Win Before the Flight: The Smart Advantage Behind Manned-Unmanned team (MUM-T) in the Indo-Pacific

Indo-Pacific security outcomes will increasingly be shaped less by individual platforms and more by how quickly nations can integrate people, software, sensors and partners into a coherent operating system. This commentary argues that the real advantage is built “before the flight”: in training pathways, human factors discipline, synthetic rehearsal and the practical art of evolving capability over time. Using New Zealand’s Project Kahu as a small-force integration case study, it proposes a pragmatic Canada+Singapore+New Zealand tri-node collaboration pattern to accelerate learning and interoperability across the region. The same integration logic also supports civil resilience, strengthening maritime safety, search and rescue, and counter-illicit activity across vast ocean spaces.

Most discussions about human-machine teaming start with platforms: crewed aircraft, uncrewed systems, autonomy levels, sensors, data links, and who’s buying what. That’s understandable as platforms are visible, budgeted, and politically legible, but the real bottleneck for Indo-Pacific Manned-Unmanned team (MUM-T) won’t be hardware. It will be the human pipeline: the ability to grow operators, engineers, instructors, acquisition staff, and industry teams who share a common “teaming grammar”, and can evolve tactics, training, and integration at the speed of software, not procurement cycles.

The premise is simple: MUM-T is an education and integration pathway before it’s a platform choice. The advantage goes to the countries that build the learning system first, because they’ll integrate safer, learn faster, and adapt sooner. That’s smart advantage in practice.

Fighter debates run on two tracks at once

If you want a case study in how platform conversations become stand-ins for deeper issues, look at the recurring “which fighter” debates that swirl around allied air forces.

Canada’s debates, F-35 or alternatives, are often framed as performance, cost, risk, and interoperability. But underneath, the argument usually runs on two tracks at once:

• the visible binary of “which aircraft is better,” and

• the deeper questions of industrial pathways, upgrade control, and how fast a force can evolve capability over time, including within tightly integrated alliance ecosystems.

At its core, this isn’t a platform argument. It’s a relevance argument: how smaller air forces stay relevant, interoperable, and load-sharing in coalition environments. Winning before the flight by building the people-and-integration advantage first.

Zooming out, MUM-T amplifies every one of these themes. Once autonomy and teaming enter the loop, capability evolution becomes less about airframes and more about:

• human factors and trust calibration

• workload and decision rights

• training and synthetic environments

• interface design

• iterative experimentation with operators and engineers in the same room

What this means is that the heart of the debate is not primarily a procurement problem, but more so a learning system problem.

A small-country reminder: Project Kahu

New Zealand offers a useful historical analogy for “integration literacy as leverage.” In the mid-1980s, the RNZAF ran Project Kahu, a major upgrade program for its A-4K Skyhawks, modernising avionics and weapons delivery, while building deep integration and sustainment habits across the force and local industry.The details matter less than the principle: Kahu wasn’t about buying scale, it was about upgrading the system (and the people) so a legacy platform could behave like something far more modern.

There’s an Asia relevance here too. Through the FPDA exercise circuit, RNZAF Skyhawks repeatedly operated in the Singapore–Malaysia training geography right up to the end of the Air Combat Force era. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, with RSAF F-16s and RMAF F/A-18D Hornets in service, the upgraded A-4K could still deploy into that environment and fly high-end, integrated training serials alongside modern fast-jets. Which is exactly the point: integration and training let smaller fleets remain relevant alongside more modern platforms.

MUM-T is the modern version of this logic. The decisive advantage isn’t simply “owning autonomy.” It’s building the workforce that can safely integrate autonomy into operations and keep evolving as threats and software change.

The Singapore factor

Singapore matters here because it’s a practical learning accelerator.

Singapore’s universities and applied ecosystem invest heavily in the disciplines that sit right underneath MUM-T: autonomous systems, robotics, and human–machine interaction, especially “human-in-the-loop” approaches where supervision, trust, and decision rights are designed rather than assumed. And that’s the core point: MUM-T’s hard problems aren’t solved by adding more autonomy. They’re solved by designing human-centred teaming, then training it, testing it, and refining it. The opportunity is not “buying tech.” It’s using Singapore’s applied ecosystem to accelerate learning then translating those lessons into doctrine, training pipelines, and industry participation back home.

A tri-node model: Canada + Singapore + New Zealand

Here’s a simple way to view a Canada + Singapore + New Zealand tri-node.

Canada brings scale, procurement gravity, industry depth, and the ability to convene and sustain long-run capability. Singapore brings applied iteration, research depth in human-machine interaction, and an Indo-Pacific vantage point where operational realities are close.A New Zealand node can bring a small-force integration perspective, with early pathway work emerging to treat MUM-T as an education and integration discipline, and to operationalise that learning into repeatable training and integration habits.

This doesn’t need to be a “programme.” It can be a collaboration pattern, a repeatable way to build MUM-T literacy, interoperability, and workforce depth without waiting for the next major platform decision to do all the work. But the tri-node is just a starter loop, extensible to other Indo-Pacific partners (Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand for example) as shared learning matures.

The role of primes and integrators This kind of collaboration doesn’t need a prime to lead it, but it benefits from primes and integrators who treat integration and training as first-class capability - the kind of focus often associated with players like Saab and Thales: mission systems thinking, human factors, synthetic integration, and the practical art of evolving capability over time. In other words: helping nations get better at teaming, regardless of which aircraft they operate.

MUM-T beyond the military

It’s also worth stating plainly, the application of human–machine teaming outside military use is significant. The same teaming literacy - safety cases, trust calibration, synthetic-first training transfers cleanly between defence and civil operations. In Canada, many high-value use cases sit in spaces that are operationally real and economically meaningful: Arctic and maritime operations, wildfire and disaster response, remote infrastructure inspection, offshore energy, and domain awareness. Across all of them, the hard part is similar: building safe, trusted, well-trained human–machine teams in dynamic environments.

What collaboration could look like (low friction, high value)

• Shared lessons learned

• Early operator-engineer-human factors contact

• Synthetic-first exploration with interoperability in mind

In a space moving this fast, the advantage goes to those who begin early. So the question facing us is who’s ready to suit up?

DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of IIPA and this platform.

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Author

Josh Wineera works at the intersection of defence capability development, training pathways and industry participation across the Indo-Pacific. He has previously written on NZ-Canadian defence industry collaboration in DefSec magazine He is a former Army forward air controller. He is Head of Global Partnerships with the Taranaki Alliance and is developing a MUM-T education and integration pathway with New Zealand’s leading aviation teaching institute.

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