Somewhere between Cocos Island and the Coral Sea, an area larger than the continental United States, Australia is expected to see everything, all the time. It cannot. No nation could, not with satellites alone, and increasingly not without eyes in the air.
That is the uncomfortable arithmetic confronting planners as Land Forces 2026 opens in Perth this week. Australia's strategic geography, an island continent astride the world's largest ocean, ringed by archipelagic chokepoints and a rapidly militarising near-abroad, demands persistent awareness across a maritime approach zone that dwarfs anything the Australian Defence Force has had to watch before. The 2023 Defence Strategic Review called for an "impactful projection" of national power. Projection first requires perception. And on that count, Australia has a gap.
Space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) has long been sold as the answer to Australia's tyranny of distance. Satellites are elegant in theory: unblinking, sovereign-controlled, immune to airspace politics. In practice, they are expensive to build, years to launch, predictable in their orbits, and, as recent conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have shown, increasingly vulnerable to jamming, dazzling and kinetic threats. A single exquisite satellite can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and once tasked, cannot loiter. It passes overhead and is gone, leaving exactly the kind of temporal gap that a submarine, a grey-hulled survey vessel or a fishing fleet with darker purposes can exploit.
The South Pacific compounds the problem. Its member states span a fifth of the globe but a fraction of the population, meaning few ground-based radar or listening posts exist to fill the coverage gaps between satellite passes. For Canberra, that is not an abstract deficiency, it is the seam through which grey-zone activity, illegal fishing and strategic competitors' maritime militias most easily slip.
This is precisely the mission set that airborne ISR (A-ISR) is built to close, and it is why the systems being discussed in Perth this week deserve close attention from Australia and its allies operating in the region.
SNC’s Rapcon-X, for instance, a rapidly deployable, modular ISR system, is designed to be forward-based at austere Pacific airstrips within days rather than months, giving commanders a persistent local watch that no satellite constellation can replicate on short notice. Paired with proven long-range platforms such as the Bombardier Challenger 650 and the larger Global 6500, the same modular payloads can be flown from Australian mainland bases out to the second island chain and back without refuelling, converting business-jet endurance and low operating cost into genuine strategic reach. Underpinning it all is the next-generation mission system (NGMS), an open-architecture system that allows sensors, communications and analytics to be swapped and upgraded without ripping out the airframe, a hedge against obsolescence that satellite programs, locked into a single payload for a decade or more, simply cannot offer.
The economics matter as much as the capability. A single A-ISR aircraft can be fielded and iterated for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the lead time of a dedicated satellite launch. It can be redirected in hours, not months, to wherever the picture is unclear: a suspicious flotilla near the Torres Strait, a humanitarian crisis in Vanuatu or a partner nation requesting maritime domain awareness support.
The Five Eyes alliance does not need to choose between space and air. But it does need to stop treating orbit as a substitute for presence. As Land Forces delegates walk the static displays in Perth this week, the case for A-ISR is not a technical curiosity, it is the difference between watching the Pacific and merely hoping it stays quiet.
Josh Rooney
Rooney is the managing director of SNC AUS, a subsidiary of SNC. A former officer in the Royal Australian Air Force, Rooney has accumulated more than 7000 flight hours and has significant experience managing large-scale programs and international collaborations.