Anna Feuer will examine the “environmental imaginary” that contributed to the particular appeal of the RAF’s air control scheme in Iraq under the British mandate.

This free lecture is part of the RAF Museum's Research Lecture Programme. If you would like to support the RAF Museum, you can make a donation at: https://support.rafmuseum.org/Donate-Now

How do counterinsurgents assess and respond to challenges posed by the natural environment? How does technological development alter their perceptions of the battlefield, and what are the consequences for counterinsurgency strategy, civilian security, and environmental wellbeing?

This paper—part of a larger research project on the relationship between nature and technology in counterinsurgency wars—examines the “environmental imaginary” that contributed to the particular appeal of the RAF’s air control scheme in Iraq under the British mandate.

Drawing on archival materials from the RAF Museum, the National Archives, and the Imperial War Museum, as well as memoirs and journalistic accounts, I demonstrate how the RAF’s case for air control depended upon specific narratives of the Iraqi environment that both emerged from and shaped British experiences in the country during the Mesopotamian Campaign and the mandate period.

Air control advocates affirmed perceptions of Iraq as an empty desert ideally suited to aerial surveillance, despite considerable variation in the country's terrain; at the same time, they pointed to Iraq’s harsh climate and seemingly illegible landscape to argue for the necessity of mechanization, as the airplane promised to overcome all topographical and climatic obstacles.

The rhetorical force of air control ideology relied, to a significant extent, on its explicit contrast with the environmental hardships faced by ground troops; the airplane would relieve colonial forces from what seemed intolerable terrain and weather conditions. The notion that counterinsurgency and colonial policing operations could be abstracted from the physical battlefield itself represents a profoundly consequential legacy of British military strategy in Iraq.

In justifying the air control scheme, the RAF took a first, crucial step toward realizing the military fantasy of remote warfare, directed from secure airbases, waged by machines that seemed to make irrelevant the physical constraints of topography and climate.

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