Airpower and Australian Defence: Making the Case for Sovereign, Allied-Enabled Capability

In a wide-ranging conversation ahead of the Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar in Canberra on 23 April 2024, I sat down with John Conway, Board Member and Fellow at the Foundation and a veteran airpower practitioner whose career spans Phantoms in the Second Allied Tactical Air Force in Cold War Germany to the contemporary strategic environment.

Conway brings a practitioner’s clarity to the discussion of airpower. He has sat in the cockpit, managed complex air operations, and now devotes his thinking to how Australia can make the most of a necessarily finite defence investment, navigating multiple competing priorities to define achievable and practical outcomes that contribute to national security in its broadest sense. Our conversation ranged across the intellectual case for airpower, the strategic context Australia faces, and the practical challenge of communicating that case to policymakers and the public.

Two Overs and One Under

Conway identified three structural problems with how airpower is currently understood and resourced: oversimplification, over-emphasis on change, and under-investment in air combat capability. He described these as “two overs and one under”, a formulation that cuts to the heart of the intellectual challenge facing the airpower community.

The first problem, oversimplification, is in his view a global phenomenon. Faced with highly complex system-of-systems challenges, the temptation in policy circles is to aggregate problems until they become digestible. The danger is that aggregation strips out the very elements that actually deliver air combat capability.

“We’ve dumbed down the explanation too much,” Conway said. The result is a public and political discourse that treats the kill web as merely a communications problem, reduces strike to a conversation about weapon range, and discusses integrated air and missile defence as if it were synonymous with ground-based systems alone. Each simplification conceals the interdependencies that give airpower its operational meaning. “It masks the significant room for manoeuvre that air combat capability development provides Government when making extremely challenging investment decisions against an increasingly sophisticated threat”.

The second problem, over-emphasis on change, is driven partly by media cycles and partly by the genuine novelty of recent combat experience. Conway is careful here: he does not deny that land warfare has changed significantly, particularly in Ukraine. But he is not convinced that airpower has changed as much as the commentary suggests.

The enduring elements, how Western air forces organise themselves, train at the high end, sustain complex logistics, remain largely intact. What has been demonstrated, he argued, is the value of long-term continuous investment, especially in the air superiority mission set. The Israeli Air Force played a central role in the degradation of Iran’s strategic capacity precisely because it maintained investment, training, and integration across decades. “They haven’t cut back on any investment over the years,” Conway observed. “They’ve built their system.”

The lesson for Australia is not to chase each new capability fad, but to sustain the fundamentals and build on its successes and natural advantages. “Air Power inherently exploits the Laws of Physics to the benefit of broader national security outcomes. Humans and technology going higher, further, faster, with more power, lethality, and survivability’ This is not a new story and underpins the easy relationship it has with Space, cyber and electronic warfare capabilities”.

The third problem, under-investment, is in some ways the most consequential. Conway identified roughly fifteen years of hollowing-out of western airpower, during which the pivot to ISR and lift in support of Middle East and Afghan operations drew investment away from air combat and strike capability. Operating from sanctuary bases during that period also produced a catastrophic neglect of ground-based air defence; the systems now in the inventory are largely legacy platforms because there was simply no market incentive to develop new ones, and current stockpiles don’t reflect reality. The compounding effect is felt particularly acutely by countries like Australia, which depend on access to the very best U.S. technology. When the United States reduces investment, allies lose the platform on which their own force optimisation rests.

“As air power practitioners, we must continue to demonstrate in real terms what is possible now with existing capability, but also explain why we need to keep the system of systems evergreen because it takes a good decade to establish the next generation of platforms. These platforms are essential not exquisite. Platforms give you the speed, reach, payload capacity, and connectivity essential for the Indo-Pacific theatre. More than that, advanced propulsion and bigger generators supply the increased demand for electrical power necessary for EW systems, directed energy and other emerging technologies. Smaller, simpler platforms in distributed systems rightly have their place, but they cannot individually generate the electrical power necessary for the high-end fight”.

Australia’s Strategic Context: Reach, Resilience and Sovereign Capability

Conway was equally concrete on resilience and basing. The vulnerability of aircraft on the ground is not a new problem. It has always been a feature of airpower, and the Cold War generation embedded dispersal, cross-servicing and survive-to-operate DNA as daily practice rather than exceptional preparation. “We practiced it day in, day out,” he recalled.

That culture is recoverable. Aircraft dispersed across multiple bases, with flexible logistics, actually present a more difficult targeting problem for a potential adversary than ships in port or soldiers in barracks. Making this argument publicly, he suggested, has a deterrent value of its own: it signals to an adversary that Australia is prepared to sustain operations, and it demonstrates to the Australian public that the investment is producing tangible, near-term capability improvements rather than capabilities notional until 2040.

There is a funding dimension here that extends beyond the defence budget. I have long argued that Australia’s northern basing resilience, fuel supply, infrastructure, dispersal capacity, is at least partly a regional development and infrastructure investment, not solely a defence expenditure. This provides immense opportunity for Queensland and the Northern Territories. Mobilising that investment requires a different conversation with government and the public than the conventional capabilities acquisition narrative. But the practical case is persuasive: you can show measurable progress within two or three years, and you can do so in ways that serve Australian interests independent of any alliance obligation.

The Kill Web, Targeting, and the Danger of Oversimplification

Conway’s critique of how the kill web concept is communicated is worth dwelling on. He argued that the kill web was about enabling the targeting enterprise, integrating intelligence into the targeting cycle and getting that information into the cockpit in as near real time as possible. That is the gold standard of what the kill web is actually trying to achieve. But in public discourse it has been reduced to a communications problem, which misses the operational point entirely.

Conway identified four priority investment areas flowing from this analysis: continuous improvement of sensing capability; development of the targeting enterprise enabled by kill web architecture; long-range strike capability launched from sovereign Australian bases; and affordability frameworks that measure value in terms of outcomes rather than input costs.

The drone question illustrates another instance of the oversimplification problem. Conway is wary of the term “drone” because it collapses fundamentally different systems into a single category. The Shahed, for instance, is better understood as a low-cost, slow-moving cruise missile that creates a sensing and targeting problem at scale: the challenge is not the individual weapon but the mass of them. The adaptation he has observed from the US Air Force, low-cost guided munitions such as APKWS bolted onto F-15s, ground-based close-in systems, suggests the targeting and economy-of-warfare logic is being worked through in practice, even if the public discourse has not caught up.

The first principle of drone warfare, as I argued in my book on the subject, is economy of the exchange ratio: the ratio of offensive cost to defensive cost is a new strategic variable, and it needs to be analysed with precision rather than aggregated under a single buzzword.

Stacking Effects: The Framework Australia Needs

Perhaps the most generative part of our conversation was Conway’s articulation of “stacking effects” as the analytical framework for Australian airpower development. Rather than thinking about airpower as a horizontal set of individual capabilities and layers, he proposes thinking about it as a vertical stack, effect upon effect upon effect, that becomes progressively harder for an adversary to unravel. The Growler, the Ghost Bat, the Peregrine, the F-35 network all coordinated by the Wedgetail: each adds a layer to the stack, and the cumulative result is a kill web that is both multi-layered and counter-kill-web capable. An adversary building its own kill web to target Australia faces an equivalent problem from the other direction.

Conway is particularly enthusiastic about the role of the Growler in the stack, now fitted with the Next Generation Jammer. “The acquisition of the Growler and involvement in the NGJ program was a master stroke as it provides a gateway into the most sophisticated mission sets in the Indo-Pacific. The Growler is the great disrupter of an adversary targeting enterprise, both air-to-air and air-to-surface”.

This framing is also a deterrence argument. A sufficiently complex, layered airpower stack, one that includes dispersed basing, resilient logistics, layered sensing and targeting, and a mix of high-end and cost-effective munitions, presents an adversary with a targeting problem that is expensive to solve. That is deterrence through denial: not the threat of unacceptable retaliation, but the assurance that the cost of attack exceeds any plausible benefit. For a country of Australia’s size, that is a more achievable deterrence posture than attempting to match potential adversaries in mass.

Conway is also strongly optimistic about the Ghost Bat and similar collaborative combat aircraft concepts. The issue is not whether such systems have potential but how they are integrated into a coherent force structure. Presented as an alternative to expensive manned aircraft, the Ghost Bat is a false promise. Presented as an additional layer in a stacked, kill-web-enabled force, it is a genuine force multiplier.

The distinction matters both operationally and in terms of how the acquisition case is made to government. “The MQ-28A relationship with the E-7 Wedgetail opens new opportunities to substantially increase sensor coverage, provide over-the-horizon and under-the-horizon connectivity with surface combatants, and thereby enhance the survivability and lethality of the integrated force as a whole. And all delivered by Australian defence industry, too.”

Conway used the F-35 as another concrete example of how “stacked effects” and a kill-web-enabled force are already being realised in practice. He highlighted that there are now something like 800-plus F-35s operated or on order by countries other than the United States, and that this sheer number creates its own deterrent and warfighting effect. In his view, that multinational F-35 fleet is a cornerstone of a broader Western airpower enterprise built around a system that shares information at the speed of light, with high survivability and growing operational maturity.

He framed the F-35 not as a standalone fighter but as a key survivable node in a system of systems: a platform that both contributes to and benefits from a kill web, advanced targeting and sensing, and allied integration. The aircraft’s ability to share data rapidly and securely was central to his argument about stacking effects, building a multi-layered, hard-to-unravel airpower construct that is both difficult and expensive for any adversary to counter.

Conway also connected the F-35 to his affordability and value argument: expensive high-end systems are necessary, but their value must be judged by the operational outcomes they enable across the force, not simply by input cost. In that context, an 800-strong allied F-35 fleet is, for him, evidence of both significant combat mass and a powerful, integrated information-sharing backbone for Western air forces, the kind of sovereign, allied-enabled capability that Australia is strongly positioned to leverage and, in turn, contribute to.

The Case That Needs to Be Made

I came away from the conversation struck by how consistently the intellectual and the practical converge in Conway’s analysis. The argument for airpower investment is not abstract. It is rooted in operational experience, strategic geography, physics, high-end training, and the evidence of recent combat, from the Israeli Air Force’s campaign against Iranian strategic infrastructure to the forty-two-minute U.S. strike on the Iranian missile depot, a textbook kill web operation that demonstrated the historical novelty of the coordination now achievable between allied systems.

What the airpower community needs to do, as Conway framed it, is reclaim the responsibility for articulating that argument in sufficient detail that it cannot be simplified away. That means describing systems in ways that are sophisticated but accessible, connecting capability choices to specific strategic outcomes, and making the value case rather than the input cost case.

It means explaining why sovereign long-range strike, a capability that can be launched from Australian territory without requiring political permission from regional basing partners, that can deliver a genuinely lethal payload at operationally representative range, and that can conduct its own battle damage assessment, is not an optional extra but a core requirement for a country that must be able to act independently when alliance partners cannot or will not.

Australia’s pursuit of sovereign allied-enabled defence capability is not a contradiction in terms. It is a recognition that the most effective allied contributions come from partners who bring genuine capability to the table, not from dependencies that create vulnerability. Airpower, properly resourced and properly communicated, is the most cost-effective path to that contribution, while providing the government with scalable flexibility at the lowest political risk. Conway’s “two overs and one under” framework is a useful starting point for any honest reckoning with where we have been. The stacking-effects framework points toward a way ahead in force design and force capability.

John Conway

John has over 40 years’ experience in the business of air and missile defences in an international context. He is currently the Head of Practice and Managing Director of Felix, a boutique professional services company established in 2017 to provide consulting, strategic advisory, and creative services to Defence, and the technological and industrial base.

John retired from the Royal Air Force as a Group Captain in 2010 having served 24 years in a number flying, staff and senior command roles. His operational experience on F4 Phantom and Tornado F3 aircraft included Cold War Europe, the South Atlantic, the Balkans, and the Middle East. He commanded the United Kingdom’s largest Permanent Joint Operating Base at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus between 2005 and 2008 enabling the airbridge into Iraq and Afghanistan, and supporting strategic ISR operations in the eastern Mediterranean.