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140<br />
We did it to ourselves...<br />
I<br />
listened recently to a relatively<br />
senior officer bemoaning the<br />
fact that the RAF had seen<br />
significantly more cuts than the<br />
Army over recent years. He was<br />
right. In 2006, the “strength of the<br />
UK Regular Armed Forces has<br />
fallen by just over a third since 1990,<br />
with the Royal <strong>Air</strong> Force falling the<br />
most (46%) and the Army the least<br />
(30%)” 1 . He asked how this could be<br />
fair or appropriate, given the unique<br />
capabilities of air power and its vital<br />
role in the contemporary operating<br />
environment. My answer to him: we<br />
did it to ourselves.<br />
While the Army has been steadily on<br />
message that they need more boots<br />
on the ground to meet the challenges<br />
of the contemporary operating<br />
environment and that the Regimental<br />
system was, if intangibly so, vital<br />
to esprit de corps, the RAF has been<br />
equally steadfast in its assertion that<br />
it can efficiently deliver increasingly<br />
decisive effect at increasing longer<br />
ranges in increasingly shorter [sic]<br />
periods of time, as long as we can<br />
access the appropriate technological<br />
solutions – technology underpinning<br />
our e-spirit dot corps. Faced with such<br />
assertions, why wouldn’t our friends<br />
in the Treasury take us at our word?<br />
We did it to ourselves.<br />
Viewpoint<br />
By Sqn Ldr Andrew Wilson<br />
Underpinning these assertions of the<br />
salience of technological supremacy<br />
in modern warfare was the<br />
Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA),<br />
which was vigorously embraced by<br />
the US in the early 1990s and went<br />
on, many have argued, to define<br />
their – and the Western – way of<br />
warfare as the century turned.<br />
Incidents such as the killing of<br />
Al Zarqawi in June 2006 by an<br />
air strike, which saw aircraft on a<br />
surveillance mission re-rolled, refuelled<br />
and retasked while still in<br />
the air to deliver the ‘decisive’<br />
strike, were held up by air power<br />
advocates 2 as examples of how air<br />
power exemplified the post-RMA,<br />
networked, innovative form of<br />
warfare that was the envy of the<br />
world and the future of conflict. But,<br />
biplanes over the trenches of WWI<br />
were able to conduct both of these<br />
missions – admittedly, and by any<br />
measure, not as well, but nonetheless<br />
they observed and they bombed. I<br />
see improvement in the use of air<br />
power, but little innovation and no<br />
revolution; 9/11 on the other hand...<br />
Moreover, faced with this new form<br />
of warfare, our adversaries decided<br />
to evolve themselves, their RMA<br />
creating what some term a fourth<br />
generation of warfare (4GW) 3 , which<br />
removed our operational superiority<br />
by removing the operational level,
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