Very soon after the RAF was founded,
wasn't always going to be effective.
So it decided it needed its
So it formed the armoured car companies,
which I commanded in Iraq,
And the idea was it was
If they were sending aircraft in to bomb
tribe or whatever they were doing in Iraq
wherever it might have been,
With troops on the ground.
So, and then in.
So they.
And they carried on right, right up until
but also in, in 1940, when,
it became increasingly clear that the RAF
on the army to defend its airfields.
And as some very clever theorists
postulated, it's much easier to destroy
It's much easier to destroy the eggs
birds sort of thing.
And then after the Battle of Crete
German paratroopers dropped on several
nowhere to be seen because
And the airfields were captured quite
it was mostly airmen then,
themselves because that wasn't their job.
Churchill decided it had enough.
And he said... He did two things.
The first one is he said that every airman
and should be prepared to fight
But in order to help them,
RAF regiment, which had two roles.
One was to defend the airfields
to defend them from air attack
And eventually, at the end of the war, the
And so you had this organisation which,
it is to defend airfields,
them,
themselves from whatever
And these days, of course,
just like in the past, to everything
It's quite a big job.
So an armed regimental squadron,
if it's a field squadron,
an air base
kilometres, because what you're trying
You don't actually want.
You don't really want to be at the edge
You want to have intercepted them
ever sort of manifest themselves.
So you've typically got.
It's quite a specialist role.
We are, I suppose
you know, if you see us operating,
But what we.
Our challenge is with, you know,
700 square kilometres of ground.
Particular focus,
where aircraft take off and land, but also
So what you tend to have is
They're very small but they pack a punch.
So probably the focus really is
finding the enemy
which kneel in a haystack at times
So a lot of surveillance,
of a lot of sensors and things like that.
And then once you detect something,
to them quickly and deal with them.
So we need mobility and we also
So you'll find an Irish regiment squadron,
it'll typically have a lot of heavy
it'll have grenade launchers,
it'll have armoured vehicles to be able
long before they get a chance
The other role we had
Started with Bofors guns
and moved on to the rapier
which has got about a 10
So it's very much close in
physically have to attack airfields.
And now we've moved on to counter
So we now have squadrons that are equipped
again, for all the threats we're seeing
first person attack drones,
drones, I suppose,
and all sorts of things like that.
So does that give you a sort
