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The next generation of airpower is not an aircraft. It is the capacity to fight night after night, week after week, month after month

Oct 26
2 min read

“The next generation of airpower is not an aircraft. It is the capacity to fight night after night, week after week, month after month.” By Robbin Laird.


The Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar in Canberra on 1 October was framed around a platform question: does Australia have enough air combat mass? By the end of the day, almost nobody in the room was answering it that way.


Operators, industry executives and visiting commanders kept reaching for the same ideas: sustainment, industrial capacity, people, architecture, and a society’s willingness to carry a long fight.


My latest analysis tests my argument for regenerative airpower against what was said in the room. The next generation of airpower is an enterprise rather than a platform. The quality that matters most is the capacity to absorb attack, replace losses and keep generating combat effects across a campaign, not just a single engagement.


The seminar supported that argument and also sharpened it.


The generation labels lose their grip. A fourth-generation airframe with fifth-generation avionics, sensors and weapons is no longer a fourth-generation aircraft in any useful sense. The India–Pakistan air clash of May 2025 showed it: the platforms were comparable and the enterprises were not.


The grind is the test. One presenter’s graph of combat effect over time made the case. The height of the curve in the grind is set by industrial capacity, so industrial readiness is a force design question, not just an industry one.


Depth is a design choice. That means multi-nodal command and control with no single point of failure, and hardened bases with layered defence. Both have to be paid for before the war.


Mass was reconsidered. Several speakers cautioned against framing attritable aircraft as mass built to be spent. Their value is that they can be replaced, and that is true only if an enterprise exists to build, supply, maintain and integrate them.


People are the part you cannot surge. The workforce of the enterprise is much wider than the workforce of the squadron.


The enterprise extends to the nation. Capability without public understanding and will becomes a Maginot line.


The seminar left open questions, including basing, access and the limits of air power. Bases are the part of the enterprise an adversary will target first.


But what the speakers described is a different idea of the next generation, and the thing being regenerated is not an aircraft. It is the capacity to fight night after night, week after week, month after month.








 
 
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