Which is a shame. So why now? The fact is that without a genuinely strategic role that only an independent air force can carry out, having such an independent air force is pointless and wasteful. The RAF currently exists to do a number of jobs โ tactical strike on the battlefield, supporting the Navy at sea, carting stuff around, and spying on things.
Since it lost the strategic nuclear deterrent role back in the s, there is nothing the RAF does that has to be done by an independent air force. The Royal Naval Air Service had done so well with its resources that it had been roped in to support the Royal Flying Corps โ whose job was largely to support the Army on the ground.
In the context of the climax of the land war in Europe, it made sense to combine these forces and put them under single command. But this was only supposed to be a temporary arrangement, and with the end of the war and drastic reductions to forces, there was no reason other than politics to retain the single air force. This was initially thought to be effective in reality it just tended to push trouble from one place to another, and created simmering resentment among people being bombed and strafed as well we exploited but the main advantage was that it was much cheaper than using the Army.
Trenchard fought off an effort in the early s to give the Navy control of its own aviation, so withered had it already become under RAF control. Had this been successful, the Army would likely have also been given command of land based forces, and the RAF wound up.
The fact that it has had to do this at the expense of military aviation in other areas is constantly overlooked. By the beginning of WW2, Army Co-operation was eroded from the huge, complex operation of WW1 into a few squadrons of ridiculous Westland Lysanders which were shot to bits over France, and it took the rest of the war to build up a truly effective tactical air force that would have made more sense being under Army command in any case. Even now the Army has had to put up with arbitrary limitations on the size of the helicopters it can operate because the RAF has persuaded Whitehall that anything bigger than a Lynx should be under its management.
