Comparative advantage

It is, to put it mildly, unfortunate that it has taken our political and military leaders forty years to comprehend this reality. Albert Einstein is often credited with the observation that doing the same thing repeatedly and hoping for a different result is a definition of insanity. He might have been talking about the West’s preferred military strategy from the 1960s until the very recent past.

Despite clear and constant demonstrations that we win in the air and we lose on the ground, for half a century the West repeatedly tried, and failed, to conduct land-centric campaigns based on the intellectually facile theory of counter-insurgency warfare. It reflects little credit on those army generals – including Australia’s – who continued to advise ingenuous politicians that they could fight and win wars “amongst the people”.

Nor is there any comfort to be taken from the fact that, when our politicians finally began to reject that advice, they did so not from any intellectual or strategic enlightenment, but rather because the wars in the Middle East had become politically unpopular, and the cost in terms of young lives squandered had become too great to accept.

Still, at least it is now widely recognised that if we must go to war – and it is very hard to see how we could not, for example, take up arms against the profound evil of Daesh – then an air campaign represents by far our best option. Indeed, noting the professionally intriguing Russian and Saudi air campaigns in Syria and the Yemen respectively it is not only politicians and leaders from the West who have (belatedly) arrived at this conclusion.

Within that context, Australians with an interest in defending this country should be grateful to the Royal Australian Air Force for its exceptional achievement in managing to remain at the forefront of international air power during a period otherwise defined by strategic failure. A little bit of history will be useful here.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when Australia’s military posture was dominated by the disastrous land-centric invasion of Vietnam, a small number of Air Force leaders fought, often against bitter opposition from the other services and Defence officials, to introduce the capabilities inherent in the F-111, the B-707 tanker, and the Jindalee over-the-horizon radar. Subsequently the same struggle was revisited when Air Force wanted to retrofit the F-111s with the PaveTack targeting system, Harpoon anti-shipping missiles, and laser-guided bombs.

These were transformational capabilities that both redefined notions of information warfare, precision, and strategic reach, and gave the RAAF the ability to control the vital air and sea approaches to our north and northwest. For the first time since Federation in 1901, Australia could legitimately claim to be capable of defending itself without the assistance of allied combat forces.

The age of air power is a long way from being over.

Furthermore, those acquisitions firmly established the RAAF (and by association the Australian Defence Force) on a trajectory of basing its force structure on the very best technologies, as evidenced today in the evolving fleet of F-35s, Super Hornets, Growlers, Wedgetails, KC-30s, C-17s, Tritons, and G550s.

That force structure is so good that it will almost certainly enable the RAAF to remain among the world’s very best air forces until 2040 – that is, for the (currently) predicted duration of the age of air power.

But military technology never stands still, and planning for whatever emerges next – perhaps earlier than 2040 – needs to be underway now. Amongst the more testing issues will be the inevitable rise of unmanned platforms and other robotics; how best to exploit artificial intelligence (a challenge for the ethics of warfare); organisational and workplace reform; space-based and directed-energy weapons; and the future of manned strike platforms (and therefore of air power’s ruling elite, its fighter pilots).

Most importantly, the RAAF must also take a stronger stance in developing and publicly articulating air power strategies. The age of air power is a long way from being over, and it is essential for our leaders and voters to understand that.