“Combat mass doesn’t always require buying more. Sometimes it requires thinking differently about what you have.” By Robbin Laird. At the Williams Foundation seminar on October 1, Air Commodore (Retd) Phil Gordon, a former RAAF Joint Force Air Component Commander who now works at Lockheed Martin Australia, was expected to make the case for more platforms. He set that aside. His argument was that combat mass can come from having more things to call on, or from doing more with the things you already have. He spoke about the second. It is a simple idea. It is also a direct challenge to how defence forces buy capability. Our latest analysis examines what Gordon calls multi-mission force multiplication. His formula: maximize speed, reach and flexibility, and minimize dependency and fragility. Speed here is measured in the time it takes to detect, understand, decide and communicate, not in knots. As Admiral Brad Cooper observed of Operation Epic Fury, time is now measured in seconds, rarely hours. Three ideas stand out: Mission apps. Air battle management, integrated air and missile defence, counter-UAS, space, fires coordination and ISR exploitation are versions of the same OODA loop. They are still bought as separate projects, each with its own funding line and its own fragile, bespoke solution. Common operating data, not just a common operating picture. The data is shared, and each operator sees it through a mission context interface tuned to the fight. PACE applied to roles, not just radios. If every node and unit has a primary, alternate, contingency and emergency role, a battle management node can become a strike cell, a counter-air cell or a space contributor when the force needs it. This is the kill web argument expressed as acquisition. A force built from single-purpose nodes is brittle. A force built from multi-mission nodes can lose pieces and keep fighting. Gordon extended the logic to effectors. He pointed to reusable high-power microwave systems against Shahed-class drones, a lead-in fighter with a contingency counter-drone role, and Apaches and armed Black Hawks working the inner air defence layer. The obstacle is not technology. It is how requirements are written, scoped and funded. Open ecosystems also depend on governments holding the integration standards and on primes letting competitors’ products in. The question is not whether the force needs more mass. It is how much latent mass it already owns, and why the acquisition system keeps it from being used. Read the full analysis: https://defense.info/featured-story/2026/10/multi-mission-force-multiplication-phil-gordon-on-generating-combat-mass-by-doing-more-with-what-you-have/

“It’s not an industry problem; it’s a combat power problem.” By Robbin Laird. At the Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar on October 1, Air Vice Marshal (Retd.) Robert Denney of Northrop Grumman made an argument that cuts against how most air forces spend their money. Denney spent 33 years in the RAAF, including as Head of Air Force Capability and Head of Force Integration. He says the tacticians, himself included in his day, have been optimizing the wrong part of the problem. His case starts with history. Industrialization turned war from a contest of tactical brilliance into an economic contest decided by industrial output. Clausewitz wrote just as that shift began, so strategy inherited a blind spot. The air domain is where this bites hardest. On land, a nation can hand a soldier a rifle and generate crude mass. An air force cannot improvise an airframe. Denney’s diagram of a war looks like an ECG trace. There is an opening surge, then a long grind. In the grind, what sets your combat effect is industrial capacity: the rate at which you can replace what an enemy destroys. The implication is uncomfortable. In a resource-constrained budget, investment in the peak is investment taken from the grind. Readiness is usually measured by the height of the peak. Denney says to measure the area under the curve. For Australia, the reality check is stark. Replacing a modern, high-technology aircraft in a reasonable time frame is unlikely. Planners also should not count on allies having the capacity, the willingness, or the means to deliver replacements at scale. My reading is that this complicates the “exquisite versus intelligent mass” debate. The case for lower-cost, more producible systems is not just about cost per aircraft. It is about what a national industrial base can regenerate under fire. A kill web that depends on a few irreplaceable nodes inherits their fragility. A fleet is a snapshot. A regenerative enterprise is a rate. The hardest part of the message is political: accepting a less sharp spear today in exchange for a deeper force later. The question is not whether Australia can fight tonight. It is whether it can fight night after night, week after week, month after month. Read the full analysis: https://defense.info/featured-story/2026/10/building-mass-with-industry-industrial-capacity-is-combat-power/

“In 1937, John Curtin argued that Australia’s defence must lie in aviation. Ninety years later, the country is having the same conversation with different technology.” By Robbin Laird. At the Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar in Canberra on 1 October, a panel on collaborative combat aircraft and Australian industry made an argument that cuts against the popular debate. The popular picture is simple. Buy large numbers of cheap uncrewed platforms because you expect to lose many of them. It is not the movie Australia is in. My latest analysis follows the panel’s reasoning from John Conway, WGCDR Chris McInnes and Jeremy Feldhahn of Boeing Defence Australia. Their position is that CCAs, or autonomous collaborative platforms, are valuable as combat depth, not disposable mass. Australia’s strategy is denial. It calls for persistence, options for commanders and coverage across an archipelago with a vast sea and air volume to defend. The panel proposed a different vocabulary: Reach, not just range: how fast a force arrives and what it delivers on arrival. Coverage: reach sustained over time. A strike off the east coast on Monday is something several parts of the ADF can manage. Repeating it in the Indian Ocean on Wednesday is something only air power can do. Cost per effect, not unit price: a multi-million-dollar platform that protects a crewed aircraft worth a hundred million, and achieves the effect, beats a cheap drone that achieves nothing. CCAs are additive. They replace nothing. So the real constraint is not whether the technology works. It is whether institutions can absorb something new, and whether an industrial base can design, build and adapt these systems at speed. The industrial argument was the most developed of the session. Nobody argued for a standing aerospace army funded in peacetime. The argument was for a kernel: the skills and people who can scale when it counts. Australia built about 2,500 combat aircraft in the Second World War with a largely untrained workforce. MQ-28 now has at least 125 active suppliers, roughly 70 per cent of investment staying in Australian industry, and several suppliers who had never worked in aerospace. The principle is to choose your dependencies rather than have them chosen for you. The unresolved problem is that Australian practice funds acquisition and sustainment but has no real R&D line. Without one, the depth the panel wants is hard to build or renew. The question is not how many platforms Australia can buy. It is whether Australia is building the enterprise behind them. Read the full analysis: https://defense.info/featured-story/2026/10/combat-depth-not-just-mass-collaborative-combat-aircraft-and-the-australian-industrial-base/

“A thousand aircraft orbiting outside an adversary’s engagement envelope do not provide the combat power of a hundred able to penetrate it.” By Robbin Laird. That was the core of Lt Gen David Deptula’s argument at the Sir Richard Williams Foundation’s 1 October seminar in Canberra, The Requirement for Air Combat Mass and Depth in the Indo-Pacific. He made it in conversation with Air Marshal Geoff Brown. As air forces rebuild combat power and add collaborative combat aircraft and other autonomous systems, the temptation is to count tails and compare unit prices. It is an attractive way to think about mass.It is also the wrong measure. Deptula’s case turns on a few distinctions: Mass is an effect, not a count. The test is how many relevant effects a force can generate, at what distance, against what opposition, and for how long. Depth is what makes mass last. Weapons, spare engines, maintainers, fuel and basing decide whether a force is a campaign instrument or a one-week demonstration. Attritable is not the same as affordable. Attritability is about risk. Affordability is about resources. A force built around expected loss ends up competing on the industrial ground where China is strongest. CCAs are enablement, not substitution. The question is not whether an F-47 can be replaced by three cheap aircraft. It is what an F-47 working with autonomous aircraft can do that neither could do alone. For Australia, distance is “one of the defining characteristics of the problem.” Range, survivability and weapons depth are requirements, not luxuries. My own addition is that the real contest is between enterprises, not platforms. The side better able to regenerate effects under pressure holds the advantage. That is a harder metric than unit price, and a more honest one. The question for air forces is not crewed versus uncrewed, or high-end versus low-cost. It is whether they will start from the effects required to win, test what the new systems can deliver, and resource the force the strategy demands. Read the full analysis: https://defense.info/featured-story/2026/10/mass-without-depth-is-temporary/

“Deterrence, absent a grounding in actuality, is dangerous.” By Robbin Laird. That was Michael Pezzullo’s opening proposition at the Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar on air combat mass and depth. The former Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs spoke for under twenty minutes. His argument was harder than most of the day’s technical contributions. Australia has made deterrence a staple of its official vocabulary. It has not said what it is trying to deter, who it is trying to deter, or what success would take. That is a comfortable position. It is also a dangerous one. My latest analysis looks at how Pezzullo worked through the question by elimination, over a forty-year horizon. He ranked three candidates by probability: A military dictatorship in Jakarta, which is the least likely. Australia would have real warning time, and the work is multi-generational. A hegemonic China in a world where the United States no longer extends security guarantees. This is the hardest problem, but it would be decades in the making. A disruptive China willing to use force to change the status quo in the Western Pacific. This is the one that matters now, and there is no warning time left. On the third, his formula was blunt: Australia cannot deter by denial alone. At most, “we deter by annoying.” The credible contribution is a combined force, integrated with American airpower and allied capability, that offers more options, in more places, more often. His sharpest criticism was aimed at the whole-of-government picture. Australia has a defence strategy. It does not have a national one. Civil defence and mobilisation remain, in his words, “two terms that dare not speak their names.” For a seminar on air combat mass and depth, this changes the question. Mass and depth are national attributes before they are service attributes. A force can sustain combat power in a contested environment only if the surrounding nation can generate, protect and regenerate it. That depends on industrial capacity, infrastructure resilience, fuel, logistics, and a public that understands why any of it matters. The question is not whether Australia needs the aircraft. It is whether the nation behind them is ready to carry the weight no air force can carry alone. Read the full analysis: https://defense.info/featured-story/2026/10/deterring-whom-michael-pezzullo-and-australias-missing-national-defence-strategy/

"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. Read the full analysis: https://defense.info/featured-story/2026/10/geostrategic-perspectives-securing-australia-in-a-fractured-world/

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

"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

'Space as a Fight Tonight Domain: Jeremy King on Australia’s Strategic Imperative' in Fight Tonight: Combat Readiness at the Speed of Relevance Proceedings - Paper 5, Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar, 23 April 2026 By Robbin Laird Jeremy King speaking to the 23 April 2026 Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar. At the Williams Foundation Seminar on the Fight Tonight Force held on 23 April 2026, Jeremy King’s, Chief Executive of Lockheed Martin Australia and New Zealand, central argument was straightforward, even if its implications are not: space is no longer a distant frontier or a strategic luxury. It is essential infrastructure, and it is already under attack. The fight tonight is not coming. It is happening now. The Infrastructure Dependency In Plain sight He opened by grounding the audience in a reality that defense planners have long understood intellectually but have been slow to operationalize. Space-based systems now underpin not just military operations but the entire functioning architecture of modern society, position, timing, navigation, communications, banking, weather, insurance, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Australia’s own independent review of critical infrastructure security has catalogued space as a dependency across every sector it examined. That dependency is deepening precisely as the threat is intensifying. King pointed to the sheer density now accumulating in low Earth orbit — thousands of satellites today, tens of thousands anticipated — and the sobering mathematics of what happens when maneuvering capability is lost. A recently published analysis found that at current orbital density, without active collision avoidance, the time to first collision would be measured in days, not years. That is not a distant risk scenario. It is a physics problem playing out in real time. But the physical threats — solar weather, collision risk — are only part of the picture. The more operationally relevant threats are the ones being prosecuted by state actors right now. King was direct: jamming, spoofing, and unsolicited rendezvous and proximity operations are not edge cases. They are standing features of the current gray zone contest. When he described the boundary between hard kill and soft kill as “wafer thin” in any operation where space dependencies are paramount, he was describing the operational environment his former colleagues inside the ADF are managing today. The Fight Tonight Frame Applied to Space The seminar theme — fight tonight — took on particular weight in King’s remarks. He was explicit that space is already a contested operational domain. The cyber attack on a satellite ground system at the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was not an anomaly; it was a preview. The ongoing electronic warfare contest in Ukraine, the persistent interference campaigns in the Middle East, these are not future scenarios. They are data points from the current fight. This framing has direct implications for how Australia structures its space architecture. King drew on the PACE methodology — Primary, Alternative, Contingency, Emergency — as a framework for thinking about resilience across degraded operational conditions. The point is not simply to build better satellites. It is to build architectures that can absorb degradation and continue to deliver effect. Primary systems must be resilient by design and fit for purpose in a contested threat environment. Alternative systems, including commercial capabilities, must be integrated to augment requirements. Contingency and emergency solutions must exist for the genuinely denied environment. This is not a new concept in resilience thinking, but its application to the space domain has lagged badly behind the threat. King did not shy away from saying so. He noted, pointedly, that the pace of space technology development has outrun procurement timelines, a dynamic that those serving as delivery managers inside Defence are experiencing directly. The systems being bought today must be able to do more than “fight tonight.” They must survive the first night and maintain an assured path to continued access thereafter. The Collaborative Imperative King was emphatic that space superiority, for Australia, is not achievable unilaterally. The ADF leadership has said as much consistently, and he reinforced it with substance. Just the previous month, Lieutenant General Coyle hosted a gathering of space chiefs at the Australian War Memorial with the explicit intent of building collaborative relationships and reinforcing shared access to space technologies. The diplomatic architecture of space competition is being assembled through these practitioner-level engagements, not through formal treaty negotiation. The industrial dimension of this collaboration is where King’s remarks carried the most operational weight. He pointed to Lockheed Martin’s work with Japan on next-generation anti-jamming military communication satellites as a model for what allied co-development can deliver, capabilities designed with regional threat considerations at heart, built to meet the needs of the warfighter today and into the future. The recently launched tenth GPS III satellite, the final in that series, represents a generation of capability offering substantially improved accuracy, coverage, and anti-jamming performance over its predecessors. GPS IIIF, the successor series, is already under construction with even more robust counter-EW features. Interoperability and resilience, in King’s formulation, are not simply technical requirements. They are the mechanisms through which allied force multiplication in the space domain becomes real. Nations that collaborate on space programs achieve more than the sum of their individual investments. They build shared architectures that are harder to degrade comprehensively and that create redundancy at the alliance level, not just the national level. The Australian Industry Dimension King was careful to anchor his remarks in Australian sovereign capability, and the picture he painted was more encouraging than many in the room might have expected. Australia has world-class companies operating in the space domain, exporting globally across civil, commercial, and military sectors. Nevaeh Technologies out of Adelaide, a graduate of Lockheed Martin’s mentor-protégé program, and Salentium Defence are examples of what Australian industry can deliver when given access to the global supply chain. FCOM Space and Defence, Black Tree Technology, Gilmore Space, and Space Machines Company round out a roster of companies that, in his telling, are genuinely competitive on the international stage. Lockheed Martin’s Australian industrial participation program has surpassed $225 million in export contracts with Australian companies, a portion of which flows directly into the space sector. King’s point was that the sovereign industry base Australia needs to underwrite its space resilience is not a distant ambition. It exists now. The challenge is to integrate it deliberately into the ADF’s space architecture rather than treating it as an afterthought to large prime-contractor programs. This is where King positioned the role of the primes. Rather than positioning Lockheed Martin as the solution to Australia’s space challenges — a pitch he deliberately stepped back from — he articulated a prime systems integrator model in which the major defense companies serve as the connective tissue linking Australian small and medium enterprises into global supply chains and allied program structures. That is a different framing than the traditional prime contractor model, and it is one that aligns better with the sovereign industrial capability objectives Australia has been articulating since the Defence Strategic Review. What Fight Tonight Actually Demands There was a thread running through King’s remarks that connects directly to the broader seminar theme. Fight tonight is not a readiness standard that applies only to aircraft and submarines and soldiers. It applies to the domain that makes everything else function. An F-35 without assured communications, navigation, and ISR from space is a diminished platform. A joint force without assured space access is not a joint force in any operationally meaningful sense. It is a collection of platforms attempting to coordinate through degraded and contested channels. The 2026 Secure World Foundation counter-space capabilities report, which King cited, is now tracking thirteen nations with counter-space programs, up from three in 2018. That trajectory does not suggest a domain that will stabilize. It suggests a domain in which the competitive pressure will intensify, the gray zone contest will continue, and the premium on resilient architecture will grow.∗ King’s contribution at the seminar was to make that case with the credibility that comes from having sat on both sides of the capability acquisition table, as a delivery manager inside the ADF and now as an industry executive. His argument for resilience by design, for collaborative architecture with allies and partners, and for deliberate integration of Australian industry into global space programs is not a marketing pitch. It is a practitioner’s assessment of what fight tonight actually demands in the domain that underpins all others. The question that follows from his remarks is the one the seminar was designed to address: does Australia’s current approach to space capability — its procurement timelines, its industrial integration, its collaborative architecture with allies — match the fight tonight standard? King’s implicit answer was that the gap remains, but that the pieces to close it are present. The challenge now is organizational will and procurement speed. Note: This is the first article covering the second session of speakers at the seminar. The presentations during the second session of the seminar will published throughout this week. Notes Lockheed Martin, “Small Business Programs: Mentor Protégé Program,” https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/suppliers/small-business-programs/Programs.html. “Silentium Defence Becomes Second Australian Company to Graduate from the Lockheed Martin Mentor Protégé Program (MPP),” news release, Lockheed Martin Australia, November 9, 2023, https://lockheedmartinau.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=2429&item=122663. Andrew McLaughlin, “Silentium Passive Radar Selected for Land 156,” Australian Defence Magazine, January 18, 2026, https://www.australiandefence.com.au/defence/land/silentium-passive-radar-selected-for-land-156. “Silentium Defence World‑Class Passive Radar Technology Selected for LAND 156,” Silentium Defence, February 9, 2026, https://www.silentiumdefence.com.au/silentium-defence-world-class-passive-radar-technology-selected-for-land-156/. “Gilmour Space Technologies | Launching Rockets and Satellites to Orbit,” Gilmour Space Technologies, https://www.gspace.com. “Gilmour Space Secures Major Funding,” Australian Defence Magazine, January 20, 2026, https://www.australiandefence.com.au/defence/cyber-space/gilmour-space-secures-major-funding. ∗ Secure World Foundation, Global Counterspace Capabilities: An Open Source Assessment, 2026 (Broomfield, CO: Secure World Foundation, 2026). Also published in DefenceInfo

'From Prototypes to Operational Realities: Australia’s Maritime Autonomous Systems Unit and the Tasks That Cannot Wait' Interview with Marcus Hellyer, Head of Research at Strategic Analysis Australia By Robbin Laird Alexander Robinson speaking to the 23 April 2026 Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar. Australia’s Maritime Autonomous Systems Unit, the MASU, stands at an inflection point. The period of experimentation and prototype evaluation that has defined the past several years of Australian engagement with unmanned maritime systems must now give way to something harder to achieve and more consequential: operational delivery. The pressure is not abstract. Australia faces a significant hull gap as its surface combatant fleet ages and new vessels remain years from delivery. The AUKUS pathway toward nuclear‑powered submarines promises transformative capability but on a timeline measured in decades. In the meantime, the strategic environment is not waiting. The question is whether MASU will rise to meet it as an operational command with real mission responsibilities, or remain primarily a niche capability and development cell within Navy’s bureaucracy. In a wide‑ranging conversation, defence analyst Marcus Hellyer, Head of Research at Strategic Analysis Australia and former Senior Analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, engaged with these questions directly. What emerged was both a frank assessment of where Australia currently stands and a practical agenda for what MASU should be doing right now. The Bolt‑Action Rifle Principle The instinct to treat maritime autonomous systems as precursors to some future perfected capability waiting until doctrine is fully developed, until the optimal platform arrives, until the concept of operations is airtight is precisely the trap Hellyer wants to avoid. He reached for a durable analogy: the bolt‑action rifle. If you look at a bolt‑action rifle as a prototype of some perfect firearm arriving thirty or forty years down the track, you miss the utility it offers right now in its own context. It kills people perfectly well. The same logic applies to maritime autonomous systems today. We know what Bluebottle USVs can do. We have seen them conduct fisheries surveillance operations. We have a good picture of their reliability from company testing and exercises such as Autonomous Warrior. The question is not whether these systems are ready for something; they are. The question is what that something should be. The answer lies not in the systems themselves but in the operational problems Australia already has and can already see coming. Learning by doing, iterating against real mission requirements, generating real data, these are the activities of an operational command, not a purely developmental one. The Hull Gap as Strategic Opportunity The Australian shipbuilding program’s well‑documented delivery challenges create an opportunity to reframe the hull gap. Rather than treating the absence of new surface combatants as simply a problem to be managed, the question becomes: how can maritime autonomous systems help bridge that gap operationally over the coming decade? The common objection that the vast distances of the Indo‑Pacific make Australian autonomous systems irrelevant compared to the compact operating environment of Ukraine’s Black Sea campaign does not hold up to scrutiny. Industry is already producing relatively small autonomous systems with strategically relevant reach: sufficient, in principle and depending on payload and configuration, to operate from Australia into the northern archipelago, from Guam to the Philippines, from the Philippines toward Taiwan. The geometry is no longer prohibitive. This reframing also changes how to think about what MASU should prioritize. Extending reach into the first island chain, managing water space to Australia’s north, building comprehensive port security for facilities that will eventually host nuclear‑powered submarines, these are not science fiction. They are near‑term operational requirements that autonomous systems, fielded thoughtfully and connected to real CONOPS, can begin addressing now. Protecting the Submarines Before They Arrive Hellyer’s sharpest observation concerned what he sees as the most underappreciated vulnerability in the AUKUS submarine pathway. He is not particularly worried about whether Australia eventually acquires and crews nuclear‑powered submarines; that will happen. Nor is he losing sleep over the prospect that technological advances will suddenly make submarines transparent to detection, vessels operating at the speeds and depths modern submarines achieve remain profoundly difficult to find. What concerns him deeply is survivability in port and during transit to open water. Submarines often spend the majority of their operational lives in port or in dry dock. HMAS Stirling, Australia’s primary naval base near Perth, will become the home of some of the most valuable and strategically consequential vessels in the Australian Defence Force. The question of how to defend that base against the full range of threats that will exist when those vessels arrive and that already exist today demands urgent attention. The threat picture is layered and diverse. Long‑range ballistic missiles can reach Australian ports. Autonomous surface and underwater vehicles, potentially carrying small missiles or drone payloads, can be launched from considerable distances. Container ships, as Hellyer and I discussed, can serve as covert launch platforms, a pattern with both Iranian activities and World War II precedent. Short‑range drones do not need long range if the platform carrying them does. In a plausible worst‑case scenario, a high‑value submarine damaged or destroyed by a very low‑cost drone, launched from a long‑range unmanned platform, would represent a catastrophic return‑on‑investment failure. The response architecture, layered air defence, counter‑drone systems, underwater barrier operations, surface surveillance networks, is not futuristic. It is anticipatable and buildable now. And HMAS Stirling offers a ready‑made development environment. Whatever defensive architecture Australia learns to build around Stirling can subsequently be applied offensively to bottle up adversary forces at strategic chokepoints. The skills and the mesh networks transfer. The ISR Grid as Foundation Hellyer’s specific operational suggestion, deploying thin‑line sonar arrays on Bluebottle USVs and potentially on larger UUVs such as Speartooth and Ghost Shark, points toward a broader architectural principle. For relatively modest investment, Australia could begin placing large numbers of underwater sensors across the approaches to its major ports and along the transit corridors its submarines will need to use. These systems could form the beginning of a defensive anti‑submarine warfare barrier. But the value of this activity extends beyond its immediate tactical purpose. Every sensor network of this kind generates data, and the task of collecting, distributing, and acting on that data whether through USV‑to‑USV relay, USV‑to‑aircraft handoff, or satellite distribution builds exactly the mesh‑networking competency that more advanced future systems will require. It almost does not matter precisely how the data flows are resolved in early iterations. What matters is that the force learns to resolve them, because that learning is the foundation upon which future capability is built. Fleet Mix: Not a Capital Ship One of the more important conceptual points to emerge from the conversation concerns the fundamental difference in how to think about autonomous maritime systems compared to capital ships. A capital ship is designed to do everything itself. It is an integrated weapons and sensor platform. An autonomous maritime systems fleet is optimized differently: multiple specialized platforms, each contributing different capabilities, working together toward a combined effect. Hellyer raised the cautionary example of Triton as a warning about what happens when autonomous systems are asked to replicate everything a traditional exquisite manned platform can do. The result is predictable: development takes as long, costs as much, and produces as few units. The whole point of the autonomous systems revolution, its promise of intelligent mass over exquisite scarcity, is lost. Mine Countermeasures, Amphibious Support, and the Full Mission Set The conversation identified three immediate mission sets for MASU that extend well beyond the Ukrainian‑inspired port‑strike scenario that dominates public discussion. First, underwater barrier operations to protect submarine transit corridors and deny adversary UUVs the ability to lay mines in approaches to Australian ports. Second, comprehensive port security, including defence against drone swarms, autonomous surface vessels, and other asymmetric threats, which carries commercial value as well as military utility. The threat to merchant shipping approaching Australian ports is real and does not require state‑level adversaries to materialize. Third, and perhaps most overlooked: mine countermeasures. As Hellyer noted candidly, Australia, like most Western nations, has allowed its mine countermeasure capability to atrophy significantly. The most effective response to a mine threat is to prevent mines from being laid in the first place, and autonomous systems operating persistent barrier patrols around port approaches offer a practical mechanism for doing exactly that. The Offshore Patrol Vessels already in service, integrated with USV and UUV capabilities, represent an existing asset combination that could deliver this mission without waiting for new procurement. The 2023 Defence Strategic Review and the subsequent National Defence Strategy have directed the Australian Army towards a more explicitly amphibious and littoral operational focus. Maritime USVs have obvious roles in amphibious operations: sanitizing landing zones, conducting ISR in contested littoral environments, providing persistent surveillance of the operational space ahead of landing forces. Given the deep operational relationship between the Australian Defence Force and the United States Marine Corps, this is an area where coordinated development could produce capabilities valuable to both forces. Strategic Rear Defence and the Alliance Value Proposition The conversation closed with a point that deserves more prominent attention in Australian strategic discourse. Japan, South Korea, and the United States increasingly regard Australia as a strategic rear area, a secure base from which to sustain and regenerate forces operating in the western Pacific. That strategic value is only as durable as Australia’s ability to actually defend its ports, its logistics nodes, and its maritime approaches. A robust MASU, one genuinely delivering operational effects rather than conducting perpetual prototype evaluation, is therefore not merely an Australian defence capability. It is a contribution to allied deterrence, a demonstration that the strategic rear is credibly defended, and potentially a model for collaborative capability development that partners could invest in and contribute to. The alliance value proposition runs in both directions. Hellyer noted that real progress is being made in Australian thinking about autonomous systems after years of what he considered excessive caution. The investments are real. The conceptual advances are real. But the gaps remain, and the timeline pressure is intensifying. The adversarial autonomous systems that might threaten Australian ports are not waiting for MASU’s concept of operations to mature. A large UUV capable of travelling from the northern approaches to Australia to its major ports is essentially a question of battery volume, platform size, and design choices, rather than a distant technological fantasy. Conclusion: Focus on Real‑World Mission Requirements MASU should be focused on real mission requirements: port security, submarine transit protection, barrier ASW operations, mine countermeasure support, and amphibious ISR requirements. The Maritime Border Command already demonstrates what this looks like: an operational force using Australian‑built systems to deliver real‑world surveillance effects. The bolt‑action rifle is not a prototype of the machine gun. It is a weapon that kills people effectively right now. Australia’s maritime autonomous systems are not prototypes of some future fleet. They are capable systems that can begin delivering operational effects today, against threats that are already evident, in defence of infrastructure that cannot afford to wait. Marcus Hellyer is Head of Research at Strategic Analysis Australia and former Senior Analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. He is the author of multiple editions of The Cost of Defence and holds a Master’s and PhD in History and the History of Science from the University of California, San Diego, as well as a Master’s in Strategic Studies. Also published in Second Line of Defense