Building Mass with Industry: Industrial Capacity Is Combat Power

The session on building mass with industry opened with a disclaimer. Air Vice Marshal Robert Denney, Northrop Grumman’s Country Executive for Australia, told the audience he had built his own slides and that they were “for oral learners,” not visual ones. A non-compete arrangement with a colleague meant he would not be competing with the earlier speaker’s material. The joke set the tone for a short, unadorned argument that cut against how most air forces spend their money.

Denney brought 33 years in the Royal Australian Air Force to the podium. He commanded No 6 Squadron and No 82 Wing, served as Head of Air Force Capability, and finished as Head of Force Integration. In that last post he was responsible for designing and assuring delivery of interoperable capabilities across the joint force. He joined Northrop Grumman in January 2025 and now spends his time building Australian industry partnerships and connecting them to U.S. capability and technology. That career gave him standing to say what he said next: the tacticians, himself included in his day, have been optimizing the wrong part of the problem.

The change Clausewitz missed

Denney began with a historical claim. Something changed in warfare in the 1800s, visible in the American Civil War, confirmed in the First World War, and decisive in the Second. Industrialization turned war from a contest decided by tactical brilliance into an economic contest decided by the nation with the greatest industrial output. The mobilization of national economies for mass production of war materiel determines what reaches the front line, how much exists at the start, and how much arrives as reinforcement.

Clausewitz’s work appeared in 1832, just as this shift was beginning. Denney’s point was that industrialization was not part of the strategic thinking of the time, so the generations of staff college tutorials that have since analyzed On War have not dwelt on it either. The discipline of strategy inherited a blind spot.

The air domain depends on industry more than any other

Denney argued that the dependency is sharpest in the air. On land, he said, Russia has shown that a soldier can be given a rifle and two weeks of training, and mass can be generated that way. That is a crude and costly form of mass, but it is mass.

The air domain does not allow it. Even to occupy the air, a nation needs complex machinery built with advanced manufacturing techniques, specialized materials, and skilled workforces. Air power depends on industry merely to exist and far more to create mass. Land and maritime forces can improvise to some degree. An air force cannot improvise an airframe.

Nations know the cost of the alternative, which is why they have always sought quick victories to avoid endurance contests. Denney offered two examples. Blitzkrieg succeeded in Western Europe, then Russia turned the Eastern Front into a grind, which let the Allies’ industrial capacity become the determining factor. More recently, he said, Iran turned an American expectation of rapid decapitation into a contest of endurance. It did this partly by absorbing weapons, and partly by exploiting the reality that the United States will not fully mobilize.

That last point matters for every Western democracy. Full mobilization takes substantial political capital, which democracies rarely hold outside a threat to national survival. Ukraine is facing that kind of threat now. Denney said the case more relevant to Australia is Poland, which is elevating industrial capacity in specific areas.

The shape of a war

At the center of the talk was a diagram Denney drew himself, which he said looked a lot like an ECG trace. He asked whether anyone recognized ectopic trigeminy, then described it as a plot of combat effect over time, “not to scale nor to be used for navigational purposes.”

The curve starts on the left with a level of peacetime readiness. Then comes a surge into the initial phase of combat, where combatants commit their pristine equipment, their war stocks, and their most highly skilled people. Intensity falls from that peak and settles into a sustained tempo. Denney called it the grind. The timeframes and magnitudes vary from war to war, but the general progression holds.

“Combat effect” is a dimensionless quantity in his construction. He joked that it might be called “capabilitrons,” though the term was already taken. It combines industrial capacity, readiness, tactical efficiency, stockpiles, communications, and more. Most of those components degrade as war goes on. Readiness falls because troops enter the fight with less training than in peacetime. Stockpiles, weapons reserves, and communications networks are targeted and destroyed. Tactics do improve, but they improve on both sides, so the improvement does not give either side a lasting edge.

What remains in the grind is set mainly by industrial capacity. Denney put it directly: that is what makes your mass. The height of the line in the grind is the rate at which a nation can replace combat effect against the rate at which an enemy can destroy it. A nation that produces more than it loses can rebuild. More often, he noted, a nation commits any surplus to a push for victory that would end the grind. This is especially so in a limited war, where political will to stay engaged decays quickly.

What industry makes in the grind

Denney split industry’s contribution into two categories.

The first is what he called the things you consume whatever the combat outcome: munitions, fuel, and spare parts. These are consumed and resupplied as a matter of course, even when everything goes to plan. Logistics systems must be accelerated and “turbocharged” for the increased tempo, and they will be targeted by an enemy who goes after production and distribution as well as the front line.

The second is reinforcement of losses: workforce, aircraft, ground support, command and control nodes. These are items a force does not plan to consume but must replace because of the destructive nature of combat.

On reinforcement, Denney was blunt about Australia’s position. Replacing a modern, high-technology aircraft in a reasonable time frame is unlikely. He suggested Australia does not have that ability today. He also argued Australia should not plan on allies having the capacity, the willingness to forgo their own needs, and the means to transport such things to Australia, on the scale needed to sustain the level of combat effect Australian planners expect in protracted operations.

For Australia, then, sustained combat effect requires sufficient domestic industrial capacity. That capacity must come from somewhere, and the timing creates the difficulty. Industrial capacity before a war determines the level of the grind, and only a finite amount can be added once a war begins. Denney said the real challenge may be raising it at all, given the other national distractions and drains on resources. History shows that it takes years if you wait for the shooting to start.

A force design problem

His conclusion was that capacity must be built up front, before an adversary starts destroying the equipment a nation already has. What Australia builds now will be the base from which its industry grows when a war starts.

He then reframed the issue. “It’s not an industry problem; it’s a combat power problem.” Industrial readiness and capacity must become a force design consideration. The size and areas of investment needed to establish the industrial base should be part of the design process, alongside platforms, sensors, and networks, and not treated as a procurement afterthought.

For where to start in what he called the pre-war period, and which he said is now, Denney pointed to consumables: munitions, fuel, and spare parts. He was careful about the business case. The production should not be sized to the current demand of the Australian Defence Force. Exporting any surplus would be welcome but should not be a prerequisite. The purpose is twofold. One is to build stockpiles and war stocks that will be there if war comes. The more important one is to develop the industrial capacity for the grind.

The paradox of deterrence spending

Denney acknowledged an awkward feature of this argument. The true value of the investment is something everyone hopes never to see realized. In the best case it would look like the worst value-for-money decision in history, an inefficient waste of production. The justification is deterrence, the same logic applied to military hardware. A submarine that is never fired in anger is not a wasted submarine. Industrial capacity that is never called on to fight a protracted war is not wasted capacity either, if it helped prevent that war.

He added that history treats industrial capacity once the shooting starts as the war winner, and that is why it needs to be treated as a requirement now.

Where the resources come from

“What’s the offset?” Denney asked, noting that this might get some people excited.

Australia is currently consuming a great many resources to be ready to fight tonight. The tacticians, as he was in his day, are working to make the point of the spear as sharp as possible: maximizing tactical readiness and aircraft serviceability, running the highest-fidelity exercises, and tightening interoperability. He said he did exactly this when he held those jobs.

His challenge was about what that effort does to the overall shape of the curve. In a resource-constrained environment, investment in the peak is investment taken from the grind. A force that maximizes the height of the red line at the front is driving down capacity later in the war because it is not investing in it. It is not maximizing the area under the curve, which is the total combat effect the nation can bring to a sustained war of endurance.

That image carries his argument. The usual measure of readiness looks at the height of the peak. His measure looks at the integral. The two lead to different budgets.

The closing question

Denney tied this to the present. Unless a force achieves a decisive result in the initial phase, war is determined by industrial capacity in the grind. Forces enter a phase limited by that capacity, and he pointed to the Middle East today, where precision strike and integrated air and missile defense interceptors are the constraint.

His parting question to the audience was whether a quick win is a realistic expectation against the most likely adversary Australia is preparing for. Or is the more likely scenario an industrial arm wrestle of attrition, which is also the most dangerous one for Australia? He believes it is the latter. The war Australia should prepare for is one that will be determined over the long run by industrial capacity.

That capacity is what gives the ADF combat mass to sustain operations “not tonight, but night after night, week after week, month after month.” The sooner and the more Australia builds it, the greater it will be at the pivotal moment, even if that means not sharpening the spear quite so much. Denney’s last claim was about deterrence itself. Preparing for the deterministic part of the war Australia will most likely face is what will deter an adversary, and deterring an adversary is the ultimate goal for Australian security.

What the argument adds to the seminar

Denney’s talk sits comfortably beside the day’s larger theme. If the seminar’s emerging answer to air combat mass is that the next generation of airpower is an enterprise and not a platform, then Denney supplied the enterprise’s foundation. A fleet is a snapshot. A regenerative enterprise is a rate: how quickly a nation can turn factories, workforce, logistics, and stocks into combat effect while someone is trying to destroy them.

His argument also complicates the “exquisite versus intelligent mass” debate. If reinforcing exquisite platforms is unrealistic for Australia, then the case for lower-cost, more producible systems is not simply about cost per aircraft. It is about what a national industrial base can actually regenerate under fire. The same applies to the kill web: a network that depends on a few irreplaceable nodes inherits their fragility.

The hardest part of his message is political and budgetary, not technical. Building industrial capacity as a force design input means accepting a less sharp spear today, in exchange for a deeper force later. That is a difficult trade in any defence budget, and harder when the threat is described in terms of readiness tonight. Denney offered no formula for the trade, and said as much by joking that he had spared the audience a colleague’s formula. What he offered was a way to see it: measure the area under the curve, not only the height of the peak.