Air Power and Empire: How the RAF Policed Britain’s Frontiers
A long read on how the RAF used air control to police Britain’s imperial frontiers, and why economy,…
7 May 2026 · 15 min read 5 June
On This Day, 1999: On 5 June 1999 RAF Tornados flew their first combat missions from Solenzara in Corsica during Operation Allied…
Read the entry →Formation & Interwar · 1918 – 1939
Formation & Interwar
The newly-formed RAF fought for its survival against those who wished to dissolve it. Colonial policing, record-breaking long-distance flights and the dawn of the monoplane era defined two decades of quiet but decisive transformation.
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The interwar years were defined by two simultaneous struggles: the RAF's fight for institutional survival, and its search for a role that would justify that survival. Hugh Trenchard, the service's first Chief of the Air Staff, became the apostle of strategic bombing — the doctrine that air power could win wars independently, without the need for armies or navies. It was a controversial theory, but it kept the RAF alive.
Across the empire, the RAF policed vast territories at a fraction of the cost of ground forces. In Iraq, India and the Northwest Frontier, air control became the RAF's primary peacetime function — controversial in its methods, but effective in demonstrating the service's utility to a Treasury determined to cut defence spending.
"Air power is the most difficult of all forms of military force to measure, or even to express in precise terms." — Winston Churchill
Meanwhile, technology transformed. The biplane gave way to the monoplane. The wooden-and-canvas construction of the Great War was replaced by stressed-metal structures. By the late 1930s, the Hurricane and Spitfire were entering service, and Bomber Command was building the force that would eventually strike Germany. The RAF that went to war in 1939 was barely recognisable from the one that had been formed in 1918.
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