Opinion: Why we must upgrade our northern air bases

Is it time to shift the posture of our bases from ‘passive’ to ‘active’ players in their own defence?

When compared to deployed personnel, fighter jets, or potent symbols of maritime power projection like aircraft carriers, domestic fixed infrastructure is probably high on the list of unsexy defence capabilities right behind defence ICT (don’t hate me, we all know it’s true).

Yet like defence ICT, base infrastructure, particularly the critical facilities across northern Australia, are fundamentally critical to supporting both the delivery of the government’s doctrine of “impactful projection” and allied operations throughout the Indo-Pacific.