Dr Frank Ledwidge is Senior Fellow in Air Power and International Security at the Royal Air Force College at Cranwell. Over the last 20 years, he has seen air power at work all over the world. After a 7 year career as a barrister, he was called up to serve as a reservist intelligence officer in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s with the mission to locate war criminals. In 2003 Frank served as commander of one of the intelligence teams sent to Iraq to hunt for WMD. One of few British officials to have served in all of the country's recent wars, he has also worked for the UK government in Helmand and Libya during the conflicts there. In his civilian life, he has worked as a human rights lawyer throughout the Balkans, the Former Soviet Union and Africa. Frank is the author of two acclaimed and bestselling books on British military performance in the 9/11 wars; Losing Small Wars (2011) and Investment in Blood (2013) both with Yale University Press, as well as several academic articles.

• Introduction


• 1: Foundations


• 2: Beginnings: The First World War 1914-1918


• 3: Theory and Practice: The interwar years 1919-1939


• 4: The Second World War: air operations in the West


• 5: The Second World War: the air war in the Pacific


• 6: Cold war 1945-1982


• 7: The apotheosis of air power 1983-2001


• 8: Aerostats to algorithms; 2001-2018


• 9: Per ardua ad astra?


• References


• Further Reading


• Index