Page 141 - Australian Defence Magazine November 2021

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failure. Whereas an F-35 is both a sensor and a shooter.” So perhaps the future is more nuanced: strike and com- bat capabilities become a joint effort between RAAF and other services, as well as between crewed and uncrewed platforms and long-range missile systems, and the demand
for HADR and airlift increases simultaneously.
“That’s probably right,” Davies answered. “And there’s a role for Army in the land-based counter-maritime capabil-
ity as well.”
In terms of challenges facing RAAF, Davies believes that
a cultural preference for crewed aircraft could prevent suf- ficient uptake of new technologies. In other words, RAAF’s force structure could change slowly – partially because of ‘investment inertia’, or the difficulty of changing course when financial costs are so high, and also because it funda- mentally has a love of flying.
“There’s a famous RAND study on the organisational cultures of the military,” Davies said. “It predicted that air forces are going to be slower to take up uncrewed aircraft than the technology would warrant.”
There are two ways to overcome this sort of inertia. The first – best avoided – would be to lose a war. The second, according to Davies, is to encourage an environ- ment of experimentation and innovation – something RAAF has arguably pioneered in the ADF through the
fifth-gen concept as well as endeavours like Plan Jericho. Predicting the future is always a fraught exercise. But a brief reading of the tea leaves can reveal some useful hy- potheses: maritime strike will likely increase in importance, prompting an increasingly joint and perhaps uncrewed re- sponse, at the same time that climate change places greater
HADR demand on the ADF.
So in sum, there is a lot of work ahead for the RAAF – work
that will no doubt set the next century apart from the first. ■
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