They may have missed a few antenna on the mockup
This powerpoint presentation is an interesting read.
https://airpower.airforce.gov.au/APD...Transcript.pdf
We’ve got a lot of antennas. I probably wouldn’t know if I’m missing one on a walk-around—there are so many. But you can see HF antennas on the bottom, a bunch of different VU and JTIDS [Joint Tactical Information Distribution System ] antennas. You’ve got Link 11, 16 and we’ve also got MiRC as well now, post [Operation] OKRA
The Director in the CAOC at the time, the USAF general, called us up one day and he said ‘I need you to get me more crews and I need you to get me more jets’ and I said, ‘Oh, why is that sir?’ and he said ‘The Wedgetail is just so much more capable, technology-wise and control-wise, the level of control that my fighters are getting. We want you guys airborne all the time’. It got to the point where we were getting specifically tasked whenever certain strikes were happening; that’s when we would fly to cover the strikes. I said ‘Thank you very much sir, that’s great, but we’ve got two crews here— that’s 50 percent of the Royal Australian Air Force’s capability right here. And we’re wheezing back at home to just keep raise, train, sustaining the ones that will come after us and replace us’. And he was shocked. He had absolutely no idea that our Air Force was that small in terms of our AEW&C community. They [USAF] had five [E-3] jets and nine crews on our base alone.
So we punch above our weight. Unfortunately, it’s led to a high demand for our services, which has a lot of impacts on us and stuff. I wish we could have given him more crews and more jets—I really do—but that’s just the state of play that we had. And, from a sustainment point of view now, because again my personal view on this is that I think Wedgetail will be involved in this for quite some time, we’ve dropped back to one crew over there, just to be able to sustain operations for the long term.