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'Air and Missile Defense, Precision Strike, and the Indo-Pacific: Lessons from Ukraine and the Gulf' in Fight Tonight: Combat Readiness at the Speed of Relevance Proceedings - Paper 3, Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar, 23 April 2026 By Robbin Laird Justin Bronk speaking at the 23 April 2026 Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar. At the Sir Richard Williams seminar held on 23 April 2026 focused on the fight tonight challenge, Justin Bronk delivered a presentation that cut through a great deal of the conceptual noise currently cluttering Western defense debates. His subject was the evolving balance between integrated air and missile defense (IAMD) and precision strike, examined across three theaters: Ukraine, the recent Gulf conflict (Operation Epic Fury), and the Indo-Pacific. What emerged was not a tidy set of prescriptions but something more valuable, a framework for understanding what is actually working, what is not, and what the cost curves are telling us about the choices Western air forces must now confront. Ukraine: The Evolutionary Contest in the Air Domain Bronk began with Ukraine, and with an observation that cut against the prevailing gloom. Things are, for once, looking somewhat better. Ukrainian mobilization reforms are working: the Ukrainian force has grown slightly each month since January, which had not been the case for an extended period. On the Russian side, the force has held at steady state only by reverting to coercing conscripts into contract service, putting Russian losses back on what Bronk characterized as an unsustainable trajectory. Neither of these facts resolved the war, but they represent a genuine shift in the operational situation. On the IAMD side, the low point for Ukraine came in mid to late January of this year. Bronk was direct about this. He described being in country during a period of persistent freezing fog and limited power, when Patriot interceptor stocks had run out and many counter-UAS systems proved to have inadequate all-weather capability. Interception rates against both UAVs and cruise missiles dropped sharply, and ballistic missile penetration followed. The human and industrial consequences were severe. What turned this around was a new shipment of PAC-3 interceptors, a small number relative to what Gulf states subsequently expended in Operation Epic Fury, and the arrival of better weather. The evolutionary contest between Russian one-way attack UAVs and Ukrainian defensive adaptation is one of the most instructive ongoing dynamics in the conflict. Russia’s Geran-2 and Geran-3 systems have had to be continuously upgraded in response to Ukrainian counter-UAS effectiveness, helicopters, turboprop gunships, and even improvised solutions have forced the Russians to slow production cycles while adding electronic warning sensors, FPV cameras, mesh networking, and evasive flight profiles. The result is a costlier, more complex system being produced in approximately the same quantities as before. As Bronk framed it, this is a back-and-forth evolutionary game, and it remains non-decisive.∗ The F-16’s role in UAV interception deserves particular attention. Bronk was unambiguous: yes, F-16s can intercept significant numbers of one-way attack UAVs. No, that should not be the primary course of action. The platform is too expensive and difficult to sustain for that mission set, and the tactical demands are genuinely specialized, formation awareness, gunnery against small maneuvering targets, dedicated counter-UAV weapons employment. One Ukrainian F-16 loss came from intercepting one target, banking, and flying into a second that had not been acquired. This is not a generic multi-role task. Bronk suggested that European nations without large high-end fast jet fleets consider specializing in this mission with advanced turboprop aircraft, the PC-9 being a practical candidate given its speed margin, wing load capacity, and two-seat configuration. That may be a harder conversation in some capitals than it sounds, but the logic is sound. The Myth of Cheap Mass One of Bronk’s most pointed analytical contributions was his challenge to the term “cheap mass.” The framing has become pervasive in Western defense discourse, the idea that large numbers of individually inexpensive systems can substitute for or complement high-end precision munitions. Bronk’s counter was not ideological. It was arithmetical. Ukrainian strike planning against meaningful targets may require between 250 and 400 one-way attack UAVs to reliably get effects on target. At $30,000 to $50,000 per platform, that is a significant expenditure and the effects delivered by the warheads that get through, typically in the three to six pound range, are minimal against anything except highly flammable targets. Oil refineries burn. Factories do not. Hardened military infrastructure does not. Against the kind of target sets that matter in an Indo-Pacific scenario, hardened, defended, often coastal, cheap mass UAVs are not substitutes for high-end precision munitions. They are, at best, decoys and enablers to improve the probability of kill for those high-end weapons. The corollary is equally important: you still need your ARGOMs, your PRSMs, your standoff precision munitions. What cheap mass buys you is improved PK on the few high-end weapons you can get into the target area. For Australia and US Navy power projection forces operating at the end of extended logistics chains, the constraint on how many high-end weapons can reach a launch-acceptable region simultaneously may be more binding than stockpile size. Ghost Shark and similar XL-UUV programs are interesting precisely because they offer a potential means of inserting large numbers of cheap systems into contested sea space alongside air power, without burning through the high-end inventory. Operation Epic Fury: Operational Accomplishment, Strategic Limits Bronk’s assessment of the Gulf campaign was crisp. The U.S. executed an operationally accomplished strike campaign, thousands of Iranian targets engaged, significant degradation of the Iranian ballistic missile arsenal, and the destruction of what remained of the Iranian integrated air defense architecture. But he was careful to calibrate the IAMD narrative: the Israelis had already systematically dismantled Iran’s air defense network in 2024 and 2025. What U.S. forces encountered in Epic Fury was a shell. Describing the campaign as a landmark counter-IADS achievement would overstate the difficulty of the problem set they faced. More interesting was Bronk’s analysis of where the campaign ran into limits, not militarily, but coercively. The political objective of regime change, announced from the outset, may have been the campaign’s central strategic error. When you make a fight existential for your opponent, when the leaders on the other side understand that losing means being killed or overthrown, you foreclose negotiated off-ramps. You push your opponent into maximum resistance rather than toward a calculation about when to compromise. This is a lesson with deep resonance beyond Iran. On the Iranian ballistic missile arsenal, Bronk identified a structural dilemma that deserves wider attention. Iran’s missiles are a finite, one-time-use asset. Every launch is an irreplaceable expenditure unless the production infrastructure is rebuilt. US and Israeli targeting of missile factories and fueling facilities made that rebuilding prospect uncertain. Iranian decision-makers therefore faced an impossible calculus: fire the arsenal and diminish your remaining deterrence, or conserve it and lose operational effect. This constraint — the non-replenishable strike arsenal — is a fundamental vulnerability that applies to any power relying primarily on ballistic missiles as a coercive instrument. The coercive dimension of this cuts the other way as well. A strike capability, Bronk noted, is generally significantly more coercive before it is used than after. Once the missiles fly and fail to achieve their intended political effect, the threat loses credibility. This principle deserves to be internalized in Indo-Pacific planning, including thinking about how Chinese long-range strike threats against Australian targets would be received after the first few strikes land, relative to how they are perceived as coercive instruments before any conflict starts. Stockpile Management: An Unresolved Problem The section of Bronk’s presentation that generated the most immediate operational relevance for Australian planners was his discussion of munitions expenditure and stockpile management. Gulf nations fired over 2,000 PAC-3 interceptors during the campaign, at approximately $6 million per round on FMS pricing. SM-3 ballistic missile defense interceptors, relevant to defense against the Chinese ballistic capabilities that can range Australia, run approximately $43 million apiece for US forces. Firing two at each incoming threat — standard shoot-shoot-look protocol — is the equivalent of expending an F-35 per target. THAAD rounds are roughly $20 million each on the same math. Bronk’s challenge to the audience was direct: can you afford to build and sustain a stockpile of these systems at the scale required for a credible defensive architecture, while simultaneously building and sustaining the offensive long-range strike capabilities that actually deter conflict? The answer, for most Western air forces except the United States, is no. Which raises the question of whether investment in passive defenses, hardening, dispersal, flush procedures, rapid generation from austere locations, should be carrying more of the defensive burden than expensive interceptors. The Ukrainian example here is instructive. Airbases that have absorbed more than a hundred individual attacks against them are still generating operational sorties. The reason is not elaborate active defense . It is dispersal, concealment, rapid sortie generation, and the simple expedient of towing aircraft into the treeline when warning indicates inbound strikes. These techniques are not glamorous. They also cost a fraction of ballistic missile defense interceptors. The unsolved problem Bronk identified is the relationship between national stockpile management authority and operational-level targeting decisions. Who, in a given country, has visibility on the national interceptor inventory during an active campaign? At what risk tolerance are operational planners authorized to proceed when that inventory is being drawn down? These are questions most Western air forces have not answered with sufficient precision, and the Gulf campaign with its extraordinary expenditure rates makes answering them urgent. What Australia Should Prioritize When asked directly what concerned him most if Australia faced a conflict scenario in ten months’ time, Bronk’s answer was characteristically honest and somewhat contrarian. He was, he said, less worried about Australia than Australians might expect him to be. From a Chinese planning perspective, projecting force down toward Australia means operating at the far end of an extended logistics chain, through submarine-patrolled waters, against a force that is tactically proficient, equipped with modern high-end systems, and operating from a sovereign base. That is not an attractive proposition. The more probable Chinese coercive option, in Bronk’s assessment, would be firing conventionally armed intermediate-range ballistic missiles into the waters near a major city, creating political shock without triggering a full military response. His actual concern was munitions. If Australia commits to alliance obligations in a Taiwan scenario pressing forward in the southern flank to prevent China from simply ignoring the southern theater forward-deployed Australian forces run short of precision munitions quickly. That gap, in his view, is where Australian investment most needs to be focused. His assessment of the Royal Australian Air Force was striking: for the people and budget invested, the RAAF deploys more practical firepower against high-end threats than the RAF does at roughly double the budget and triple the personnel. This was not flattery. It was a direct critique of how UK defense investment has been allocated, and by extension, a reminder that organizational efficiency and targeting firepower are not the same thing as dollar expenditure. The Strategic Logic of Offense and Defense Bronk’s closing argument was one that bears repeating in any capital currently debating the balance between IAMD investment and long-range strike development. IAMD investment is only valuable insofar as it buys time for offensive options to deny your opponent their immediate theory of victory. China will not start an operation against Taiwan expecting a two to three year attritional struggle. They will start it because they have convinced themselves it can succeed, and that Australia and Japan can be intimidated into staying out. That calculation is more likely to be modified by visible Australian long-range strike capability by the capacity to threaten Chinese theories of victory than by impressive air defense architecture. This is not an argument against IAMD investment. It is an argument for understanding what IAMD is for. Defense buys time. Offense denies the adversary’s plan. You cannot defend all the cities. You cannot cover all the coastlines. What you can do is make the cost of the offensive campaign prohibitive which requires that you have the strike capability to execute that threat credibly. The kill web framework I have been developing with Ed Timperlake is relevant here. The question is not whether you can defend each node. The question is whether your distributed force can continue to generate combat power and threaten the adversary’s operational plan even as individual assets are degraded. That requires hardening, dispersal, and redundancy on the defensive side and credible, ranged offensive capability on the other. Bronk’s analysis from three active theaters of competition points to the same conclusion: the force that survives to generate sorties and deliver precision effects shapes the operational calculus. Everything else is a supporting investment. Justin Bronk’s remarks at the Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar provided significant insight into lessons being demonstrated in real world operations. The harder question is whether the acquisition decisions, the doctrine, and the command structures are moving fast enough to absorb them. ∗ The Geran-2, Russia’s domestically produced version of Iran’s Shahed-136, is a low-cost, long-range loitering munition used extensively against Ukrainian infrastructure. Powered by a pusher-propeller piston engine, it cruises at 150–190 km/h with a range of 1,000–2,000 km, carrying a 30–50 kg warhead now upgraded with tungsten shrapnel for improved anti-personnel effects. Russia replaced the original Iranian avionics with GLONASS navigation, Russian flight-control units, and hardened jamming-resistant electronics, while scaling production at the Alabuga SEZ into the thousands of units; by late 2025, variants had also gained 4G connectivity and alleged Starlink-based terminal guidance. The Geran-3 is a jet-powered evolution of the same family, using a small turbojet to reach 300–370 km/h and closing gaps that Ukrainian air defenses had exploited against the slower Geran-2 swarms, with the KometaM-12 CRPA antenna system added to defeat the spoofing and jamming that had degraded earlier waves with both variants now deployed together in mixed strike packages launched from new forward bases near the Ukrainian border. Also published in DefenceInfo

'Ten Months, Not Ten Years: Mike Pezzullo on Australia’s Strategic Moment' in Fight Tonight: Combat Readiness at the Speed of Relevance Proceedings - Paper 2, Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar, 23 April 2026 By Dr Robbin Laird Mike Pezzullo speaking to the 23 April 2026 Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar. There is a particular kind of clarity that comes from a man who spent four decades inside the machinery of Australian national security and is now, as he put it, “free” to speak. Mike Pezzullo, former Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs and one of the most consequential figures in Australian strategic planning over the past generation, brought that clarity to the Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar in Canberra on April 23, 2026. The message was direct, unsparing, and organized around a single uncomfortable proposition: Australia needs to prepare for a fight tonight force focused on the right timeline. Geography as Inheritance, Geopolitics as Problem Pezzullo opened by insisting on a distinction that he said most strategic commentary fails to make: the difference between the geostrategic and the geopolitical. Australia’s geostrategic inheritance, he argued, remains among the most favorable of any nation on earth. No natural predatory adversary abuts its frontier. Unlike Ukraine, Lithuania, Taiwan, or the Philippines, Australia is not surrounded by hostile neighbors. The sea approaches are long, the country has never gone to war with a neighbor, and for the greater part of its federation it has enjoyed a kind of strategic insulation that most nations would envy. The one historical exception Pezzullo cited was instructive. In the 1950s and 1960s, Australian strategic thinking grew genuinely anxious about a militarized Indonesia under Sukarno. That anxiety reached its apex when Prime Minister Menzies met President Kennedy in the Oval Office in 1962 and was told directly that ANZUS might not apply in a conflict with Indonesia, depending on the geopolitical circumstances of the day. Menzies walked out of that meeting thinking about bombers. The decision to pursue the F-111 flowed from it, as did a now-declassified exploratory nuclear weapons program that continued until 1979. But that was the exception, Pezzullo emphasized. The rule has been strategic comfort, underpinned first by British sea power and then by American dominance of the Pacific. The only time that “protective dome,” as he called it, was genuinely penetrated was in 1942 and that penetration was not directed at Australia per se but at denying the Americans the ability to use Australia as a base for force projection against Imperial Japan. The structural logic of that moment, Pezzullo argued, is the logic Australia faces again today. Twenty Years of Warning Time, Squandered The core of Pezzullo’s argument was historical and personal. Around Anzac Day 2006 — twenty years ago — he had just been appointed Deputy Secretary for Strategy and was reading himself into what was then highly classified intelligence on Chinese military development. He went to see the then-Chief of Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston who was present in the room at the seminar. The conversation, Pezzullo recalled, turned on a single question: does the classical model of Australian defense still work? The “classical model” or the Defence of Australia doctrine that crystallized in the 1987 Dibb white paper under the Hawke government was a homeland defense model predicated on fighting in the sea-air gap to Australia’s north, relying on Australian combat forces but assuming U.S. enablers would be available. It was a model built for a world where the most plausible adversary was a militarized Indonesia, not a global peer competitor projecting naval and air power across the western Pacific. By 2006, Pezzullo told Houston, that model was breaking down. The PLA was developing the capability to push the Americans back. The American defensive perimeter was likely to reset along a line running from Alaska through Japan, the Philippines, and Guam, through northern Australia, with submarines potentially based in Western Australia. That assessment was not speculative. It was derived from intelligence that has since been substantially declassified through the Pentagon’s annual China Military Power reports. The warning time, in other words, was not ten years from 2006. It was two compounding ten-year cycles: they had already lost the first one, and by 2026 they were burning through the second. The National Defence Strategy and Its Limits Pezzullo was measured and fair about the 2026 Australia’s National Defence Strategy. For what it sets out to do, hedging against a classical ten-year planning horizon with a major recapitalization of the maritime force, the Hobart-class destroyers, the Hunter-class frigates, the Mogami-class ships, the Virginia-class submarines and eventual SSN-AUKUS boats, it is, he acknowledged, not a bad document. His quibbles were at the margins: the balance perhaps tips too heavily toward the Navy at the expense of the land force and Air Force, though he understood the recapitalization logic driving that weighting. But the NDS is a force for 2036, not for tonight. And Pezzullo’s central argument was that the two timelines, ten years and ten months, are not interchangeable. The force being built will not arrive before the window of maximum strategic risk. As he put it with characteristic bluntness: “It is not the force that we need in ten months’ time.” The Taiwan Window and the Phone Call The ten-month timeline is not arbitrary. Pezzullo walked through the intelligence record: former INDOPACOM Commander Admiral Philip Davidson’s assessment that the PLA was aiming to be ready in 2027; his successor Admiral John Aquilino’s consistent messaging; Admiral Sam Paparo’s more recent warnings about the capability window. Most significantly, he cited former CIA Director William Burns’s remarkable statement at Georgetown in February 2023, notable precisely because CIA directors speak of estimates and judgments, not of intelligence, that the Agency had intelligence indicating President Xi had directed the PLA to be ready to give him the military option against Taiwan in 2027. Pezzullo was careful about probability. He attributed roughly a 10 percent chance that Xi will use military force, blockade, quarantine, seaborne assault, airborne assault, or some combination, against Taiwan. That is not a high probability. But allowing for the weather window and the seasonal rhythms of military operations in the Taiwan Strait, the most opportune period runs approximately March-April 2027, roughly ten months from the date of the seminar. He then sketched a scenario that cut through the usual diplomatic abstractions. Imagine the phone call. The American president, whoever that may be, calls Canberra. He has not yet decided what to do. But he needs Australia to understand that the infrastructure being built in northern Australia is not theater. It is for war-fighting. He is asking: are you with me? The answer is binary. Political management, the art of the talking point, the art of threading the needle between commitment and ambiguity, will not work in that moment. The question will have been asked, and it will require an answer. Three Things That Need to Happen Now Against this backdrop, Pezzullo laid out three immediate requirements. First, the government should commission the writing of a war book, a genuine national contingency planning document led by Defence and the Department of Home Affairs that addresses fuel and petroleum reserves, pharmaceutical stockpiles, the protection of critical infrastructure now in private hands, the status of internet connectivity and undersea cables, and the question of whether vulnerable populations would be moved out of northern cities like Darwin if strikes became a possibility. This is not the war book of the 1930s or 1950s, he noted. Society has changed fundamentally. Critical infrastructure is privately owned and operated. Those private operators need to be inside the tent. Second, diplomacy needs to be restructured. The pursuit of middle-power coalitions, useful for some purposes, is not the right instrument for the problem Australia faces. As Pezzullo framed it, the credible risk of military conflict is a coalition fight in which the United States and China are the principals and Australia’s role flows from its geography. Two conversations need to happen, with clarity and without equivocation. In Beijing: Australia does not want this war, will work against it, and will honor its alliance commitments. In Washington: here is what we need to know about the plan, here is how command arrangements should work in the Australian theater, and here is the conversation about force flow and strike options that has not yet been had. “We don’t need Douglas MacArthur,” he said pointedly. “We’ll command the local theater.” Third, the NDS needs to be reframed on two time horizons simultaneously. The ten-year horizon document is broadly adequate for an independent defensive Australia force in 2036. The missing document is the ten-month readiness plan, working with what the ADF has available now, not what it will have when the shipbuilding programs mature, and focusing ruthlessly on unit proficiency, platform readiness, and the institutional capacity to fight tonight. The honesty of that framing was bracing. Pezzullo has spent a career inside the system, navigating the constraints that systems impose. He knows what it costs to say these things clearly. The Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar gave him a room of people who understand both the stakes and the machinery, and he used it to make a case that does not require elaboration or diplomatic softening. For those of us who have spent time analyzing how Western democracies manage the gap between strategic reality and public communication, Pezzullo’s remarks were a useful benchmark. The “fight tonight” standard, the readiness criterion that animates much of the best allied defense thinking today, is not a slogan. It is a question that has to be answered honestly, even when the honest answer is uncomfortable. Also published in DefenceInfo

'So how to exploit Australia’s strategic advantages?' in Fight Tonight: Combat Readiness at the Speed of Relevance Proceedings - Paper 1 Sir Richard Williams Foundation Seminar, 23 April 2026 By Dr Robbin Laird ACM (Retd) Mark Binskin, Chair, Sir Richard Williams Foundation, opening the seminar on 23 April 2026 The Sir Richard Williams Foundation seminar of 23 April 2026 brought together practitioners, analysts, industry leaders and allies to confront a deceptively simple question: what does it actually mean to exploit Australia’s strategic advantage, not in a decade, but now? “Fight Tonight” was not a slogan but a stress test. It was applied to platform readiness, training pipelines, industrial capacity, space architecture, intelligence integration, munitions stockpiles and, crucially, the honesty with which government explains the strategic situation to its own citizens. The program framed four themes: building combat mass and depth across domains; generating tempo; enhancing industry and the national support base; and surviving to operate through redundancy and dispersal. Presentations made clear that these are not sequential objectives but simultaneous requirements under a tightening timeline. The Strategic Clock Mike Pezzullo, former Secretary of Home Affairs, delivered the day’s most arresting intervention: Australia is preparing for the wrong war on the wrong timeline. The dominant ten-year planning horizon embedded in most defence documents simply does not match the window of strategic risk. Pezzullo traced his own reckoning back to Anzac Day 2006, when serving as Deputy Secretary for Strategy he read highly classified intelligence on PLA developments and put a single question to then-CDS Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston: does the classical Defence of Australia model still work? That model, codified in the 1987 Dibb white paper, assumed focus on the northern approaches, ready U.S. enablers and a militarised Indonesia as the most plausible challenge, not a global peer competitor contesting U.S. access. By 2006, he had concluded the framework was breaking down as the PLA built the means to push the Americans back. In Pezzullo’s judgment, much of the ensuing twenty-year warning time has been squandered. The 2026 National Defence Strategy, with its recapitalisation agenda and aspiration toward a more independent maritime and strike capability by the mid-2030s, is not wrong in what it attempts but it is not the force Australia needs ten months from now. His ten-month clock is anchored in the intelligence record: Admiral Philip Davidson’s 2027 window assessment, consistent warnings from Admirals Aquilino and Paparo, and former CIA Director William Burns’s 2023 statement that Xi has directed the PLA to be ready to give him a military option on Taiwan by 2027. Pezzullo assigns around a ten percent probability to the actual use of force, blockade, quarantine or assault, but notes that the most opportune period runs through the March–April 2027 weather window, roughly ten months from the seminar. His prescription was pointed: commission a genuine national war book, restructure diplomacy around a coalition fight in which the United States and China are the principal antagonists, and produce a ten-month readiness plan in parallel with ten-year recapitalisation. Air Power and Fighting Depth Air Marshal Stephen Chappell, Chief of Air Force, offered the most comprehensive account of how Australia’s advantages can be converted into deterrent airpower. His framework, building fighting depth, ran from geography and basing through human capital, technical investment and national aviation potential to allied integration. Geographically, Chappell encouraged thinking of Australia not as a single island continent but as an archipelago, drawing on the work of Andrew Carr. An archipelago is defended by disaggregation, dispersal and distributed operations, the logic underpinning RAAF posture and exercises such as Bronze Crocodile, which develops runway repair and airfield recovery at Townsville, and Point Group Rising, which reconnects the force to the reality that bases are the core of the weapon system. On human capital, Chappell was emphatic: the RAAF is a tier-one force, and he offered evidence rather than rhetoric. An E-7A Wedgetail deployed at short notice into a two-way range in the Middle East, with crews sheltering under air raid sirens before regenerating airpower. The Air Warfare Instructors Course, running since 1954, produces graduates who hold their own with the best at Nellis. An Air Mobility graduate captained a C-130J into Tel Aviv between ballistic missile barrages to evacuate more than a hundred Australians and New Zealanders. Technically, the F-35A, Super Hornet and Growler fleets remain at the leading edge. The MQ-28 Ghost Bat has now demonstrated its credentials as a genuine combat system by firing an AMRAAM and shooting down a target. The National Air Power Council, co-chaired by Chappell and his transport counterpart, is designed to harness the broader national aviation ecosystem, some 50,000 Australians and approximately 2,200 airfields, into a coherent airpower resource. AIRCDR Matthew McCormick, Commander Air Combat Group, gave the practitioner’s view from inside the force. The long transition following F-111 withdrawal is over. ACG has moved into spiral upgrading, with the F-35 as its backbone and the focus shifting from standing up platforms to maximising their effect. The tri-national Joint Simulation Environment at Pax River is central: RAAF pilots arrive confident and leave appropriately “recalibrated,” and at the most recent event the ACG team achieved the highest score of the year against a field dominated by U.S. weapons school students and instructors. In an era where fighter kill ratios against peers are closer to two-to-one than the ten-to-one of the Top Gun era, this matters. Lessons from Active Theatres Justin Bronk of RUSI brought the perspective of someone who walks airbases under fire and draws operational conclusions from live conflict. Across Ukraine, Operation Epic Fury in the Gulf and the Indo-Pacific, he interrogated the evolving balance between integrated air and missile defence (IAMD) and precision strike. In Ukraine, Bronk challenged the mythology of “cheap mass.” Achieving meaningful effects against defended targets may demand 250–400 one-way attack UAVs per strike, at US$30,000–50,000 each, carrying warheads in the three-to-six pound range. Against hardened or high-value targets of the kind that matter in an Indo-Pacific scenario, such systems are, at best, decoys and enablers that increase the probability of kill for high-end munitions; they do not replace ARGMs, PRSMs and other standoff weapons. In the Gulf, Bronk cautioned against overstating Epic Fury as an IADS-busting triumph. The United States executed an accomplished strike campaign, but much of the opponent’s IAMD architecture had already been systematically degraded by Israeli operations in 2024–25. More instructive were the limits of coercive leverage: making a fight existential by signalling regime change closes off negotiated off-ramps and incentivises hardline resistance rather than compromise. Bronk’s starkest warning concerned stockpiles. Gulf partners expended more than 2,000 PAC-3 interceptors during the campaign at around US$6 million per round. SM-3s for U.S. forces run to roughly US$43 million each, and standard “shoot-shoot-look” protocols mean expending the equivalent of an F-35’s cost per incoming threat. Most Western air forces, Australia included, cannot afford to field defensive stockpiles at that scale while simultaneously buying the offensive long-range strike that actually deters. The implication is a greater emphasis on passive defence: hardening, dispersal and rapid sortie generation, rather than false comfort in exquisite but unaffordable interceptors. His strategic bottom line was crisp: defence buys time but offence denies the adversary’s theory of victory. The force that survives to generate sorties and deliver precision effects is the force that shapes the operational calculus. Maritime Power in Transition Rear Admiral Matt Buckley, Acting Chief of Navy, spoke from three decades at sea, much of it in submarines. Deterrence, he argued, is not a single platform but an integrated all-domain effect generated by persistent posture and credible lethality. Availability and lethality must be held together: a lethal ship that is not available does not deter, and an available ship without credible lethality invites challenge. On any given day around half the fleet is at sea: as Buckley spoke, 23 ships and more than 1,600 sailors were deployed, and his weekly readiness brief rarely shows fewer than ten ships underway. This is readiness as practised behaviour, not a planning assumption. The Enhanced Surface Combatant Lethality Program has integrated Tomahawk, NSM, SM-6 and the Aegis Baseline 9 upgrade onto the Hobart class, transforming them from presence platforms into serious contributors to joint deterrence. The Navy must nonetheless grow by roughly 25 percent in people and platforms within a decade, approximately 4,000 personnel, into increasingly complex systems. Buckley’s confidence rests on people: the night before the seminar he was informed that a young Australian nuclear technician, in only her second year, had recorded the highest score ever for her category at U.S. Nuclear Power School, a performance the Americans are putting on a plaque. Space, Industry and the Alliance Space is no longer a distant frontier; it is essential infrastructure already under daily pressure. Jeremy King of Lockheed Martin Australia and New Zealand stressed that any force that loses assured space access loses the ability to integrate joint effects at scale: an F-35 without resilient space-derived communications, navigation and ISR is a diminished platform, and a joint force without space is joint in name only. The proliferation of counterspace programmes from three nations in 2018 to at least thirteen tracked in the 2026 Secure World Foundation report makes resilience by design, allied architectures and deliberate industrial integration non-negotiable. Harvey Wright of Optus Satellite highlighted how collapsing launch costs and the dominance of commercial satellites, now roughly ninety percent of objects on orbit, have transformed the strategic equation. His framework centred on sovereign control of critical ground infrastructure, delivery at commercial speed rather than multi-year procurement tempo, and targeted investment in key technologies with Australian firms and research institutions: the logic of distributed resilience applied to space. Industry speakers Kris Christensen of BAE Systems and Richard Morris of Northrop Grumman brought the readiness debate to the factory floor. Christensen’s war-footing workshops use back-casting from a 2027 crisis to ask what workforce, business and capability decisions leaders will wish they had made in 2026. Readiness, she argued, is threefold: workforce readiness (people, clearances, surge capacity), business readiness (the ability to contract and decide at speed), and capability readiness (spares, tooling, local suppliers). If it cannot be sustained, it is not really a capability. Morris argued for reversing the traditional mission–mass–manufacturing–margin logic. In a zero-warning world, margin must come first because it sustains industry at all. Profits fund investment; investment builds factories; factories generate combat mass. The proliferation of FPV drones in Ukraine emerged from industrial actors making practical, profitable decisions at scale, not from mission-first procurement doctrine. Australia’s distinctive advantage is the current influx of primes from the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, South Korea and Japan seeking global production capacity. Seen through a margin-first lens, this is a strategic asset that can embed Australian industry inside global supply chains before crisis arrives. The alliance dimension threaded through Colonel James Landreth’s remarks as USINDOPACOM’s liaison to HQJOC and through Bronk’s munitions warning. The U.S.–Australia alliance is an asymmetric advantage adversaries cannot replicate, built over a century and manifested in deeply integrated operations, logistics and intelligence. Australia as theatre provides distributed logistics that mitigates tyranny of distance, and posture initiatives. from Marine Rotational Force Darwin to enhanced bomber rotations and Talisman Sabre, translate geography into operational reality. But as Justin Bronk underscored, the comfortable assumption that the United States can always act as “arsenal of last resort” has eroded, as even close allies such as Estonia and Finland now discover in delayed deliveries and public caveats. For Australia, Bronk’s guidance could not have been clearer: the munitions available on day one of conflict are effectively the munitions available for the duration. Buy as many as you can, as fast as you can. Advantage as Active Work Taken together, the 2026 Williams Foundation seminar portrayed a country with genuine strategic advantages that require constant work to exploit and can be rapidly eroded by complacency, underinvestment or institutional slowness. Geography is a fact but not a strategy. Partnerships are a foundation but demand maintenance. Recapitalised forces are a starting point that must be organised and operated to deliver integrated combat power at the moment of decision. Across domains, the outlines of an answer emerged. Geographically, dispersal, distributed operations and agile combat employment convert continental depth into resilience. The human dimension benefits from sustained investment in a tier-one workforce capable of extraordinary performance when circumstances demand. Technically, spiral upgrades, autonomous systems like Ghost Bat and integrated space architectures extend reach without exhausting scarce human capital. Industrially, a margin-first logic and integration into global supply chains build sovereign capability before crisis. In intelligence and space, disciplined foundational work and allied-by-design architectures turn data into decision advantage and fragility into resilience. Over all of this hangs Pezzullo’s challenge: the clock is wrong, and someone must say so. “Fight Tonight” is not a metaphor. It is a standard against which Australian readiness must now be honestly measured. Also published in Second Line of Defense

The Williams Foundation advances awareness, understanding and constructive debate about integrated, coherent & sustainable combat power to strengthen Australia’s national security. Through its events & engagement activities with Defence officials and the wider Australian national scientific and industry base, the Foundation shapes and influences policy decisions regarding Australia’s defence with an emphasis on air and space power. We advance awareness, understanding and constructive debate about integrated, coherent & sustainable combat power to strengthen Australia’s national security Our Purpose EXPERT ANALYSIS In-depth thinking by our highly experienced network of non-resident fellows, scholars and active practitioners Australia’s Air Power: Ready for Tonight, Preparing for Tomorrow Oct 6 7 min read MORE EXPERT ANALYSIS NEWS & UPDATES Stay up-to-date with the latest in the Foundation's news and activities > Australia in Era of Strategic Uncertainty: The Defence Dimension - Dr Robbin Laird May 23 3 min read CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS EVENTS Errol McCormack lunches and Conferences are complimentary for financial members of the Williams Foundation. 2025 Errol McCormack Member Lunches Dec 15, 2023 1 min read 2025 Williams Foundation Conferences Dec 13, 2023 1 min read Click for more information and registration Platinum Corporate Partners

About Us Who are we? The Sir Richard Williams Foundation is an independent organisation whose primary purpose is to strengthen Australia’s national security by shaping and influencing policy decisions regarding Australia’s defence with an emphasis on air and space power. The Foundation also promotes national security policies that: promote the generation of coherent and sustainable combat power by Navy, Army, Air Force, Space and Cyber; particularly in an integrated context, including through the wider Australian national scientific and industry support base; and influence the evolving regional strategic environment in a manner favourable to Australia’s security. The Foundation aims to stimulate awareness, understanding and constructive debate on national security policies by supporting research, consulting with senior Defence officials and industry representatives and hosting seminars and events. Our origins and early development After years of discussion, in 2008 a group of retired Air Force officers decided that there was a need for an organisation to support development of Air Force. Possible solutions covered the range from “CAF Grey Beards Advisory Committee” to “Independent Think Tank”. After several formal and informal exploratory meetings, the decision was taken to form a RAAF Association Think Tank to be called the Sir Richard Williams Foundation. The first formal meeting of the Foundation was conducted on 14 October 2008 at the Air Power Development Center with Dr Alan Stephens as Chair. During the meeting Dr Stephens suggested, and the Committee agreed, that AIRMSHL Errol McCormack AO (Retd) take the Chair. Through 2009 the Committee developed the structure required to support the Foundation and decided that product of the Foundation would be “Papers” on topical issues. Workshops were to be used to support development of the papers. “Workshops” soon developed into “Seminars” as a means of gaining company sponsorship. The first seminar, ISR, was held at ADC on 19 April 2011. At a meeting on 14 December 2010 the Committee decided that the Foundation should be independent from the RAAF Association. Thus, on 03 December 2012 the Sir Richard Williams Foundation Incorporated was registered in the ACT as a charity. Since then the Foundation has continued to develop and expand in scope and range of activities. The Foundation is now recognised in the Department of Defence as an influential component of operational development of air power in the ADF. Our founder Air Marshal Errol McCormack AO (Retd) Errol McCormack joined the RAAF as an aircrew cadet in March 1962 after completing an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner. On graduation he was assigned fast jet and completed tours in South East Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Borneo) on the F-86 Sabre, Vietnam on the Canberra bomber, US on the F-111A and US on the RF-4C Reconnaissance Phantom. As a senior officer he completed two tours in Operational Requirements, two tours at staff college (RAAF and Joint), one tour in Operational/Air Command and two tours in diplomatic posts (Air Attache Washington and Commander IADS, Malaysia/Singapore). He has commanded at squadron, wing and Air Force levels. Errol McCormack retired from the RAAF as Chief of Air Force in May 2001. Since then he has sat on local company boards and consulted for many local and foreign companies dealing with Defence. In Oct19 he divested himself of all commercial commitments and now conducts pro bono activities only. Who is Sir Richard Williams? Sir Richard Williams The Foundation is named after Sir Richard Williams. In World War I Sir Richard Williams was the Australian Army's outstanding air combat commander. In 1921 he became the first chief of the newly-formed Royal Australian Air Force. Williams is widely acknowledged as Australia's pre-eminent military airman. For more about Sir Richard Williams, Brian Weston and Alan Stephens, wrote a three part series of articles in 2019 published in On Target - a regular column in the Australian Defence Business Review . Brian Weston 'On Target: Who was Richard Williams? ' in Australian Defence Business Review, March-April 2019 p. 82 Brian Weston 'On Target: The Birth of an Australian Air Force – Part 2 ' in Australian Defence Business Review, May-June 2019 p 82 Dr Alan Stephens 'On Target: Richard Williams and the Defence of Australia ' July-August 2019 This column written for the ADBR July-August 2019 an edition that was not published Image Acknowledgement - This photo of Sir Richard Williams was donated to the Williams Foundation from the Wall family private collection. The photo can be found on the front cover of Sir Richard Williams'autobiography 'These are the Facts' , published by The Australian War Memorial and the Australian Government Publishing Service, 1977

Corporate Partners & Sponsorship The Foundation would like to thank the following sponsors for their continuing support. Platinum Corporate Partners Gold Corporate Partners Bronze Corporate Partner Conference Sponsors and Annual Corporate Members Annual Corporate Members Supporters In-Kind The Foundation is an independently funded, not-for-profit institution. The Board invites sponsorship from organisations or individuals wishing to contribute constructively to a forward-looking Australian defence policy. Sponsors will be acknowledged in the Foundation's publications and media releases.