Senior RAF Officer Calls For New Approach To Warfighting

Air Marshal Edward Stringer, Director General of Joint Force Development, says the UK must modernise its thinking and approach to warfighting if it is to regain the technological edge it once had over the enemy.

In an address to the annual Trenchard Memorial Lecture, named after the founder of the RAF, Air Marshal Stringer said: "We now consider there to be five warfighting domains, when you include space and cyber.

"The lesson from the history of the RAF as an independent service is that you have to fight comprehensively across all the domains. You cannot prioritise one and hope to cherry-pick benefits from the others, except at some cost."

Air Marshal Stringer argued that to get the full benefit from investments in new technology like the fleet of F-35 stealth fighters, destined for the RAF and Royal Navy, there must be a similar modernisation in defence thinking and strategy.

Air Marshal Stringer says the UK needs to work with allies to share the burden of operating in new domains.

"Because we never saw space as contested, we never did these things. Well now space is contested, then there are other ways that we can configure our deployments."