If the UK’s Royal Air Force is to maintain its relevancy, it must transform itself into a more agile and lethal force, while maintaining operational capability — all in the face of budget cuts that will close 40 percent of the RAF’s 73 airfields by 2020.

So what exactly is transformation in light of such a challenge, asked Air Chief Marshal Sir Clive Loader, the first commander-in-chief of the RAF’s Air Command, which was established in April.

“If I were to ask 50 or so members within the Ministry of Defence this question, I would expect to get 50 or so different answers,” Loader said Nov. 10 at the 3rd Biennial Defense News Middle East Air Chiefs Conference, just before the Dubai air show. “But whatever the interpretation of its meaning, it is the subject of continuing importance as an underlying driver of where, why, when and how the Ministry of Defence, and therefore the individual armed forces, will be shaped to meet the challenges of the evolving security environment.”

Loader’s remarks

In his job, he said, “transformation means maintaining the relevance of the RAF, and, more importantly, how we ensure the relevance of air power in the joint environment.”

Loader said that relevance comes in two guises: operational and financial.

Loader’s presentation

“Operational is obvious — it is about what we, the RAF, bring to the defense mix, both now and in the future,” he said. “Financial is absolutely no less important, for there is just no point in having capabilities — actual or potential — that are not affordable by this or any other government.

“This is critical, for we all recognize that governments have choices such as health service, better education or defense. I suspect that most of us would agree that there are probably more votes in the first two than in the latter.”

It is the efficient use of resources that will help modern air forces deal with today’s challenges of globalization and interdependency of nations.

“The pace of globalization, of social, political and economic change, of an increasingly uncertain context in which we now live — all of this has demanded unparalleled change in the U.K. armed forces,” Loader said. “This has driven the need to transform and adapt our armed forces towards expeditionary operations in order to tackle such implications as asymmetric threats and unstable regimes.”

As an example of adapting the RAF to modern-day requirements, Loader cited the “re-invention” of the Nimrod MR2 from a maritime surveillance platform to use for strategically critical overland ISR tasks.

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