By Robbin Laird

This was the title of the presentation by Chris McInnes, a noted Australian airpower and defence analyst, to the April 11, 2024 Williams Foundation Seminar. He provided an overview of how airpower made unique contributions to Australian defence by providing rapid strike options throughout the Australian areas of interest.

McInnes highlighted air power’s ability to provide rapid engagement and could do so over extensive operational space to deliver desired effects. He argued that in times of an effects-based approach, airpower transforms the time and space dimension for Australia’s maritime strategy.

Airpower provides cost-effective options for Australia’s national security and cost-effectiveness should be prioritized in Australia’s maritime strategy of denial, focusing on delivering large amounts of high explosives to hard targets like warships, airfields, and ports.

Indeed, his presentation was an argument that airpower provided a cost-effective way to deliver massive firepower at range.

His analysis led to his argument that airpower gives Australia time and space to plan, act, and move effectively. This means that prioritizing investment in air superiority to avoid second-best hand in high-stakes situations is crucial.

The presentation can be broken down into three core efforts.

The first was to look back at World War II and examine airpower’s key role in the Pacific campaign. It played a crucial and decisive impact on the enemy prior to any other means to encroach on the Japanese advances in the Pacific. A combined arms campaign was necessary to recover territory seized by the Japanese empire, but air power was the tip of the spear and a core element of the ability of the allied air forces from sea and land to destroy enemy forces.

The second revolved around the question of the time-space functionality of airpower. Every platform in the joint force is a time-space entity with core characteristics which define what it is able to do. Airpower can move at speed and range no ship can; ships provide slower moving capabilities which can build out a presence force.

As he argued:

“We can swiftly respond with airpower across huge distances with different options in different places on different days. We have more options available and more time in which to consider them.

“But it works both ways. Three hours from Darwin is also three hours to Darwin. PLA airpower can and does hold Australia and its assets at risk across our region in a discretionary, scalable and sustainable manner and in hours, not days. It has already disrupted Australia’s sense of time and space. We are inside our warning time.

“I don’t think we’ve quite latched on to what that means though. Airpower shapes how we sense and exploit time and space, which is the most precious thing for Australia and its maritime strategy.”

He used a chart to visually underscore the time-space point about airpower.

McInnes carefully examined the cost-benefit of weapons delivery enabled by airpower with standoff weapons from sea or land.

He introduced his analysis as follows:

“My analysis is limited to strike as the central operational feature of Australia’s maritime strategy of denial. I see the delivery of large amounts of high explosives as determining strike effectiveness and war, and credibility in circumstances short of war.

“Australia’s maritime strategy of denial depends on our ability to deliver large and concentrated amounts of high explosive at long range, we could call this impactful projection. We need to hit hard enough to stop movement in different places on different days across a huge area over and over again.

The charts he showed highlighted the range, unit costs per weapon, and warhead class correlated with the launch platform to assess cost effectiveness of ADF weapons.

He described the charts this way:

“Unit costs are shown in U.S. dollars and are based on U.S. budget figures going back to the 70s. The unit cost of new weapons will fall as more are purchased.

“The charts clearly show that the delivering the weight of explosive our maritime strategy needs is going to be very expensive, particularly if we become overly reliant on stand-off missiles rather than stand-in weapons in the bottom left corner. It is remarkable how often one reads of the ADF need for long range missiles because of the apparently short range of our air power.

“We must however distinguish between stand-off range – which is the distance a weapon travels from its launcher, and which is what the first chart shows – and effective reach, which incorporates the distance the platform and weapons can rapidly cover.

“When considering effective reach rather than stand-off range, the picture changes dramatically. Stand-in weapons suddenly become some of our longest-range options.

“The second chart incorporates a modest strike radius for the Super Hornet, our shortest-range weapon carrying aircraft. The ADF certainly does need stand-off weapons as they have specific utility against particular targets including air defenses, but they are expensive and inefficient high explosive delivery devices.

“Every exquisite component is single use and many many missiles are needed for strikes, particularly against defended targets. They must carry and do everything internally, including propulsion, navigation and communication. This forces trade-offs, often in warhead size.”

“Stand-in weapons are much lower cost and almost entirely warhead, including our largest options. They do rely on expensive delivery platforms, but these are reusable, and multi-role. We do need standoff weapons for specific tasks. But once that is done, stand-in weapons are our most economical and among our longest range options for maritime strategy of denial.”

He then focused on the key question of the operational infrastructure for the ADF and its operations, arguing that criticism of airpower as too dependent on vulnerable bases and supply lines overlooked the reality that these dependencies could not be avoided.

This is how he put it when looking at the opportunity costs of different operations:

“What are the trade-offs?

“It seems unavoidable that Australia will always need bases and supplies in its north for military operations in our region. Because at some point, all operations need bases and they will all need air power of some kind. Suggestions that dispersing Australia’s assets throughout the archipelago to our north can somehow minimize these costs are hard to square.

“Even assuming we hold permission to fly missiles through our neighbours airspace, the units will need to supply and defend themselves locally against air and other attack and they will still need supply lines back to Australia, which will have to be secured using air and sea power.”

McInnes’s closing point was to call for a renewed emphasis on the primacy of air superiority in airpower thinking and investment. As he said:

“However, we will have no options at all without air superiority. And this I contend is where we have reason for concern. In its simplest sense, air superiority is the condition under which we can operate free from prohibitive interference by the enemy.

““Air superiority can be general or local in time and space, it is almost never absolute, and it is a continuous struggle. It is deeply ingrained in the design and operation of Western societies and military forces, including the ADF. It is fundamentally why Australia has an Air Force. It was explicitly the prime campaign for Australian air power until the turn of the century.

“But the Western bloc has lost sight of this primacy over the last 30 years due to complacency and distraction. While the U.S. is reinvigorating it’s air superiority approach, its Air Force is struggling for funding while operating its oldest and smallest aircraft fleet since it was formed. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given European air forces a rude wake up. Australia has strengths in the air but it would appear requirements exceed resources geographically and across missions. Mass and tempo are limited.”

“Air superiority is a fast-moving competition and deeply unforgiving for those who fall behind. The primacy of air superiority needs to be restored, particularly as the threat grows and funding is squeezed.”

The really decisive aspect of his presentation and indeed what is at the core of the evolution of 21^st century combat forces, is the question of payloads and platforms or what I refer to as the evolution of the kill-web force. At the heart of the evolution of fifth generation enabled operations is a significant shift in terms of the sensor-shooter relationship whereby the weapons to be fired at an adversary do not necessarily come for the platform which has the sensor which has identified the target. This is at the heart of the F-35 development which frankly is still not fully understood and comprehended in the defence analytical world.

If your goal is to deliver lethal payloads, there are a variety of ways to do so.

But at the heart of the issue is where are they launched from and determining what target sets determine which weapons you need and their range. With manned and uncrewed air assets, one significantly reduces the range of the weapon necessary to strike a target as opposed to being launched from land or a ship. The U.S. aircraft carriers have combined speed, mobility, and launching airpower to close the distance for the missiles being fired.

To conclude, I want to build on McInnes’s focus on the need dramatically to reduce the cost of the weapons being used. I would argue that we need to build the functional equivalent of the 155mm shell used by the artillery for an air-launched missile which can be produced across the allied forces.

This will not be a super long missile, probably in the range of 400 miles, but the long range TLAMS which go further are expensive and in limited supply. What this means is that the future belongs to the common air missile produced in quantity that could also be fired from the ground or sea. The functional equivalent of the role of the shells of the 88 in the German army in World War II is what I envisage.

The answer is that it does not look like the defence strategy which has been followed throughout most of the post-war period. The threat envelope is quite different. There is no American and Western managed rules-based order dominating the world. There are diverse authoritarian movements and states which follow their distinct interests but play off of one another.

As one analyst has put it: “But the end of the Cold War has led to the atomisation of threats – many of these threat groups possess weapons and backing from powerful regional states that in some cases make them as capable as state-based actors.

“Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Middle East, where improved military capabilities are combined with an ideological zealotry that makes normal cost-benefit calculations underpinning deterrence redundant. This makes it very difficult for Washington to achieve the type of deterrence on which long-term regional stability is often based.”

And the direct threat to Australia is broad and not narrowly focused on what the Australian Defence Force can do. A sustainable force and a resilient Australia are beyond the scope of narrowly considered defence investments in a ready force. They are all of government and all of society challenges.

At the Williams Foundation Seminar held on April 11, 2024, the former Australian Secretary of Home Affairs, Mike Pezzullo, clearly underscored how different the era into which Australia and its allies had entered compared to the previous one.

As he put it in his presentation:

“What might this mean for Australia and specifically the Australian defence enterprise? Defence planning is rightly focused on a wide range of contingencies. With very little notice the Australian Defence Force could be called upon to undertake rapid deployments into the nearby arc of small states. While necessary and important, such ventures would only be marginally relevant to today’s great issues of war and peace. The same could be said of vital operations in support of distressed communities in the wake of natural disasters.

“Given long lead times, defence also has to focus on complex capability and programming issues, especially as related to the planned force of 2035 and beyond.”

But he cautioned that the threats in front of Australia now needed to drive a re-set in efforts that considered the engagement of the society in its own defence, not just crafting hypothetical future force structures.

And he quite correctly warned against the danger of shaping Potemkin long range capabilities that may never arrive in time to make a difference.

He focused much of his attention on the need to engage whole of government in working with economic leaders in shaping a way ahead for a more resilient Australia that could support a sustainable ADF along with core allies working with Australia as a strategic reserve both to deter and to prevail in crisis situations.

He underscored: “The most important question is whether a nation at large has the structures, capabilities and above all, the mindset and the will, that are required to fight and keep fighting to absorb, recover, endure and prevail. These cannot be put in place or engendered on the eve of the storm.

“Now as a practical suggestion to focus relevant effort, we should consider modernizing the earlier practice from the 1930s and and then again from the 1950s of the preparation of a war book. The war book of those times were guides on what would need to be done and by whom, in the event of war. Preparing a new war book would help to focus the national mind.”

He clarified his suggested approach as follows:

“A new war book would deal with the entire span of civil defense and mobilization which would be required to move to a war footing, consisting of a range of coordinated plans. Some would deal with critical infrastructure protection, and national cyber defense. Other plans would deal with the mobilization of labour and industrial production covering supply chains, industrial materials, chemicals, minerals, and so on.

“Sectoral plans would address the allocation, rationing and or stockpiling of fuel, energy, water, food, transport, shipping, aviation, communications, health services, pharmaceuticals, building construction resources, and so on and so forth.

“They would also be plans for the protection of the civil population covering evacuation, rapid fortification and or shelter construction, and for augmenting police fire, rescue and ambulance capacities, and also dealing with social cohesion, border security, domestic security and public safety.

“Lessons could be adapted from international experience, especially Ukraine and Israel, as well as from domestic experiences such as natural disasters, and the COVID pandemic noting however, that war is different.”

In short, 21^st century defence is not narrowly focused on the ADF and long range investments in a future force.

All one has to look around you and find the activity of the multi-polar authoritarian world and the end of the American-led “rules-based order” to understand the future is now.

How best to shape a way ahead in terms of augmented capabilities in short to mid-term and engage the nation in its own defence for the longer term is really the challenge.

By Robbin Laird

The first of two seminars of the Sir Richard Williams Foundation in 2024 was held on 11 April 2024 at the National Gallery of Australia.

The seminar was entitled, “The Multi-Domain Requirements of an Australian Maritime Strategy”, and the aim of the seminar was identified as follows:

“To examine the enduring and emerging multi-domain requirements of an Australian maritime strategy in the context of the Defence Strategic Review. The Seminar examines the requirements through a Defence lens but will consider all national means that contribute to a maritime strategy and the need for coherence across concepts, doctrine, equipment, basing and preparedness. This strategic coherence is needed to synchronise effects across the Whole of Australian Government, Defence and industry, as well as international partners.”

Last year’s DSR highlighted the ramped-up threat to Australia and the need to focus on the region, its partnerships and the need to build a more effective defence effort by Australia in the regional deterrence context. The focus of the government in its subsequent priorities has tended to focus on longer term acquisitions, first in terms of nuclear submarines through the AUKUS relationship and then for a new surface fleet in its recently released surface fleet review.

A multi-domain operations discussion builds on the work of the Foundation during the time I have been writing the reports since 2014. The focus has been upon building a fifth-generation force, which after all revolves around sensor-shooter relationships built across an integrated force delivering multi-domain effects or what I prefer to call a kill-web enabled force.

The focus is upon how you get full value out of your force now and to build out that extant force in the future to become more lethal and survivable. If you are focused on the fight tonight, which any credible combat force must focus on, then long range assets are projections of the possible, not augmentations of the credibility of the operational force.

So any multi-domain discussion inevitably focuses on the way ahead for the force in being, rather than a force planning discussion of a projected future.

When you add a specific target of what is that force in being operating in support of, inevitably gaps are identified, and the question then is how do you close the most significant gaps which threaten your security and defence interests. Such a focus is in turn raised if one raises the question of the means to the end of what one might consider a maritime threat envelope and strategy to deal with that envelope.

In other words, one would expect the seminar discussion to focus more on the transition challenges of the ADF and the nation to deal with threat environment in the near to midterm rather than in 2040.

That is what happened at the seminar in which speakers started by highlighting the importance of focusing on the here and now rather than on the force that might exist in 2035 or 2040. After the initial presentations focused on the current challenges and the role of the ADF and the nation to prepare to deal with them, the discussion shifted to whether Australia had a maritime strategy and if so what were the priorities of such a strategy.

The majority of the presentations focused on specific services or industrial perspectives of how best to meet the multi-domain requirements for the evolving Australian defence challenge.

But at the heart of the discussion was really the major challenge facing Australia: how to close defence gaps? How to engage the nation beyond the ADF in the broader defence challenges facing Australia? How to build a sustainable force?

In later articles, I will provide detailed looks at the presentations and how the presenters dealt with these and other issues associated with the transition of the ADF. But here I am going to focus on the key issue of how does the ADF get more capable in the next three-to-five years and to do so in a way that is a prologue to the anticipated force transformation being designed?

Peter Jennings was the first speaker and he underscored that the DSR had highlighted the near-term threats but was putting its money in forces a decade away.

He put the challenge as follows:

Governments can and do promise to spend unbelievable quantities of money on the future force but you only know what you get when you open the box.

Not one cent of it buys deterrence today.

From a deterrence perspective there is potentially some risk in promising strong deterrent capabilities in the future while maintaining the military capabilities of a skinned cat in the present day.

That is the risk of pre-emption. Indeed, one reason why analysists are so worried about a mid- to late-2020s risk of conflict against Taiwan, or in the South China Sea, is that Xi Jinping may calculate that he faces a ‘use it or lose it’ choice with the PLA.

Xi’s best chance of strategic success to achieve unchallenged military dominance in the Pacific are maximised by early action before his opponents’ next generation military capabilities are realised and while the democracies are internally distracted and divided.

The tragedy is that there is so much which could be done with a bit of political and Defence push to strengthen ADF and national capabilities in the relative short term.

For example:

• Ramping up domestic ammunition production and stockpiling.
• Establishing offensive drone capabilities on the basis of existing technology – not everything has to be quantum, AI, hypersonically joint and enabled.
• Funding some of the incredibly smart military capabilities that have been developed by Australian businesses.
• Researching some of the remarkable military and operational achievements which the Ukrainians (with allied help) and the Israelis have used in recent months.
• Here I’m not just talking about drones; but also optimising air defence capabilities; integrating intelligence and battlefield situational awareness; finding the right balance between exotic and more prosaic technology; working out how to get things in production in less than a decade.

There is so much that could be done, so much so, in fact that our failure to do any of this makes me wonder if it is not the case that the government and Defence establishment is actually getting what it really wants?

The second presentation was by Mike Pezzullo, the former Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, who made an impassioned speech reminding the audience that building an effective defence structure is not simply the task of the ADF. The society needed to be engaged in shaping an Australia more capable of defending itself. You cannot outsource defence and security to an alliance or to the professional military for one needs to build a more resilient and sustainable Australian society and nation.

Jennifer Parker of the National Security College (ANU) provided a comprehensive look at the maritime security challenges facing Australia and argued that in fact there was no strategy to deal with these comprehensive challenges. Her talk focused attention on what is the demand signal and what is the product needed to deal with that demand signal for maritime security and defence.

Such an approach highlights what are the gaps to be met and how to meet them, which is quite different from force structure planning of an envisaged future force. Rather, one looks at demand drivers and what tools a nation has available to it, far beyond simply a professional military.

The remaining presentations provided insights regarding how the ADF is changing to deal with the evolving challenges and I will take a detailed look at these presentations and focus on them in later articles.

I will then return to the question of the match between the specific recommendations and the challenge of building an effective multi-domain force and sustainable society in dealing with the evolving threats and challenges.

By Robbin Laird

When shaping a relevant 21^st century defence approach, sustainability is a key aspect of any credible effort. Gone are the days where just in time delivery from distant global supply chains is an effective means for deployed defense assets.

Credible defense capability is built on a foundation of sustainability.

The war in Ukraine has exposed the Achilles heel of Western defense, namely the lack of magazine depth. Munitions and weapons have been in perilously short supply. Digging into one’s war reserves to help the Ukrainians is short term necessity and folly.

We collectively face the challenge of building a 21^st century version of the arsenal of democracy, whereby allies build munitions in common and cross support one another in a crisis. Just having a single point of failure or having to wait for delivery from a global supply chain almost certainly to be disrupted is a strategic failure of the first order.

If you are Australia, you face an especially difficult challenge as an island continent which is completely dependent in many areas on long global supply chains and a country in which manufacturing and self-processing of its rich natural resources has not been prioritized. Such a formula guarantees the absence of sustainable forces.

This situation becomes even more significant when one looks at the most plausible allied engagement strategy, namely working with all of its Pacific allies to cross-support one another, and not simply focus on the United States. By enhancing its indigenous supply capabilities, Australia can also form a strategic reserve for allies in the region or forces that might operate from Australia in the future.

But planning for such a future in the context of ongoing studies and briefing charts will not cut the cake. Briefing charts only kill the audience, not the enemy.

So what can be done in the three to five year period do achieve something real and concrete?

One answer is to build indigenous munitions capabilities, essentially a no-brainer from my point of view. If one looks at France, several years ago the government abolished the munitions facility established at the time of Louis XIV. Just in time was enough in our peaceful world. But with Macron focusing on the need for a war economy, the French have already rebuilt their munitions production capability and are proceeding apace.

It is rather obvious that Australia needs to do the same on a priority basis.

During my April 2024 visit to Australia, I had the chance to talk with a key munitions manufacturer, Robert Nioa about the challenge.

He is head of the Nioa group which is described on their website as follows:

NIOA is a privately-owned global munitions company. Established in Queensland, Australia in 1973, today the NIOA Group has strategic locations around the world. We are dedicated to the best practice supply and manufacture of firearms, weapons and munitions to Australian and allied nation defence forces, law enforcement agencies and commercial markets.

My main question to him was could they work an effective strategy of sustainable munitions supply for Australia in the timeframe which I think is critical.

According to Nioa: “Within a three-to-five-year window, we can enable Australia to provide the munitions required for an allied effort within the Indo Pacific region. We need dramatically eto xpand our energetics production, and we can do that within that three-to-five-year window.

“We don’t have enough production capacity in Australia currently to support what we need to do for ourselves, let alone to support allies in the Indo Pacific region.

“But we can build factories within that timeframe to provide the explosives required to produce the kinetic enablers for the ADF and as we scale up for allies in the region. We can build a factory to make solid rocket motors.

“We can build a factory to make the warheads. And then we can bring in technology for the guidance systems for long range strike or even expand conventional munitions production, everything from artillery munitions through to small arms production. It’s simply an allocation of funds and priorities.”

The demand signal for such expanded sustainable capability is clearly there with the shortfalls exposed in the war in Ukraine. By Australia expanding capacity they can become a strategic reserve for allies in the region as well.

And building such a sustainable infrastructure provides the material to enable lethal payloads in the future as new platforms and ways of delivering lethality evolve as well, such as I discuss in my latest book entitled The Coming of Maritime Autonomous Systems.

One can get caught up in imagining weapons of the future and building planning scenarios: but if you don’t have the building blocks in place for effective force sustainability, it really will not matter when you face a determined adversary that has built a sustainable force.

Photo: An Australian Army soldier from 1st Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment, fires the 84mm Carl Gustaf on 5th January 2024, Townsville Field Training Area, Queensland. Australian Army Soldiers from 1st Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment conducted static live fire with the 84mm Carl Gustaf, engaging 450-metre targets at the Townville Field Training Area. The training aimed to build confidence in members when using the weapon system and qualify junior non-commissioned officers as a part of the Section Commander Battle Course (SCBC). 5 January 2024. Credit: Australian Department of Defemce.

See also the following:

https://www.eurosatory.com/en/ammunition-supply-the-growing-role-of-australias-nioa-group-on-the-international-stage/