What the Williams Foundation Seminar Told Us About the Next Generation

The Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar in Canberra on 1 October, The Requirement for Air Combat Mass and Depth in the Indo-Pacific, was framed around a question that sounds like a platform question: does Australia have enough air combat mass? By the end of the day, almost nobody in the room was answering it that way. Operators, industry executives and visiting commanders kept reaching for the same set of ideas: sustainment, industrial capacity, people, architecture, and the willingness of a society to carry a long fight.

The closing synthesis put it plainly. Mass is about much more than numbers of aircraft. It is a property of a whole system, and the test is whether that system has the depth to absorb disruption, adapt and keep operating. Technology, it added, does not equal a strategy.

That is the argument of my concluding essay: the next generation of airpower is an enterprise rather than a platform, and the quality that matters most is regeneration. By that I mean the capacity to absorb attack, replace losses and keep generating combat effects across a campaign rather than a single engagement. What follows tests that argument against what was said in the room. The seminar ran under Chatham House rules, so I have not attributed remarks to individuals.

The generation label loses its grip

The pointed comment on generations came from a former combat commander, who said he found the fourth-, fifth- and sixth-generation labels unhelpful. His example was a fourth-generation airframe fitted with fifth-generation avionics, sensors and weapons, which he said is no longer a fourth-generation aircraft in any useful sense. What he cared about was range and payload. A 500-nautical-mile tool is no use against a 1,000-mile problem. The label describes the airframe, but the problem lives in the system around it.

A veteran airpower planner made a related point. The F-35 and F-22, he said, are better understood as flying sensor-shooters, valued as much for collecting and sharing information with the integrated force as for what they carry. He was also exasperated that his government had just announced a new combatant command built around autonomous weapons. You build commands around missions, he said, not weapons. It is the platform habit in miniature, because even autonomy gets organised as a thing rather than as a contribution to an effect.

The clearest evidence that architecture outranks airframe was the India–Pakistan air clash of May 2025. Both sides flew capable fourth-plus-generation aircraft with good weapons and well-trained crews. One side arrived with a far more advanced communications, sensor and command-and-control architecture, and the information advantage tipped the exchange. The platforms were comparable and the enterprises were not.

Even the road to a sixth-generation force looked like an enterprise story. A visiting senior officer noted that the next major crewed platform is more than a decade from the front line, so the force must fight with what it has. In the meantime, uncrewed combat aircraft, digital engineering frameworks and human–machine teaming are maturing as what he called a deliberate stepping stone. The enterprise is built first and the aircraft arrives at the end of it.

The grind is the test

The most direct support for regeneration came from an industry presenter who drew a simple graph of combat effect over time. It starts with a level of readiness, then a surge into high-intensity combat in which pristine equipment, war stocks and skilled people are committed. After that comes a decline into what he called the grind.

Almost everything that makes up combat effect degrades. Readiness falls as people go forward with less training, stockpiles are consumed, and networks and nodes are targeted. The height of the line in the grind is set by industrial capacity, meaning the rate at which a nation can replace combat effect as fast as the enemy destroys it.

His conclusion was that it is not an industry problem but a combat power problem, and that industrial readiness must become a force design consideration. A force optimised for the sharpest possible tip on its best day, in a resource-constrained environment, is trading away the area under the curve. That area is the total combat effect a nation can bring to a sustained war.

He doubted Australia could count on replacing exquisite platforms in any reasonable time, or on allies having the capacity, willingness and means to deliver them. So he argued for starting with munitions, fuel and spares, produced to build the capacity for the grind rather than to meet today’s demand. He joked that it might be judged the worst value-for-money decision in the department’s history, and hoped it would be, because its value is deterrence. That is regeneration expressed as a business case.

Others brought evidence from current operations. A former combat commander described the widening gap between the demands of enduring combat and the sustainment enterprise behind it. A fleet funded around 16 flying hours a month per jet can find itself flown ten times that over Pacific distances. The supply chain, he said, is not prepared for a tenfold increase sustained over months rather than weeks, and the shortfall cascades to allies chasing the same parts. Weapons expenditure makes the headlines, but sustainment is what quietly runs out.

The airpower veteran gave the sharpest illustration. Operation Midnight Hammer was celebrated, but it consumed the entire B-2 force to assemble one package, and most of the ageing tanker fleet needed serious maintenance on landing. Repeating it the following week, or perhaps the following month, would have been a stretch. Here the enterprise was failing to regenerate in the middle of a success.

Depth is a design choice

Regeneration concerns architecture as well as supply. An industry presenter on battle management argued that Australia buys its command and control as a series of separate projects, each with its own funding line, competition and bespoke solution, rolled out in ones and twos. That, he said, creates dependency and fragility. His alternative was a multi-nodal network in which every node can operate independently if cut off. Each node would carry a primary, alternate, contingency and emergency role, borrowing the communicator’s PACE concept. Every node then becomes a potential strike cell, counter-drone cell and contributor to space battle management. That, in his words, is depth and resilience.

Readers of this site will recognise the kill web logic. Any node can connect to any other, and the loss of one degrades the system gracefully. His point is the supply-side twin of that logic: do not build single points of failure into the architecture, or into the way the project portfolio is structured.

A former combat commander offered the physical version. An air force that wakes up under ten to twelve layers of air defence, behind hardened shelters, has decided in advance what it will be able to absorb. He had yet to meet anyone, he said, who thinks they have enough air base defence. Depth is something you design and pay for before the war.

Mass, reconsidered

Here the seminar complicated my essay usefully. I described attritable collaborative combat aircraft as mass built to be spent. Several speakers cautioned against that framing, and they were right to.

A CCA industry strategist said the picture of needing lots of aircraft because you plan to lose lots of them is not the movie Australia is in. For a strategy of denial he offered three pillars: risk management, capacity optimisation and persistence. Another speaker called it leverage. The high-value assets that cannot be replaced quickly, above all the people, are the fulcrum, and uncrewed systems are the lever. You cannot build an E-7 or a tanker overnight, so the question is how new technology multiplies what the existing fleet generates. Both stressed that these systems are additive rather than a replacement, which is an awkward fit for an acquisition system built around replacing one platform with the next.

The airpower veteran went further. Attritability is about risk, he said, and affordability is about resources. Losing an aircraft is an operational decision made on the day, but a force whose principal virtue is that it can afford to lose large numbers is a force development decision, and a bad one. He preferred “sufficient capacity” to “mass”, since mass is not the number of tails. In the first 24 hours of Desert Storm the air campaign struck more targets than the combined bomber offensive did across 1942 and 1943, with far fewer aircraft. Stealth, precision and effects-based targeting made the difference.

He also asked for proof. Increment one CCAs are flying, but the operational analysis so far has been done on computers, and the right metric is cost per effect rather than unit cost. A questioner from the floor made the same point from the other direction, noting that published price points sit well above the figures people like to quote for affordable mass.

I read this as a refinement that strengthens the regenerative argument. The value of attritable mass is not that you can afford to waste it. It is that you can replace it, and that is true only if an enterprise exists to build, supply, maintain and integrate it. The aircraft is the visible part of a claim whose substance is the production line, the software baseline and the sustainment pipeline. In effect, the sceptics were asking for proof that the enterprise exists.

People are the part you cannot surge

My essay argued that the human element is itself a production system, with its own throughput limits. The seminar supplied three supporting observations.

The first came from a visiting senior officer responsible for people in his service. He said people will remain the greatest challenge in building a sixth-generation force. He asked what a sixth-generation workforce looks like, which skills and attributes it needs, and admitted nobody has thought it through given AI-driven, networked technology. Without the people, he said, the kit does not do anything.

The second came from the CCA strategist, who noted that autonomy is already changing who works in air power. The new workforce includes software engineers, design specialists, supply chain and production people, not just pilots and mechanics. The workforce of the enterprise is much wider than the workforce of the squadron.

The third was training as capability. A former combat commander explained that the main training ranges had become too small to rehearse jamming and electronic attack at realistic distances. The service moved to larger exercises that launch aircraft over combat-relevant distances, where young aircrew learn where they will recover only when the tanker tells them. They are owed that fog and friction, he said, before the real thing. The airpower veteran added that many units outside the forward-deployed forces are not flying enough hours to maintain basic mission qualification.

The Air Force strategists tied this together with a hierarchy borrowed from Boyd: people, ideas and things, in that order. A Tier One air force, one said, develops people who can conceive novel ways of using capability and introduce innovation quickly. He warned of Augustine’s law, in which rising cost leads to a single magnificent aircraft whose destruction removes the capability altogether. The last word of the day agreed. A Tier One air force is not just the capability you have, but how you use it and how you support it.

Industry as the combat reserve

The industrial theme ran through every session, and the most useful contributions were practical.

On the MQ-28 program, the strategist said roughly 125 suppliers are active, about 70 per cent of the investment flows back into Australian industry, and several suppliers had never worked in aerospace before. The value he stressed was intellectual depth. If the specific system turns out not to be the answer, there is something to pivot from. He pointed to Ukraine compressing its development cycle from months to weeks by drawing on a car-making and wiring-loom industry.

Another speaker recalled that Australia built thousands of combat aircraft and high-performance engines in the Second World War, and made most of its own machine tools, having had no such capacity beforehand. He did not expect taxpayers to fund a large defence-only aerospace industry in peacetime. But the country needs the kernel, meaning the people and competencies who know how to design, build and adapt. The strategist added a sovereignty test worth keeping: it is unrealistic to do everything yourself, but you should choose your dependencies rather than have them chosen for you.

A visiting leader, asked how to scale output more than tenfold, said defence cannot solve that alone. His ideas included dual-use arrangements, contractual mechanisms that do not rely on goodwill, and conversations with airlines about what they could contribute in a conflict when their passengers stop flying. He also observed that large defence budgets elsewhere are soaking up capacity globally. That is a caution for the allied dimension of my argument. Shared spares pools and production lines regenerate combat power only if they are deep, and in a long conflict every partner draws on them at once.

Three further points stood out. First, a commander urged closing the business case with someone other than your own government, as Israel does by exporting what it builds, because peacetime demand alone will never sustain surge capacity. Second, a presenter noted that Australia’s investment program funds acquisition and sustainment but has no research and development line, so the capacity to pivot is thin. Third, the airpower veteran recalled that the F-22 line was terminated just as it was producing at its lowest cost and best quality. Production lines are regenerative capacity, and once they close they are very hard to reopen.

The enterprise extends to the nation

The last theme is the one my essay placed last and the seminar treated with growing urgency: the homeland and the public.

The opening speaker, drawing on large-scale national polling, reported that Australians already regard supply chain disruption, AI-enabled attack and critical infrastructure attack as likely within five years. Eighty per cent believe a foreign military attack would have major or catastrophic consequences. His message was that no defence effort lasts without public understanding, consent and active support, and that capability without will becomes a Maginot line.

A later speaker pressed the point from the policy side. Australia has a defence strategy, he argued, rather than a national defence strategy, because the civil defence and mobilisation partnership with Home Affairs is largely absent. Abstract deterrence talk leaves the public uninformed and gives practitioners no cover to reach across government and industry. A visiting officer contrasted the leaflet that arrived in every Swedish letterbox explaining what to do in an attack, and doubted anything similar would be tolerated at home.

The Air Force strategists framed the payoff in a way I found helpful. Air power’s value is to the nation as well as the defence force: more options, more places, more often. A workforce of roughly 25,000, about the size of a regional town, generates effects across millions of square kilometres by using the same assets for different jobs, again and again. They described building depth through posture, through space and through time, meaning quick turns and rapid reprogramming. That is a regenerative enterprise in practice, where assets, people and nodes can be turned, re-tasked and reconstituted quickly.

What the day left open

Two caveats. The closing remarks acknowledged that access, basing and overflight were not covered and that the limits of air power would come in a later seminar. My own depth argument rests on distributed, hardened and co-designed basing, so the gap matters. Bases are the part of the enterprise an adversary will target first.

Second, one speaker argued that in the most demanding contingency Australia would deter only by annoying, and that its realistic role would be securing a bastion at the southern end of the island chains. I would put it differently. 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.

Conclusion

The seminar’s closing synthesis said the decisions made now will determine the combat power available to Australia in 2035 and beyond. The best answer I heard to what “sufficient” means was the industry presenter’s graph. Sufficiency is measured across the whole curve of a campaign, rather than at its best moment, and the height of that curve is set by what was built before the shooting started.

Platforms will keep arriving, and they will matter. But on the evidence of this seminar, the speakers were describing a different idea of the next generation. It is a system with sustainment that scales, an industrial base that can replace losses, people who can be trained faster than they are lost, architecture with no single point of failure, allies who reinforce one another, and a public that understands what it is being asked to carry. I called it regenerative airpower, and nothing said in Canberra argued against the name. The thing being regenerated is not an aircraft. It is the capacity to fight, as one speaker put it, night after night, week after week, month after month.