On Thursday 18 December 2025 at 6pm, Arka Chowdhury will examine the RAF and the use of military force in Afghanistan and the North West Frontier in the interwar period. This lecture will be hosted virtually via Crowdcast.

Did the Royal Air Force’s (hereafter RAF) action in Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier (hereafter NWF) in the early half of the nineteenth century adhere to the British-Indian Army’s so-called ‘minimum force doctrine’? Did the RAF initiate a tactical departure from the British-Indian Army’s tribal control in the nineteenth century with the dual method of air bombing and air policing? These are the central questions around which this paper revolves. It examines the interplay of military technological development, imperial tactics of tribal control, and the application of military force in British-Indian counterinsurgency (henceforth COIN).

The introduction of aeroplanes added a third dimension to warfare during the First World War. With its faster speed and manoeuvrability compared to ground troops, Air Power greatly enhanced an army's striking capability; hence, it was quickly inducted into the armed establishment of world powers. Another notable advantage of aeroplanes was that they were completely free from topographical constraints. This was most relevant in the British-Indian Army's frontier warfare, where the infantry had to traverse great distances over rugged terrains. The NWF has often been considered the most strategically important frontier of the British Empire. To protect and control this vast stretch of land, air power has been used extensively in Indian frontier COINS since the Third Afghan War. Furthermore, air control of the frontier attempted to supplant the older methods of punitive expeditions.

This paper argues that the British-Indian Army’s approach to frontier COIN cannot be analysed using the minimum or maximum force binary. The use of force in COIN campaigns was not uniform throughout the nineteenth century. With this premise in mind, this paper examines whether Air Power functioned solely as an agent of military coercion based on brute force or if it initiated a regime of coercive surveillance for the control of tribal lands.

Arka Chowdhury is a doctoral scholar in Military History at Jadavpur University, India and an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Sri Ramkrishna Sarada Vidya Mahapitha, India. Arka has recently submitted my PhD thesis under the supervision of Prof. Kaushik Roy, and Arka's research interests pertain to Counterinsurgency and irregular warfare, warfare and technology and war and state-formation. Arka published a chapter on violence and the British-Indian Army’s warfare in an edited book by Routledge. In 2023, Arka received the Professor Partha Sarathi Gupta Memorial Prize and Professor J.C. Jha Memorial Prize in the Indian History Congress for the paper Imperial Racial Discourse and Military Technology: The British- Indian Army’s Warfare in Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier in the Nineteenth Century.

Virtual Lecture: Coercive Surveillance: RAF and the Use of Military Force in Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier, 1919-1937