Generating operational mass in the Indo-Pacific requires new approaches to projecting, sustaining and employing military power across vast distances and contested environments. This must be achieved despite constraints in workforce and industrial capacity that can undermine sustainment in high-intensity warfare. A possible solution to this challenge is to embrace rapidly evolving, semi-autonomous uncrewed systems, while adapting defence industry to exploit rapid, continuous modernisation.
Current defence development emphasises spending on small numbers of advanced, complex and expensive crewed platforms. This is increasingly out of step with the very rapid innovation cycles associated with semi-autonomous uncrewed systems. Such systems – if acquired at low cost, in volume and at a rapid pace – offer the ability to quickly build combat mass – bringing together quantitative superiority and military effects in the right place and right time. Continuous modernisation, demonstrated by Ukraine’s rapid evolution of autonomous drones, also allows for rapid innovation of these uncrewed systems at a lower cost.
At the 2026 ASPI Defence Conference in June, a panel explored the role of uncrewed semi-autonomous systems. The discussion focused on developing operational mass to enable the ADF to better project, sustain and employ military power across the Indo-Pacific.
Learning from Ukraine: semi-autonomy can deliver combat mass | The Strategist
(Malcolm Davis – ASPI The Strategist)
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