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Consistency of language is not simply a writing skill; it is a leadership responsibility.

The main theme of the 2026 Air and Space Power Conference was “building fighting depth” and the Aviator Symposium was “the airminded warfighter.” However, a question that came up repeatedly during the event was “what success actually looks like”? Instead of asking what success looks like now, ask what it would look like decades from now if these ideas had truly taken hold.

Over the past years, the theme of resilience has been firmly enshrined as one of the many attributes required of the contemporary war fighter. Nowhere in the country is the preparedness of our Air Force more succinct than in northern Australia.

Australia is a maritime, geographically vast, technologically capable, and globally connected nation. These attributes do not guarantee effective national security, but they do provide choice, and Australia is now under increasing pressure to make the right one.

In Why Air Forces Fail: The Anatomy of Defeat (Higham & Harris, 2016), historians Robin Higham and Stephen Harris assemble a team of experts to investigate examples of failure and defeat in the application of air power. Overall, Why Air Forces Fail is an interesting and important book because it analyses the reasons why air forces have suffered defeat and failure. It draws some important lessons in this regard, and it provides an excellent resource for those studying air power.

Strategist Joseph Caldwell Wylie argued that strategies were implemented through two general types of operational patterns: (1) cumulative warfare, which involves “a collection of lesser actions” where tactical actions gradually built up to have strategic impact; and (2) sequential warfare, which is “a series of discrete steps” where each lead to the next; an example being the island hopping campaign across the Pacific during World War Two.

There is a blunt but effective thought experiment for anyone in a leadership role: if you see yourself as the village hero, but everyone you lead sees you as the village idiot, you have a problem.

David TurnbullAustralian Defence ForceIn my previous blog (Turnbull, 2026), I explored the foundational work of building self-awareness, embracing

Sustaining Communications Across a Degraded NetworkSteven CrawfordAustralian Defence ForceThe increase in interconnected systems within the Royal A