Britain’s Royal Air Force is chomping at the bit to go to war against Russia. RAF Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton told an air chiefs conference in London on July 13 that the U.K. was prepared to take on adversaries in the wake of Russia’s (allegedly) illegal invasion of Ukraine. “What we need to communicate, so that our adversaries comprehend that we have credible capability, is that we’re ready to fly and fight and that they will lose,” he said. However, the Telegraph notes, it comes at a time where the state of the Armed Forces has been called into question, owing to cuts across the RAF, Army and Royal Navy.
But Knighton clearly lives in a fantasy world, given that the economic basis of not only the U.K. but also of the United States and the European countries represented at the conference he spoke to, is collapsing. “Some will argue that Russia is now weaker than it was before we started the war. And that is certainly true in the land domain,” he went on. “The Army has lost more than two-thirds of its tanks, but the Air Force remains largely intact and we’ve been thinking hard in the U.K. about how we deal with these threats.”
He claimed that the U.K. had learned lessons from Ukraine and cautioned that “the operational challenges our air forces will face wherever we’re fighting are going to be the same. We are going to have to break into [the] integrated air and missile defenses of our adversaries.”