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RAF ‘ready to fly and fight’ against Russia despite budget cuts
Sir Richard Knighton says that the UK is prepared to take on adversaries even though Armed Forces face funding issues
The Royal Air Force is ready to “fly and fight” against Russia, the force’s new head has said, despite concerns over cuts to the military.
In his first speech as Air Chief Marshal, Sir Richard Knighton told the Air Staff’s Global Air & Space Chiefs’ Conference that the UK was prepared to take on adversaries in the wake of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.
He said: “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.”
However, 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.
Earlier this year, the United States warned that it no longer saw the UK as a top-level fighting force because of cuts made across the service.
Sir Richard made the comments while discussing the war in Ukraine, as he highlighted that neither side had managed to gain “air superiority”.
He said that as a result, the two countries were “locked in a struggle between offence and defence”, where neither has the ability to “strike the adversary in the deep”.
Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, has spent months pleading for donations of F-16 jets, with Ukrainian pilots having warned how they must fly their planes, such as MiG-29s, at dangerously low altitudes to dodge Russia’s more capable jets.
Sir Richard added: “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.
“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 UK about how we deal with these threats.”
He said that the UK 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 our integrated air and missile defences of our adversaries,” he said.
Sir Richard warned that the UK could face cruise missile and long-range missile attacks on “our air bases and our air forces” in the future, and that the UK should be prepared for “hybrid attacks on our logistics chains and our industrial base”.
“All of us are going to face those threats,” he added.