"Historian of the Seminars", a phrase I've earned the hard way: a decade of notebooks, one Williams Foundation seminar at a time. By Robbin Laird. I have been coming to Australia since 2014 to write the Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminars. Over a decade of seminars, in a real sense, makes me the historian of this particular record, not because I have any special claim to insight, but because I have been in the room, notebook open, for the whole arc. And from that vantage point, the October 1, 2026 seminar at the National Gallery of Australia reads less as a single event than as the latest crest in a wave that has been building since I first started making this trip. It is worth remembering where that wave began. In 2014, the story was modest by design. On that first visit I toured the new KC-30A tanker fleet and the newly arrived Wedgetail airborne early warning aircraft, visited a hypersonics research effort still in its early stages, and sat in on an RAAF-sponsored conference about an F-35 that had not yet arrived. The C-17 had recently given the RAAF reach it had never had before. The characterization that stuck with me from that trip, offered by a Canadian air force officer sitting in on the same conference, was that Australia was building “a modest but effective 21st century Air Force”, assembling the building blocks, one platform at a time, after a long period of underinvestment, shaped by hard lessons from East Timor and Afghanistan. It was an Air Force preparing itself, not yet an Air Force positioned against a specific, capable adversary. The F-35 was still a thing that was coming. The 2024 seminar was where that preparatory decade cashed out. That session put the fifth-generation revolution on full display in Australia: the F-35 no longer a future acquisition but an operational reality reshaping how the RAAF thought about combat, and fifth-generation thinking beginning to pull the rest of the joint force along with it. It was, in the terms this analysis has used elsewhere, the moment Australia stopped assembling parts and started fielding an architecture. That seminar answered the question the 2014 trip had left open: what happens once the modest, effective building blocks are joined by a genuinely transformational platform. The answer was a shift in mindset as much as in inventory — air and space power beginning to be understood as the domain that determines whether the rest of the force can operate at all, rather than a supporting function bolted onto ships and land systems. That transformation is ongoing, and it is not yet finished. But the center of gravity has moved. The October 1 seminar, under the heading of mass and depth, is not introducing a new platform the way the 2024 session did. It is confronting what the fifth-generation revolution failed to solve on its own: a small, exquisite, technologically superior force is not, by itself, a sufficient answer to a Chinese air and maritime force that has generated its own precision revolution — long-range strike, dense sensor coverage, and a targeting complex that treats fixed, forward, and known bases as vulnerabilities rather than assets. An adversary that can do the arithmetic on a fleet of extremely capable but extremely limited platforms can also calculate how quickly that fleet runs out. Mass and depth, and the basing and sustainment posture that make mass and depth sustainable rather than merely notional, are the next phase, not a departure from the fifth-generation shift but its necessary completion. This is the throughline a decade of these seminars has made visible: 2014 built the modest, capable pieces; 2024 fused them around a fifth-generation core and a new way of thinking about airpower’s role in the joint force; 2026 is asking whether that core can be made deep enough, distributed enough, and sustainable enough to survive contact with a precision-strike adversary rather than simply outmatch it in a single engagement. Collaborative Combat Aircraft — Ghost Bat and its Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman counterparts — are this seminar’s answer to that arithmetic problem: not cheaper substitutes for crewed fifth-generation aircraft, but the mechanism by which a fixed, expensive fleet becomes a scalable one, attritable mass that dilutes an adversary’s targeting problem instead of simplifying it. The sessions on workforce, training, and sustainment that round out the agenda are not housekeeping. They are where the difference between an aspirational force and a real one gets decided, exactly as they were in 2014, when a C-17 global sustainment program and a shared tanker fleet with Singapore were the unglamorous mechanisms that actually gave the RAAF reach. If one lays the 2014 balance of Chinese and allied airpower in the Pacific next to today’s, the shift is unmistakable, and it runs in a direction that should concern anyone still describing Australian airpower primarily in terms of what it can add to the joint force rather than what it must independently be capable of sustaining. In 2014, the conversation was about acquiring the pieces of a 21st century force. By 2024, the conversation had become about fusing those pieces around a genuinely transformational platform. By 2026, the conversation is about whether that platform, however capable, can survive and keep fighting against a Chinese force that has spent the intervening decade building precisely the kind of precision-strike mass that punishes small, forward-based, exquisite formations. Ten years in, the question this seminar puts in front of the Australian government is not whether the Air Force can support the Integrated Force. It is whether the Integrated Force, and the basing and sustainment architecture beneath it, can support an Air Force fighting a war of depth against an adversary that no longer has to be deterred by quality alone. Originally posted at Defense.Info

"If we're not at the table, we're on the menu" applies to air forces too — except in this case, the table is the sky over the Indo-Pacific, and without it, nothing else survives. By Robbin Laird. On 1 October, the Sir Richard Williams Foundation returns to the question that has quietly reshaped Australian airpower debate over the past two years: not whether the Royal Australian Air Force can support the Integrated Force, but whether it can generate the scale, endurance, and reach to fight and keep fighting in a contested Indo-Pacific. The seminar’s title states the problem plainly: mass and depth. Its argument is less plain but more consequential, and it builds directly on the April 2026 session’s “fight tonight” theme. National Defence Strategy 2026 and its accompanying Integrated Investment Program described an Air Force that “provides air support for integrated operations”, surveillance, air defence, strike, air transport. That formulation, framed around inputs and tasks, is precisely what this seminar sets out to move past. The organisers argue for a reset: air and space power judged by operational and strategic outcomes rather than by the list of missions it services. That is a shift from thinking of Air Force as a supporting function bolted onto a joint force built around surface combatants and land systems, toward thinking of it as the domain that determines whether the rest of the force can operate, survive, and matter at all. The logic is straightforward once stated. Australia is building a larger surface combatant fleet and a land force oriented on littoral operations in the northern approaches — landing craft, tactical joint fires, combined-arms systems designed for archipelagic and coastal fighting. Every one of those investments raises, rather than reduces, the demand on air combat power. Ships and land forces operating forward need localised air superiority to survive; they need survivable strike reach to hold targets at risk without exposing the platforms doing the holding. The more capable the surface and land forces become, the more air combat mass they consume, not less. This is the seminar’s central bet: capability growth elsewhere in the Integrated Force is quietly outrunning the air combat capacity meant to protect and enable it. That produces a demand-and-supply framing that runs through the agenda. On the demand side: control of the air, sustained continuously across vast geography, in all weather, alongside a strike capability launchable from sovereign bases with integrated targeting and enough political discretion to preserve surprise. On the supply side: a mix of crewed and uncrewed systems sufficient to generate that control and that strike reach without exhausting a small, exquisite, and therefore fragile force structure. This is where the seminar’s framing intersects with what I have elsewhere called the choice between intelligent mass and exquisite scarcity. A force built entirely around small numbers of extremely capable, extremely expensive platforms is a force that cannot absorb attrition, cannot generate enough combat power across a theatre the size of the Indo-Pacific, and cannot deter because an adversary can do the arithmetic and see that the force runs out quickly. Mass and depth are not a hedge against that logic. They are the answer to it. The agenda’s opening panel on Collaborative Combat Aircraft makes the point concretely. CCAs — represented on the program by Boeing’s MQ-28 Ghost Bat effort alongside contributions from Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman — are not simply cheaper adjuncts to crewed fighters. They are the mechanism by which Australia converts a fixed, expensive crewed fleet into a scalable force: attritable mass that multiplies sorties, dilutes an adversary’s targeting problem, and extends reach without extending the exquisite-platform bill. Phil Gordon’s session on “multi-mission force multiplication” and Robert Denney’s on “building mass with industry” both point the same direction: industry is being asked to help solve a structural problem, not just supply hardware faster. The seminar also foregrounds a set of enabling arguments that rarely get equal billing in force-structure debates: workforce, training, and sustainment. A scalable air combat force is only as real as the people and pipelines that generate and regenerate it. Sessions on workforce management and automation, and on training-system effectiveness and mission rehearsal, are not peripheral housekeeping items. They are where “self-reliant, scalable capability” either becomes real or stays aspirational. The same is true of the closing block on preparedness, replenishment, basing, logistics and supply chains. Deterrence by denial is a sustainment problem as much as a platform problem; a force that cannot be replenished at the tempo a high-end fight demands is not, in practice, a force that can sustain denial for long. If the April seminar was about readiness — fight tonight — this one is about durability: can the force that fights tonight still be fighting, and generating deterrent effect, months into a high-end contingency. Mass and depth are the answer the Foundation is putting on the table. Whether the National Defence Strategy’s next iteration absorbs that answer, or continues to describe Air Force primarily as a supporting service to the rest of the Integrated Force, is the question this seminar sets up for the Government to answer next.

'Training as Combat Generation: The Case for a Systems Approach' in Fight Tonight: Combat Readiness at the Speed of Relevance Proceedings - Paper 4, Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar, 23 April 2026 By Robbin Laird Alexander Robinson speaking to the 23 April 2026 Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar. One of the more thought-provoking presentations at the seminar came from Alexander Robinson, Sales and Capability Director at Pilatus Aircraft Australia. Robinson opened with a self-deprecating acknowledgment: he had spent the previous evening sitting next to Air Chief Marshall Binskin, trying to make the turboprop training argument against a career’s worth of carrier landing experience, Mirage time, Hornet time, and F-16 time. He called it “a valuable discourse.” His escape hatch, he said, was to frame the entire discussion as being about providing options, not selling platforms. That framing was more than rhetorical cover. It was the intellectual spine of the presentation. The Core Argument: Training as Operational Terrain Robinson’s central argument cuts against the grain of how training is conventionally discussed in defense circles. He is not making an education argument, and he is deliberately not making a platform argument. He is making what he calls a “combat generation” argument or the claim that Phase 4 training design has direct strategic consequences for mass, depth, and survivability, especially in a high-threat and fiscally constrained environment. The point is not subtle. Australia fields a genuinely tier-one Air Force, exceptional platforms operated by high-quality people, but at limited scale, across a vast operating area, with finite surge depth relative to task demand. In that context, as Robinson put it, “the training pipeline itself becomes operational terrain.” Every instructor posting, every red air sortie, every jet hour consumed for training is an opportunity cost: it represents combat-ready mass that either exists or does not when the call comes. The harder question, Robinson argued, is not simply whether Australia is training well. It is whether the training system is designed to generate and sustain combat-ready mass at the tempo the strategic environment demands. That is a different question entirely and it is one that the current architecture may not be optimally positioned to answer. The Fifth Generation Mismatch In fifth generation air combat, the center of gravity in the cockpit has shifted. Modern fighters are in many respects easier to fly than their predecessors but considerably harder to employ effectively. As Robinson observed, aircrew today are managing far more sensors, far more data, and far more complex tactical situations. The aircraft has become a decision node, not merely a weapons platform. The pilot is functioning as a conductor rather than a musician. The competencies that now dominate modern air combat, systems thinking, cognitive prioritization, situational awareness, decision-making under pressure, timeline control, are being developed late in the pipeline, often largely at the OCU level. Meanwhile, expensive jet hours are being consumed earlier for training events that do not require jet-specific performance to achieve the required training effect. The result is the familiar combination: bottlenecks, downstream remediation, and pressure concentrated at the most expensive end of the system. Robinson was careful to frame this as a system design problem, not a failure of people or effort. That distinction matters. It means the solution is also systemic, not a question of working harder within the existing architecture but of rethinking the architecture itself. Training Realism Defined by Effect, Not Platform The core design principle Robinson offered is deceptively simple: training realism should be defined by the effect, not by the platform. Each training task should be delivered by the lowest cost platform that can credibly deliver the required training outcome, whether that is a simulator, a turboprop, an advanced jet trainer, or a frontline aircraft. The goal is to protect what he calls “the jet-only envelope” and to be explicit and disciplined about where that envelope actually begins. There are tasks that genuinely require jets: high alpha, sustained high-G maneuvering, transonic acceleration, mass fuel flow management, specific excess power. Those effects are envelope-specific, not merely syllabus-specific, and they belong in jets. But many of the highest-value training tasks are cognitive, procedural, and decision-based rather than kinematic. Radar mechanics, intercept geometry, tactical formation, data link discipline, attack decision-making, the closure rates change on a turboprop, but the decision points do not. If the trainee is making the same calls, in the same sequence, under the same cognitive pressure, the training effect is being generated. This logic points toward what Robinson describes as a hybrid Phase 4 construct: cognitive-dense tasks delivered on a high-performance turboprop integrated with embedded mission training suites and potentially live-virtual-constructive capabilities, while jets are reserved for the irreducible envelope that only jets can teach. The objective is not to pretend a turboprop is a fighter. It is to stop using jets for tasks that do not actually require them. The Allied Precedents: Switzerland and France Robinson grounded the argument in operational precedents rather than theory. Switzerland has trained fighter pilots exclusively on turboprops since 2008. It is one of at least four nations operating a direct turboprop-to-fighter pipeline, transitioning directly from the PC-21 to the F/A-18C and shortly to the F-35. The Swiss made this shift incrementally, after operating Hawks and F-5s as advanced jet trainers—and what instructor and student feedback has consistently shown is that the hardest transition was not PC-21 to Hornet but PC-7 to PC-21. The cognitive load explanation accounts for that; the kinematic explanation does not. Importantly, Switzerland has reported no requirement to double training time and no degradation in operational outcomes. France offers a parallel data point. The French Air and Space Force replaced a mixed fleet of Epsilons and Alpha Jets with a single PC-21 fleet for transition directly to Rafale and Mirage. The results: a fivefold reduction in maintenance and operational costs, fuel savings, improved training flow, and no change in downstream operational performance. What the French have been explicit about is that the primary value of the PC-21 is not kinematic replication. It is systems management exposure, decision discipline, and structured deep debriefing, precisely those fifth-generation skills that Robinson identifies as the current pipeline’s gap. Both services openly acknowledge their limitations, high alpha, sustained specific excess power, the absence of external stores. Robinson’s point is not that these limitations are irrelevant but that they can be mitigated through syllabus design and a protected jet envelope, rather than by holding onto legacy platforms that were designed for a different training logic. What These Forces Have Done and What It Means for Australia Robinson’s summary formulation is worth sitting with: these forces have traded platform purity for training system resilience. They have strengthened their combat generation capability and their scalability as a result—both upward and downward. The argument is not that Australia should copy Switzerland or France. As Robinson put it, there are no perfect solutions, only trade-offs, and the goal is to help Air Force design the training system as a system of systems so that air power can be genuinely scalable across all four training phases. He closed with something more personal and more revealing about the intellectual posture behind the presentation. He had considered swapping out one of his slides to feature the forthcoming PC-21X, a platform refresh Pilatus is set to announce later in 2026. He thought better of it. To do so would have been, as he put it, “disingenuous to the first point I made” that this is not about a platform. What Pilatus wants, what industry wants, and what Robinson said he personally wants as an Australian, is a training system that produces aircrew ready for OCU at the standard required: the right knowledge, skills, attitudes, and mission-critical competencies so that when those young men and women get to the frontline, they fight tonight, they win tomorrow, and they come home. The Broader Context Robinson’s presentation connects to a broader theme running through the Williams Foundation seminar and through the wider conversation about Australian strategic advantage: the question of how to generate and sustain effective air power at scale in a fiscally constrained environment, against a threat that is evolving and across an operating area that demands both range and presence. The training pipeline is not typically where those conversations begin. Robinson’s argument is that it should be because the pipeline is where the force is made or unmade before the fight begins. The kill web construct that Ed Timperlake and I have developed over the years places significant weight on the depth and resilience of the force, not merely on the exquisite capability of individual platforms. A training system designed as Robinson describes would contribute directly to the intelligent mass side of the equation: more air crew, progressed further and faster, with the cognitive tools to function as effective decision nodes in a networked, distributed fight. That is not a training abstraction. It is a combat generation problem. And Robinson is right that it has strategic consequences. The paper Robinson referenced published in The Air and Space Power Journal and forthcoming in condensed form in the ASPI Journal is worth reading for those who want the analytical foundations in full. ∗The presentation itself, delivered to a room that included some of the most experienced airmen in the Indo-Pacific region, was a model of how an industry representative can contribute to a serious strategic conversation: by leading with the operational logic, letting the platform follow if it must, and keeping the focus on the outcome that actually matters.∗ ∗ https://ciasp.scholasticahq.com/article/158558-better-faster-smarter-scalable-aircrew-training-for-modern-air-power ∗ The paper addresses the urgent need for scalable aircrew training in the Indo-Pacific context, where modern aviators must manage information at tempo, make autonomous decisions under pressure, and coordinate effects within joint, complex, and often degraded battlespace conditions. Robinson’s work emphasizes how Australia’s strategic environment, characterized by accelerating military modernization, grey-zone coercion, and potential high-intensity conflict—elevates the premium on adaptable, integrated air power. See my own book, on the same subject: Training for the High End Fight: The Paradigm Shift for Combat Pilot Training Also published in DefenceInfo