Regenerative Airpower: The Next Generation Is an Enterprise, Not a Platform

The word “generation” has been doing a lot of quiet work in airpower for three decades. We speak of fourth-generation and fifth-generation aircraft, and now of sixth-generation fighters, as if the word described a property of the machine. A generation is a step change in a platform’s stealth, sensors, networking, and computing, and the next step is whatever the next platform does better.

That usage is worth questioning, because “generation” has a second meaning that matters more than the first. To generate is to produce, and in air operations that means generating sorties, combat power, and trained crews, and then doing it again after the adversary has tried to stop you.

The question for the next phase of airpower is whether a force can keep generating and regenerating combat effects under attack, at distance, and over time. I am increasingly convinced that the answer depends far less on the airframe than on the enterprise around it.

The Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar in Canberra on October 1, The Requirement for Air Combat Mass and Depth in the Indo-Pacific, is a good place to test this argument. The program does not read like a sixth-generation platform conference. It reads like a description of an enterprise.

The platform habit

The platform habit is understandable. Aircraft are visible, and they carry national prestige. They can be photographed, flown at airshows, and counted in a force structure table. Acquisition systems, budgets, political narratives, and industrial strategies are all organized around them. When a defense ministry wants to signal seriousness, it announces a platform.

The habit also has real intellectual roots. Over the last forty years, platform generations did transform air combat. Stealth changed who could survive in contested airspace. Sensor fusion changed what a pilot could know. Networking changed how individual aircraft contributed to a larger picture. The fifth-generation revolution was real, and I have spent much of the last decade documenting how it reshaped Australian, American, and allied thinking, including the way the F-35 pulled the rest of the joint force toward a different concept of operations.

But notice what the fifth-generation revolution actually demonstrated. The most important thing about the F-35 was never the aircraft considered alone. It was the way the aircraft forced change in the surrounding system: in data handling, in maintenance, in training, in how commanders thought about information, in how allies operated together. The platform was the catalyst, and the transformation happened in the enterprise. We gave the credit to the airframe because the airframe was what we could see.

The sixth-generation conversation risks repeating that misattribution at higher stakes. If we believe the next leap is a better aircraft, we will spend the next decade optimizing the wrong variable.

What the seminar’s own framing reveals

The background paper for the October 1 seminar is revealing because of what it asks for. It does not ask for a better aircraft. It asks for “increasingly self-reliant, scalable capability” that can provide deterrence by denial. It calls for “increased availability of both crewed and uncrewed systems” to maintain control of the air “over vast geographic distances, 24/7/365, and in all weather.” It asks for strike launched from sovereign bases with operationally relevant payloads and integrated targeting systems. And it notes that recent operations in the Middle East have shown counter-air operations to be “resource intensive, technically challenging, and highly dependent on persistent air and space-enabled ISR and targeting systems.”

Every one of those phrases describes a system property, not a platform property. Scalability is a property of production lines, training pipelines, and logistics. Availability is a property of maintenance and supply. Persistence depends on basing, tankers, sensors, and space. Sovereign launch depends on infrastructure. Self-reliance is about the industrial base. The paper also explicitly says the requirement “steps substantially beyond” the provision of air support for integrated operations and demands a “fundamental re-set” in how air and space power is articulated, in terms of operational and strategic outcomes rather than inputs and tactical application.

Inputs and tactical application are precisely the language of platforms. Outcomes are the language of enterprises. The seminar’s organizers have, perhaps without intending to, written a definition of the problem that no single aircraft can solve.

The agenda items reinforce the point: natural strategic advantages such as airspace and geography, operational risk management, workforce management and automation, training system effectiveness and mission rehearsal, collaborative combat systems, accelerating capability development, and preparedness, replenishment, basing, logistics, and supply chains. Only one of the seven is about a category of aircraft, and even that one is titled “Collaborative Combat Systems,” which shifts the emphasis from platform to system.

Even the program’s speaker slots tell the story. Among the titles is Air Marshal Sir Paul Lloyd’s “Preparing for the Storm: Developing and Delivering a Sixth-Generation Royal Air Force.” Take the grammar seriously: the thing being developed and delivered is a Royal Air Force, not an aircraft. The sixth generation is attached to the force. I do not know how Air Marshal Lloyd will develop that theme, and I will be listening for it, but the framing is already a signal that the British are thinking about generation as an institutional attribute.

Why regeneration is the test

Why regeneration rather than simply capability, or mass, or resilience? Because regeneration is what a precision-strike competitor is designed to defeat.

Consider the problem from the adversary’s perspective. The People’s Liberation Army has spent a decade building a targeting complex of long-range strike, dense sensor coverage, and intelligence fusion that treats fixed, forward, and known bases as vulnerabilities. A planner in that system does not need to shoot down a fifth-generation fighter in the air. It is enough to hold at risk the runways, fuel, munitions stocks, maintenance facilities, and command nodes that put that fighter in the air. A small fleet of exquisite aircraft is an arithmetic problem, and arithmetic problems can be solved. If you know how many aircraft can be generated per day, and you can disrupt the infrastructure that generates them, you can calculate how quickly the force is exhausted.

This is why the platform-centric view of airpower is dangerous against a peer competitor. It measures the force at the moment of its best day: aircraft ready, bases intact, weapons stocked, crews rested, networks up. But a war is not a best day. A war is the fifth day, the fifteenth day, and the fortieth day, after the first strikes have landed on the infrastructure and the first losses have hit the inventory. The force that wins is the one that can still produce combat effects then.

The Middle East experience the seminar paper cites points the same way. Sustained offensive and defensive counter-air operations consume interceptors, tankers, sensor coverage, crew hours, and maintenance capacity at a rate that surprises even experienced planners. Ukraine has shown, from a different direction, that the side able to replace losses, adapt production, and reconstitute capability under fire holds an advantage that no single weapon system confers. In both cases, the decisive variable has been the ability to keep going.

That is what I mean by regenerative airpower: the capacity of an air combat enterprise to absorb attack, replace losses, reconstitute degraded nodes, and continue to generate combat effects across a campaign rather than a single engagement. It borrows from the engineer’s sense of regeneration, in which a system restores function after damage, and from the biologist’s, in which an organism replaces what it loses. Neither meaning depends on any one part.

The anatomy of a regenerative enterprise

If regeneration is the test, what does a regenerative air combat enterprise consist of? I see four interlocking elements, each of which appears on the Williams Foundation agenda.

Mass that is built to be spent. The most visible element is the collaborative combat aircraft. Australia’s MQ-28 Ghost Bat, and the American CCA programs that run in parallel, are frequently described as cheaper wingmen for crewed aircraft. That description is accurate but incomplete. The deeper significance of the CCA is economic and industrial. A crewed fifth-generation fighter is a scarce asset that takes years to produce and cannot be risked lightly. An attritable uncrewed aircraft changes the cost-exchange calculation, and it changes the production logic. If a platform can be built in numbers, on a line that can be scaled, and accepted as a consumable in a way a crewed fighter never could be, then the force gains the ability to absorb loss.

But the aircraft is only the visible part. Attritable mass is meaningless without the enterprise to produce it at rate, to supply it with munitions and spares, to maintain software across a fleet, to integrate it into targeting and command systems, and to keep it flying. A squadron of uncrewed aircraft with no replenishment pipeline is a one-time demonstration. This is why the seminar’s CCA discussion is framed around “CCAs and Defence Industry,” and why the sessions on “Building Mass with Industry” matter as much as the discussions of the aircraft. The CCA is not a cheaper platform. It is a forcing function for building an enterprise that can make and sustain mass.

Depth that is geographic, logistical, and political. The second element is depth. The seminar’s background paper emphasizes “access, basing, and overflight considerations” that are “becoming more consequential and complex,” and it lists Australia’s natural strategic advantages of airspace and continental geography as an agenda item.

Geography is a real asset. A continent with large distances, dispersed airfields, and strategic depth complicates an adversary’s targeting problem. But geography only becomes depth when it is developed: when runways, fuel storage, munitions handling, maintenance capacity, and protective infrastructure are distributed so that losing any one node does not collapse the system. Depth also has a political dimension. The background paper speaks of strike “at the lowest political risk” and from “sovereign bases,” meaning that Australia wants to retain the ability to act without depending on the permission of others. Self-reliance in this sense is a component of regeneration, because a force whose basing depends on another nation’s consent has an enterprise whose continuity depends on someone else’s decisions.

This connects to a theme I have pursued in other work on the Indo-Pacific: the evolution from hosting to co-design. If Australia’s northern bases are to serve the combined force rather than merely host visiting aircraft, then the infrastructure, sustainment, and logistics must be designed for distributed, resilient operations from the start. That is an enterprise design problem, and no aircraft solves it.

People as the regenerating element. The third element is the workforce, and here the platform view is at its weakest. Aircraft can be produced in factories, but aircrew, maintainers, intelligence analysts, air battle managers, and logisticians are produced by training systems, and those systems are slow. You cannot surge experience. A force that loses trained personnel faster than it can replace them cannot regenerate, however many aircraft sit on the ramp.

The agenda addresses this directly, with sessions on workforce management, automation, and development, and on training system effectiveness and mission rehearsal. I take those items seriously as indicators of where the thinking is going. Automation can reduce the human burden of some tasks, and synthetic environments can compress the time it takes to build proficiency and rehearse missions before they are flown. But the underlying point is that the human element of airpower is itself a production system, with its own throughput limits, its own vulnerabilities, and its own requirements for investment. An enterprise perspective treats that system as a core element of combat power and not as an overhead line.

Industry and supply chains as the combat reserve. The fourth element is the industrial base and supply chain behind the force. The National Defence Strategy 2026 themes cited in the seminar paper include the resilience of the sovereign defence industrial base and more diverse international industrial partnerships. The Foundation’s agenda lists “Preparedness, Replenishment, Basing, Logistics & Supply Chains” and “Accelerating Capability Development.”

Replenishment is the word that best captures the regenerative idea. A modern air campaign consumes munitions, spares, fuel, and airframes at a rate that peacetime stockpiles rarely anticipate. The ability to replace what is consumed, and to adapt quickly when requirements change, is a form of combat power. A nation with a responsive, resilient industrial enterprise possesses a reserve that does not appear on any order of battle. A nation without one has a force that can fight only as long as its initial inventory lasts.

The kill web and the enterprise

Readers who follow my work will recognize a connection to the kill web, the concept that Ed Timperlake and I have developed over many years to describe how modern forces fight through distributed, reconfigurable networks of sensors, shooters, and decision-makers rather than through linear kill chains tied to specific platforms.

The kill web describes how the force fights. Regenerative airpower describes how the force stays in the fight. The two are complementary, and each is incomplete without the other. A kill web that cannot be replenished will thin out. A regenerative enterprise without a flexible kill web will produce forces that are hard to destroy but poorly employed.

There is also a structural parallel. The logic of the kill web is that any node can connect to any other, so that the loss of a node degrades the system gracefully rather than catastrophically. The logic of regeneration applies the same principle to the supply side: no single base, factory, training school, or supplier should be a point of failure, and the system should be able to reconstitute around losses. In both cases, resilience comes from architecture, not from the excellence of any single element.

This is why I think of the enterprise, not the platform, as the relevant unit of analysis. A platform is a node. An enterprise is the web.

Implications for Australia and its allies

If the argument is right, several implications follow.

First, acquisition logic has to change. Decisions about what to buy should be judged by their contribution to the regenerative capacity of the whole, not by the performance of the item alone. A platform with slightly better specifications but a fragile supply chain, a scarce maintenance workforce, or a dependence on vulnerable fixed infrastructure may add less combat power than a less exquisite platform embedded in a robust enterprise.

Second, sustainment moves from the back of the conversation to the front. The glamorous questions in airpower are about range, speed, stealth, and weapons. The decisive questions are increasingly about turnaround time, spares availability, software update cycles, fuel resilience, and the throughput of training pipelines. These are enterprise metrics, and they need the same attention, and the same senior champions, that platforms receive.

Third, industry becomes part of the force in a more direct sense than before. The Australian government’s emphasis on a sovereign defence industrial base is not merely an economic policy. In a regenerative framework, it is a component of deterrence by denial, because an adversary must reckon not only with the force in being but with the capacity to rebuild it. That has implications for how Australia structures its partnerships with American, British, and other allied industries. The aim should be mutual reinforcement, in which each partner’s enterprise can regenerate the others’ combat power, rather than simple dependence.

Fourth, allied interoperability takes on a deeper meaning. We have spent decades pursuing interoperability in communications and data. Regenerative airpower suggests interoperability in sustainment and production: shared spares pools, common munitions and software baselines, interchangeable maintenance capacity, and distributed basing arrangements that allow a coalition to function as a single enterprise. The 2014 observation that shared tanker and global sustainment arrangements gave the RAAF real reach is a modest precursor of this idea. The next step is to extend that logic across the whole air combat system.

Fifth, the conversation must include the homeland. The seminar paper notes that protection of Critical National Infrastructure will compete for scarce air combat resources. A regenerative enterprise depends on civil infrastructure, power, transport, communications, and fuel, and an adversary will target them. National resilience, which the NDS elevates as part of national defence, is therefore not a separate topic from airpower. It is the foundation on which the air combat enterprise stands.

Conclusion

The sixth-generation platform will arrive, in one form or another, and it will matter. Better sensors, better stealth, better propulsion, and better integration with uncrewed teammates will all add combat value. I am not arguing that platforms are unimportant.

I am arguing that they are no longer the decisive variable. Against a competitor that has built its strategy around holding fixed infrastructure at risk and exhausting a small, exquisite force, the decisive variable is whether the air combat enterprise can absorb the first blow and keep generating combat power. The winning advantage will belong to the side that can regenerate.

That is a different idea of what the next generation means. It is not a number attached to an airframe. It is a property of an entire system: its mass, its depth, its people, its industry, its bases, its allies, and its resilience. In that sense the next generation is already under construction in every area the Williams Foundation’s agenda has identified, whether or not anyone has yet given it a name.

I would offer one. Call it regenerative airpower, and recognize that the thing being regenerated is not an aircraft. It is the capacity to fight.