The Historian of the Seminars: Watching Australian Airpower Cross Three Thresholds
I have been coming to Australia since 2014 to write the Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminars. Over a decade of seminars, in a real sense, makes me the historian of this particular record, not because I have any special claim to insight, but because I have been in the room, notebook open, for the whole arc.
And from that vantage point, the October 1, 2026 seminar at the National Gallery of Australia reads less as a single event than as the latest crest in a wave that has been building since I first started making this trip.
It is worth remembering where that wave began.
In 2014, the story was modest by design. On that first visit I toured the new KC-30A tanker fleet and the newly arrived Wedgetail airborne early warning aircraft, visited a hypersonics research effort still in its early stages, and sat in on an RAAF-sponsored conference about an F-35 that had not yet arrived. The C-17 had recently given the RAAF reach it had never had before.
The characterization that stuck with me from that trip, offered by a Canadian air force officer sitting in on the same conference, was that Australia was building “a modest but effective 21st century Air Force”, assembling the building blocks, one platform at a time, after a long period of underinvestment, shaped by hard lessons from East Timor and Afghanistan.
It was an Air Force preparing itself, not yet an Air Force positioned against a specific, capable adversary. The F-35 was still a thing that was coming.
The 2024 seminar was where that preparatory decade cashed out. That session put the fifth-generation revolution on full display in Australia: the F-35 no longer a future acquisition but an operational reality reshaping how the RAAF thought about combat, and fifth-generation thinking beginning to pull the rest of the joint force along with it.
It was, in the terms this analysis has used elsewhere, the moment Australia stopped assembling parts and started fielding an architecture. That seminar answered the question the 2014 trip had left open: what happens once the modest, effective building blocks are joined by a genuinely transformational platform. The answer was a shift in mindset as much as in inventory — air and space power beginning to be understood as the domain that determines whether the rest of the force can operate at all, rather than a supporting function bolted onto ships and land systems.
That transformation is ongoing, and it is not yet finished.
But the center of gravity has moved.
The October 1 seminar, under the heading of mass and depth, is not introducing a new platform the way the 2024 session did. It is confronting what the fifth-generation revolution failed to solve on its own: a small, exquisite, technologically superior force is not, by itself, a sufficient answer to a Chinese air and maritime force that has generated its own precision revolution — long-range strike, dense sensor coverage, and a targeting complex that treats fixed, forward, and known bases as vulnerabilities rather than assets.
An adversary that can do the arithmetic on a fleet of extremely capable but extremely limited platforms can also calculate how quickly that fleet runs out. Mass and depth, and the basing and sustainment posture that make mass and depth sustainable rather than merely notional, are the next phase, not a departure from the fifth-generation shift but its necessary completion.
This is the throughline a decade of these seminars has made visible: 2014 built the modest, capable pieces; 2024 fused them around a fifth-generation core and a new way of thinking about airpower’s role in the joint force; 2026 is asking whether that core can be made deep enough, distributed enough, and sustainable enough to survive contact with a precision-strike adversary rather than simply outmatch it in a single engagement.
Collaborative Combat Aircraft — Ghost Bat and its Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman counterparts — are this seminar’s answer to that arithmetic problem: not cheaper substitutes for crewed fifth-generation aircraft, but the mechanism by which a fixed, expensive fleet becomes a scalable one, attritable mass that dilutes an adversary’s targeting problem instead of simplifying it.
The sessions on workforce, training, and sustainment that round out the agenda are not housekeeping. They are where the difference between an aspirational force and a real one gets decided, exactly as they were in 2014, when a C-17 global sustainment program and a shared tanker fleet with Singapore were the unglamorous mechanisms that actually gave the RAAF reach.
If one lays the 2014 balance of Chinese and allied airpower in the Pacific next to today’s, the shift is unmistakable, and it runs in a direction that should concern anyone still describing Australian airpower primarily in terms of what it can add to the joint force rather than what it must independently be capable of sustaining.
In 2014, the conversation was about acquiring the pieces of a 21st century force. By 2024, the conversation had become about fusing those pieces around a genuinely transformational platform.
By 2026, the conversation is about whether that platform, however capable, can survive and keep fighting against a Chinese force that has spent the intervening decade building precisely the kind of precision-strike mass that punishes small, forward-based, exquisite formations.
Ten years in, the question this seminar puts in front of the Australian government is not whether the Air Force can support the Integrated Force.
It is whether the Integrated Force, and the basing and sustainment architecture beneath it, can support an Air Force fighting a war of depth against an adversary that no longer has to be deterred by quality alone.
Enhancing and Accelerating the Integrated Force: An Operational Perspecdtive