CENTRE FOR AIR POWER STUDIES

Almost as soon as Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait in August 1990 the United Kingdom answered the call for military assistance. The Royal Air Force was the first of the three British armed forces to be operationally ready and active in-theatre and it remained busy patrolling no-fly zones in the north and south of Iraq for years after the cessation of hostilities in 1991. It then played a significant part in the major combat phase of Gulf War II and the following counter-insurgency campaign. Yet the Royal Air Force's operations have received relatively scant media attention and even less academic interest, largely because, when compared to land operations, air power seems less accessible and harder to understand.

The Defence Studies Department of King’s College London and the Royal Air Force Centre for Air Power Studies invites applications from air power academics and specialists, military historians, experts on the Gulf Wars, and RAF and other veterans of these conflicts to share new analyses of the RAF’s contribution to operations in Iraq across the broad spectrum of conflict, including the 1991 and 2003 Gulf Wars, the policing of the no-fly zones between 1991 and 2003, and the counter-insurgency phase from 2003 to 2009.

The conference intends to bring together scholars and practitioners, including those with operational experience, with an interest in the RAF’s participation in the various phases of the Iraq deployment in order to explore the following (and any related) themes: