mass-and-depth-in-the-indo-pacific/
