Bradley Perrett | The Labor government is neglecting to expand the fighter force

The main problem is that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers have not allocated enough money to defence.

This month we've learned that one of the most obvious moves for urgently bolstering our military, increasing the fighter force, won't happen.

Labor inherited a despicable defence policy from the former Coalition government, one that failed to provide for meaningful strengthening the country's armed forces in this dangerous decade. So far as we can tell, Labor is not doing nearly enough to fix that, basically because it is relying on only a little reallocation of defence funds rather than additions.

As Chalmers revealed in the May budget, the defence share of the economy will remain stable until at least 2026-27.

Our main opportunity for quick reinforcement is in expanding the Royal Australian Air Force. It so happens that over the past 25 years we've completely renewed our military aircraft fleet. As a result almost everything that the RAAF has in service is up-to-date equipment that's still available from warm foreign production lines.

In the always difficult business of defence acquisition, things don't get much easier than just adding more of what you already have. You know how well it works, you know how to operate it and, in buying more of it, you probably don't need to spend much more on training and support.

Although the public version of the review said almost nothing about the RAAF, we had a reasonable hope that the full, secret version took advantage of air force's situation by planning for more aircraft.

It still might - but not fighters.

If we became involved in a war over Taiwan, our F-35A Lightning fighters would be deployed to protect critical facilities against missile strikes, deal with Chinese ships or land installations in our vicinity and maybe reinforce the US in the Western Pacific. We should have more of them quickly.

Lockheed Martin could begin delivering more in 2027 or 2028, if only we ordered - if only Albanese and Chalmers would make the money available.

Instead, Labor is sticking with the fighter and strike-aircraft force level set by Gough Whitlam's government 50 years ago: three fighter squadrons, a fighter training unit and two strike units, the latter now organised as one squadron and one training flight.

Although the tasks vary, all the aircraft in that organisation are fighters: 24 F/A-18F Super Hornets for the strike elements and a planned total of 72 F-35As for the fighter elements. We also have 12 Growler electromagnetic attack aircraft, but they're not fighters.

We now know the force level will not change because the chief of the air force, Air Marshal Robert Chipman, confirmed to Aviation Week this month that our next fighter acquisition would replace the Super Hornets around 2035.

That's what the former government planned, except that the timing has been delayed by about five years and the replacements may not be F-35s.

So the fighter force will not grow, at least not until sometime after 2035. The force level that was good enough in 1973 is supposed to be good enough in 2023 and indeed in 2033.

While failure to promptly buy more F-35As to establish another squadron or two is a huge mistake, delaying replacement of the Super Hornets is commendable. They're good fighters, too good to throw away in 2030, and Chipman also reveals that we will upgrade them. Wise move.

We will delay Super Hornet replacement to consider any F-35 alternatives that may be available in the middle of next decade, he says. It's the issue raised by this column in December: the F-35 won't be obsolete by then, but it won't be fully competitive, and better designs will be on the market.

Meanwhile, the government says it will buy 20 C-130J Hercules airlifters to replace 12 well-worn ones that we already have. So the Hercules fleet will expand.

It's a good move, but there's less to it than meets the eye. In part, it will just compensate for a mess that began under the former Labor government and continued into the Coalition's term.

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Foolishly, we ordered an uneconomically small fleet of 10 little C-27J Spartan airlifters in 2011 then persisted with the purchase after the US Air Force, the lead operator of the design, decided in 2012 that it didn't want it.

That left us with a greater task in making our Spartans fit for their function of battlefield transportation for the army. In the end we failed. By 2021 they had been reassigned to civil missions. What a waste.

Helping cover the gap, the Coalition ordered four more CH-47F Chinook transport helicopters, and now we see Labor adding eight Hercules.

Altogether, there's an increase in air-transportation capability. But the price we're paying for the C-130Js is just gobsmacking: $9.8 billion, a ridiculous $490 million per aircraft. That demands explanation.

The government is reportedly planning another incremental addition to an aircraft type we already have in service, the A330 MRTT tanker (called KC-30A by the RAAF). Buying two more will increase the fleet to nine.

That's far too few. Tankers multiply the value of other aircraft, especially for air forces, like Australia's, that must deal with long distances. We should probably be at least doubling the tanker fleet to 14.