An Update on the Royal Australian Air Force: A Conversation with Air Marshal Chappell

At the May 22, 2025 Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar, Air Marshal Geoff Brown (Retd) , former Chief of Air Force 2011-2015), talked with Air Marshal Chappell (current Chief of Air Force since July 2024) about the current state of the RAAF and the way ahead.

Air Marshal Chappell emphasized that the Royal Australian Air Force is highly regarded globally, built on over a century of investment in people and training.

He provided several examples of exceptional performance:

• During the Pitch Black 24 exercise, involving 20 nations and 4,500 personnel, Australian aviators demonstrated exceptional crisis response when an Italian pilot was forced to eject. Within minutes, Australian aircraft were overhead providing assistance, leading to the pilot’s recovery within 90 minutes despite being 90 miles from Darwin.
• Even more dramatic was a life-saving mission to Lord Howe Island, where a C-27J Spartan aircraft battled severe weather conditions — winds gusting to 40 knots against limits of 25 knots — to evacuate a six-year-old boy suffering from sepsis. The crew successfully landed on their sixth and final approach, demonstrating the kind of skill and determination that defines the service.
• Perhaps most telling were his accounts of P-8A Poseidon operations in contested airspace over the South China Sea, where young officers and non-commissioned officers conducted Australia’s most sensitive missions while facing aggressive intercepts by foreign fighter aircraft. The professionalism displayed by crews comprising flying officers and corporals in these high-stakes encounters reflects the quality of training and character development within the service.

Contrary to widespread concerns about defense recruitment, the Royal Australian Air Force has actually grown by 685 people in the past year, reaching its largest size since 1998. The statistics tell a compelling story of organizational health:

• Total separation rate of just 6.9%, well within the healthy range for large organizations.
• Voluntary departures at only 3.6% annually.
• Involuntary separations at 0.5%, representing about two people per day who fail to meet Air Force standards.

“We have young Australians and not so young Australians lined up around the corner looking to be recruited,” Chappell noted, though he acknowledged some administrative challenges in the recruitment process that need addressing.

The real challenge lies not in numbers but in experience levels. The Air Force faces a shortage of supervisory personnel — corporals, sergeants, and warrant officers — partly due to COVID-era departures and competition from growing defense industries.

Drawing lessons from the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, Chappell emphasized how Russia’s failure to achieve air superiority stemmed from fundamental doctrinal flaws dating back to the Spanish Civil War where air power was treated as subservient to land forces rather than as an independent domain.

“They weren’t structured to try and gain and maintain air superiority over what was an inferior force,” he observed, noting that had they achieved air dominance, “everything would have come easier for them and almost impossible for the Ukrainians.”

However, he cautioned against directly applying Ukraine lessons to Australia’s strategic context. Any future conflict in the Indo-Pacific would unfold very differently — arriving “incredibly quickly” across vast distances, potentially reaching from “the Northern Rock of Bathurst Island to the southern tip of Tasmania in seconds to minutes in cyber and within 15 minutes, potentially physical.”

Air Marshal Chappell underscored that Australia is in the midst of a significant capability transformation with approximately $1.8 billion invested in advanced strike weapons. The inventory will include 200 Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles (LRASM), 80 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles Extended Range (JASSM-ER), and 63 AGM-158C LRASM missiles across Super Hornet, Growler, and eventually F-35 platforms.

Recent exercises demonstrated the potential of these capabilities, with strike packages flying 2,400 nautical miles from Australia’s east coast to simulate targets within one minute of planned timing. “You take that combat radius from Darwin or Curtin or Learmonth, that takes you into the northern South China Sea,” Chappell noted.

But Chappell identified clear priorities for additional investment, using a boxing metaphor: “There’s no point putting muscles on arms as a boxer if you’ve got a weak chin and you can’t cover your core. If you’re unconscious on the canvas, then the big arms aren’t going to matter.”

His top priorities include:

• Integrated Air and Missile Defense: Described as critical infrastructure protection, with active defense capabilities under development through Air 6500 program working with industry and U.S. partners.
• Counter-targeting Capabilities: As Air Marshal Chappell noted: “The more we can poke out the eyes and the ears and the other senses of a competitor when we come to fight them, then the easier everything else gets.”
• Aerial Refueling: Air Marshal Chappell underscored: “You can’t have enough gas airborne,” emphasizing the need for either more tanker aircraft or autonomous collaborative platforms carrying fuel and sensors.
• Weapons Stockpiles: Acknowledging that advanced weapons will be consumed rapidly in high-intensity conflict, similar to what’s observed in Ukraine, clearly finding ways to build weapons stockpiles is an urgent and key priority.

Looking beyond traditional defense structures, Chappell advocates for leveraging Australia’s robust civilian aviation sector to enhance national air power capacity. Unlike some other industrial sectors relevant to defense, Australia’s aviation industry is “really vibrant, really capable” with significant untapped potential for defense cooperation.

This concept would mirror the Navy’s Australian Maritime Defense Council, creating frameworks for integrating civilian capabilities during crises while maintaining industry expertise critical to ongoing air power generation.

Central to Chappell’s strategic thinking is a refined approach to deterrence focused not on nations or militaries, but on what he terms “malign minds” — the decision-makers who might choose to escalate from strategic competition to conflict.

“We’ve got to focus on that target, then we’ve also got to understand that deterrence requires capability with credibility, and it’s communicated in a way that’s comprehended by those targets,” he explained.

This philosophy emphasizes that deterrence comes not just from acquiring future capabilities or conducting current operations, but from demonstrating through force generation exercises that Australia can “continue to deliver, degrade, disrupt, destroy, defeat” while remaining “highly lethal, highly survivable.”

As Australia develops its 2026 National Defense Strategy, Chappell argues for ensuring air power’s role is properly recognized within the broader maritime strategy. While acknowledging that the service has benefited from two decades of focus on high-end training rather than being consumed by Middle Eastern operations, he warns against complacency.

“We’re not going to remain in a pretty good place if we don’t get more focused attention on air power,” he emphasized, noting that Australia’s geography — three oceans and an archipelago — is fundamentally covered by air, with air power providing both lethality and survivability that enhances all other services’ capabilities.

Featured image: Flight Lieutenants Sam (L) and Jake taxi to the runway in preparation for a training sortie during Exercise Pitch Black 24.