Air power
From Viscount Trenchard Sir: I was interested to read Bruce Anderson's article CA middle-sized invasion', 14 September) in which he states that the new plan to bring about regime change in Iraq is a lightly armed force backed by air power.
My grandfather, in a speech at the Cambridge Union in April 1925 — when, as chief of air staff, he revealed that the university was to have its own air squadron — spoke of the use of air power in Iraq. 'I would ask you to look at what has happened in Iraq, which was formerly called Mesopotamia, where we really have reduced expenditure from many millions to three or four millions and with less casualties to our own people than before and also with less casualties to the enemy. I, therefore, claim for the air that it is a humane weapon. I look upon it as most humane in running countries like Iraq where, perhaps, six aeroplanes can go out at once and deal with a truculent tribe. They will not kill probably more than 20 or 30 of the tribe and perhaps two pilots will be killed on our side, possibly none at all, and the whole thing will be finished in a day or two whereas, under the old methods, it would be necessaty to send a column for a couple of hundred miles or so, which would take a month to get there and need long lines of communications, and then have to fight a stubborn enemy resulting in five or six hundred casualties and perhaps a hundred among our own people.'
The world has, of course, changed enormously, but perhaps some of the lessons of the 1920s are still valid today.
Trenchard
Standon, Hertfordshire
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