Preview: Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar, 1 October 2026, National Gallery of Australia
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.