John Cooper

I beg to move, That this House has considered the RAF E-7 Wedgetail programme. It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Christopher. Victory in the battle of Britain means we are having this debate in this place in English, but how was that aerial triumph secured? Of course, it had much to do with the pilots of the RAF—Churchill’s famous “few”—who risked all at long odds to blunt the Luftwaffe’s talons. Key, too, was the workhorse Hawker Hurricane, which bagged most of the kills. There was also the show pony Supermarine Spitfire, which grabbed most of the glory, to the extent that German pilots would lie about being brought down by a Spit and not the deadly but less elegant Hurricane. I would contend that the unsung hero is the world’s first organised radar early warning system, code-named Chain Home and strung like pearls around the British coast, with particular emphasis on the English south and south-east. It meant Britain could see the enemy coming and marshal our meagre fighter resources to best effect. Radar allowed us to vector our squadrons against the bomber streams and their escorts for, had we to rely on the “mark 1 eyeball”, as RAF pilots call it even today, or imprecise Royal Observer Corps listening devices that were more great war than great efficiency, suffice it to say the world would be a different and much worse place. Soon radar was miniaturised and put aboard aircraft, and aerial combat was transformed, so that today it is less Biggles battling the Hun in the sun and more BVR—beyond visual range—spotting our enemy long before they spot us and taking them out at a remarkable distance. Airborne radar and comms are today’s air war essentials, as vital to modern air forces as the Rolls-Royce Merlin engines that powered both our Spitfires and Hurricanes in the second world war. But the RAF has a problem: a capability gap—and for capability gap read “credibility gap”—because it cannot offer the complete integral mission package.