On Thursday 5 June 2025 at 6pm, Arun Dawson will examine British combat aircraft procurement between 1970-1979. This lecture will be hosted virtually via Crowdcast.

Britain’s post-war trajectory has long been debated, with historians divided between narratives of inexorable decline and strategic recalibration (Reynolds, 1991; Barnett, 1995; McCourt, 2014; James, 2024). With few exceptions (Edgerton, 2005; Peden, 2009), such assessments overlook the role of military capabilities. Equally, analyses of the defence aerospace sector, ranging from interpretations of outright industrial neglect to negotiated subservience to the United States, seldom consider the competing economic, foreign policy, and military demands which impinge on defence acquisition (Hayward, 2018; Hamilton-Paterson, 2018; Sakade, 2021). Where headway can, therefore, be made is in linking these two historiographies. Just as the disposition of overseas bases embodies a nation’s global ambitions, how, why, and with whom military capabilities are developed or acquired can expose the trade-offs underpinning its grand strategy.

In this spirit, this paper examines British combat aircraft procurement between 1970-1979. On the one hand, Britain’s admittance to the EEC, after the two French vetoes of 1963 and 1967, suggest a mutual desire for closer European collaboration. The Anglo-French Jaguar and the Panavia consortium would seem to evidence this. At the same time, however, Sakade (2021) and Bellany (1994) point to other grand strategic influences which shaped procurement preferences: commercial pressures from the American aerospace industry in the former’s case, and in the latter’s, the need for aggressive defence exports to secure Gulf oil, foreign exchange and basing. In using archival materials to evaluate these competing historiographies, this paper reveals the role of aircraft as strategy. Additionally, by highlighting the tensions between sovereignty and dependency, industrial protectionism and alliance obligations, and military capability and economic pragmatism, this paper touches on themes relevant to today’s policymakers.

Arun Dawson is a PhD candidate at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. His thesis uses RAF fighter procurement to offer an original analysis of British grand strategy post-Suez. This feeds into a wider interest concerning how the development, production and diffusion of military technology interacts with international relations. Arun has written for, and lectured, military and civilian audiences on these subjects in the UK and overseas. As part of his doctoral studies, he was the 2023 Guggenheim Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

Virtual Lecture: Aircraft as Strategy: Britain, 1970-1979