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ID:
161292
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Summary/Abstract |
As the RAF celebrates and commemorates the 100th anniversary of its foundation as the world’s first independent air force on 1 April 1918, RUSI marks this event with a special edition of the RUSI Journal. When he established RUSI in 1831, the Duke of Wellington could not have envisaged the multi-domain nature of contemporary military operations, and indeed his great rival Napoleon had disbanded the French military balloon corps some 30 years previously. However, a glance at the archives of the RUSI Journal demonstrates an interest in airpower as part of the military instrument long before the founding of the RAF, with an unsurprising intensification through the First World War. The extent of the continuities as well as the dramatic change in military airpower can be seen in an article from 1914 which discusses the use of aircraft to rapidly remove wounded soldiers from the battlefield.1 In the twenty-first century, this took the form of RAF Chinook helicopters delivering Medical Emergency Response Teams directly to the battlefield in Afghanistan. The articles in this special edition do not seek to review the entire history of the RAF or indeed the military use of airpower, but rather engage with contemporary debates through a range of academic prisms and with insights from academics, practitioners and practitioner-academics.
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2 |
ID:
148973
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Summary/Abstract |
The nature of the geostrategic and military challenges facing the UK and NATO is changing in ways that necessitate a significant rethink of the approach to defence, Ewan Lawson and Richard Barrons argue. Developments in technology have the potential to redress the balance but only with new conceptual approaches and a commitment to spend appropriately.
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3 |
ID:
180513
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Summary/Abstract |
Hybrid warfare has been an important topic in much of Western national security discourse in the past five years, albeit with many different labels. The concept is problematic in that it can be applied to a range of activities that, while coercive, might have been considered part of routine statecraft and has been applied to a range of contexts where the actual activities being described are quite different. In this article, Ewan Lawson discusses how the concept of hybrid warfare is important for policymakers as it reinforces the idea that conflict and competition should not be seen through a simple peace–war dichotomy. It also highlights the importance of a whole-of-government response and the risk of seeing it through a purely military prism.
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