Interdependent

That characterisation is largely correct.

However, platforms alone have never constituted a capability: they can only fulfill their potential when they are a part of an extensive and complex system. Thus, it would be more accurate to talk about fifth generation air power rather than simply aircraft.

The prototype of a fifth generation air power system emerged in the Middle East in June 1982, during the Israeli Air Force’s remarkable week-long campaign in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

As a precursor to a planned Israel Defence Force invasion of Lebanon, the IAF was tasked with neutralising Syria’s ostensibly powerful ground-based air defence system in the 120km long Bekaa Valley. Syria had packed the valley with 19 surface-to-air missile batteries and hundreds of anti-aircraft guns, supported by early-warning radars and command and control centres. During the previous major clash between Israel and Syria in 1973, Syria’s GBAD had seriously hurt the IAF.

However, in the intervening years, the IAF had dramatically improved its capability to achieve information dominance and to operate with speed and precision. By networking F-15, F-16, F-4, A-4 and Kfir strike/fighters with AEW&C Hawkeyes, electronic warfare 707s, and remotely piloted vehicles, all of which were controlled in real time from an operations centre 250km away in Tel Aviv, the IAF gave its pilots a degree of situational awareness never before achieved in air warfare. The addition of precision-guided munitions and leading-edge electronic countermeasures further strengthened their advantage.

In perhaps the most one-sided air battle in history, it took the IAF only hours to destroy Syria’s GBAD. And when the Syrian Arab Air Force’s large fleet of MiG-21s and MiG-23s was scrambled to try to retrieve the situation, the disaster (for Syria) was compounded. By the end of the first day some 30 SyAAF jets had been shot down for no IAF losses, and after six days the ratio had climbed to an extraordinary 80 to nil. While the IAF pilots had better aircraft and weapons and were more skilled, the real story was that they were fighting with overwhelming knowledge superiority and the Syrian pilots were fighting blind.

Two observations are pertinent here.

First, fifth generation air power is built on a range of interdependent capabilities, all of which are necessary to achieve the optimum outcome. Second, only a handful of the world’s air forces have the necessary combination of high-quality hardware, software, systems, and people; and once the RAAF has added real-time live-picture connections across its fleet (which will be achieved via Plan Jericho – see ‘Swift Intuition’ in, August 2015 Australian Aviation), it will be one of them.

A fact not always recognised by Australia’s politicians and public is that, since the Bekaa Valley campaign, Western military affairs have been typified by what might be described as the age of air power. As far as Australia is concerned this has a couple of profound strategic implications.

In the first instance, the RAAF’s force structure and professional expertise would allow it to dominate the air and sea approaches to our continent against any aggressor other than the US, China or Russia. In other words, fifth generation air power underwrites our government’s ability to fulfill its most important responsibility, namely, assuring our independence, territorial integrity, and national security.

And at a different level of threat, those same capabilities allow Australia to fight against organisations such as al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Daesh on our terms rather than theirs. Thus, instead of persisting with the failed cult of counterinsurgency warfare, the RAAF and its allies in the Middle East can look to exploit their incontestable advantage through such 21st century strategies as air-enforced exclusion zones, safe zones, containment, economic targeting, selective targeting, degrading enemy forces, and so on.

Words are important. Instead of talking simply about fifth generation fighters, Australia’s military leaders need to start telling our politicians and the public about fifth generation strategy and fifth generation air power.

The fifth generation, however, has broken that linear progression.