For three decades, “generation” has been a word we attach to aircraft: fourth, fifth, now sixth. The label implies that the next step forward is a better machine. The Sir Richard Williams Foundation’s 1 October seminar in Canberra, The Requirement for Air Combat Mass and Depth in the Indo-Pacific, suggested otherwise. It read less like a platform conference than a description of an enterprise. My special report, published this month, follows that argument through the day.
The April seminar was about readiness: fight tonight. This one asked whether the force that fights tonight is still fighting, and still deterring, months into a high-end contingency. The day began with geography and strategy and only then turned to what a force requires. Platforms were something to be fitted into a larger problem, not the starting point.
The best day is not the war
A platform-centric view measures a force on its best day: aircraft ready, bases intact, weapons stocked, networks up. But a war is the fifth day, the fifteenth and the fortieth, after the first strikes have landed on the infrastructure.
The People’s Liberation Army has spent a decade building a targeting complex of long-range strike, dense sensors and intelligence fusion that treats fixed, forward and known bases as vulnerabilities. A planner does not need to shoot down a fifth-generation fighter. It is enough to hold at risk the runways, fuel, munitions and maintenance that put it in the air. A small fleet of exquisite aircraft is an arithmetic problem, and arithmetic problems can be solved.
One industry presenter drew the answer as a graph of combat effect over time. A force surges into combat with pristine equipment, war stocks and skilled people, then declines into what he called the grind. The height of the line in the grind is set by industrial capacity: how fast a nation can replace combat effect as the enemy destroys it. A force optimised for the sharpest tip on its best day trades away the area under the curve, the total combat effect a nation can bring to a sustained war. This, he said, is not an industry problem. It is a combat power problem.
Regeneration is the test
That is what I mean by regenerative airpower: the capacity of an air combat enterprise to absorb attack, replace losses, reconstitute degraded nodes and keep generating combat effects across a campaign rather than a single engagement. The thing being regenerated is not an aircraft. It is the capacity to fight.
The seminar surfaced four elements, each on the Foundation’s agenda.
Mass that can be replaced. Collaborative combat aircraft were central, but speakers rejected the idea that Australia needs them because it expects to lose many. That is not the movie Australia is in. The case was risk management, capacity optimisation and persistence: uncrewed systems as the lever, scarce crews and aircraft such as the E-7 and the tanker as the fulcrum. They are additive, which fits awkwardly in an acquisition system built to swap one platform for the next. Attritable mass is valuable not because you can afford to waste it but because you can replace it, and that holds only if an enterprise exists to build, supply, maintain and integrate it. The sceptics were, in effect, asking for proof that the enterprise exists.
Depth that is designed. Geography becomes depth only when it is developed: distributed runways, fuel, munitions handling, repair capacity and layered base defence, paid for before the war. The seminar acknowledged that access, basing and overflight were not covered. That gap matters, because bases are what an adversary will target first.
People who cannot be surged. Aircraft come from factories. Aircrew, maintainers and logisticians come from training systems, which are slow. One senior officer admitted that nobody has yet thought through what a sixth-generation workforce looks like, and the enterprise’s workforce now includes software engineers and production specialists as well as pilots and mechanics.
Industry as the combat reserve. The MQ-28 program involves roughly 125 suppliers, with about 70 per cent of investment flowing to Australian industry, some from firms that had never worked in aerospace. The argument was for a sovereign kernel, the people and competencies who know how to design, build and adapt at speed. And production lines are regenerative capacity: once they close, they are very hard to reopen.
The evidence
On sustainment, a fleet funded around 16 flying hours a month per jet can find itself flown ten times that over Pacific distances, and the supply chain is not prepared for a tenfold increase sustained for months. Weapons expenditure makes the headlines. Sustainment is what quietly runs out.
On architecture, consider the May 2025 India–Pakistan air clash. Both sides flew capable fourth-plus-generation aircraft with good weapons and trained crews. One arrived with a far more advanced communications, sensor and command-and-control architecture, and the information advantage tipped the exchange. The platforms were comparable. The enterprises were not.
The enterprise extends to the nation
The room treated one final theme with growing urgency: the homeland. National polling cited at the opening found that 80 per cent of Australians believe a foreign military attack would have major or catastrophic consequences. No defence effort lasts without public understanding and consent. A later speaker argued that Australia has a defence strategy rather than a national one, because civil defence and mobilisation planning is largely absent.
I would put one point differently. That speaker argued that in the most demanding contingency Australia would deter only by annoying. Regeneration is how a middle power turns a modest force into a credible contribution to a coalition’s staying power. A bastion that can keep generating effects is far more than an annoyance, but only if it can regenerate.
What follows
Acquisition has to change. Decisions should be judged by their contribution to the regenerative capacity of the whole, not the performance of the item alone: a slightly better platform with a fragile supply chain may add less combat power than a less exquisite one embedded in a robust enterprise. Sustainment moves to the front of the conversation. And allied interoperability must extend beyond data links to shared spares, common munitions and software baselines, and distributed basing.
The arc across a decade of these seminars is visible. In 2014 the conversation was about acquiring the pieces of a twenty-first century air force; by 2024, fusing them around a fifth-generation core; in 2026, whether that core can be made deep, distributed and sustainable enough to survive a precision-strike adversary.
The closing synthesis said it plainly: air combat mass is far more than numbers of aircraft, and technology does not equal strategy. Platforms will keep arriving and they will matter. But the winning advantage will belong to the side that can regenerate.