Competing Visions: The Admiralty, the Air Ministry and the Role of Air Power

Abstract

Air power at sea operates in the overlapping dimensions of sea and air. Because of that, there was probably bound to be a degree of tension between the protagonists of both. This was partly a question of institutional interests between the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force and the British Army too, for that matter. But the institutional tension between the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force was also a question of competing visions of a debate about what air power was for, and these both helped shape, and derived in large measure from, different conceptions of the nature and the needs of British strategy. The Air Ministry, however, had a rather different vision of the future of air power. Like the policy-makers in the Admiralty, the airmen drew lessons from the experience of the First World War and argued that the air could make a decisive contribution to the future security of Britain and its Empire.