On Tuesday 17 June 2025 at 12pm, John Alexander will re-examine the close air support (CAS) provided by the Hawker Siddeley Harrier GR3s of No. 1 Squadron RAF during the Falklands Campaign. This lecture will be hosted virtually via Crowdcast and livestreamed from the RAF Museum's London site.

This lecture re-examines the close air support (CAS) provided by the Hawker Siddeley Harrier GR3s of No. 1 Squadron RAF during the Falklands Campaign. As the British official historian notes, the story of air power in the Falklands focuses on the battle between Argentine attack aircraft and British Sea Harriers and surface-based air defences. Nevertheless, he notes two of the three GR3s shot down were re-attacking, the strained command arrangements in theatre, including the absence of a joint theatre commander, and the limited capacity to coordinate offensive air support. Furthermore, the campaign is often seen as an anachronism, occurring during what one air power scholar calls a ‘doctrinal vacuum’ of British air power doctrine, and before the institutionalisation of the operational level, operational art, mission command, the manoeuvrist approach, and ‘jointery’ in British doctrine.

The lecture offers a fresh perspective on British CAS in the Falklands and the perennial issue of its prioritisation vis-à-vis other roles, drawing on raw contemporary official reports, some only recently released, rather than post hoc memoirs. The lecture finds while British operations were successfully synchronised vertically from the War Cabinet down to tactical actions, the absence of joint operational commander was particularly detrimental to what NATO defined as offensive air support operations: battlefield air interdiction, tactical reconnaissance, and CAS. While this was the GR3s dedicated role in Allied Command Europe, the Carrier Task Group was configured for air defence by Sea Harriers, and as the Chief of the Air Staff subsequently observed, there was no properly constituted offensive air support plan; instead GR3 sorties were often at the whim of senior naval officers. Hence, notwithstanding decisive CAS at Goose Green, many GR3 sorties were risky armed reconnaissance until tactical air control, effective communications and Britain’s first use of laser guided bombs were combined at the very end of the campaign.

John Alexander is researching a PhD by publication on the development of British joint air-land operational art. As an RAF officer, he practised air-land operations in the Falklands in 1982 and subsequently with airborne and commando forces, in Oman, as a Chief Air in a NATO corps headquarters, and in various Middle Eastern campaigns. He has conceptualised warfare, including joint operational doctrine, for the UK MOD, the RAF, Director Special Forces and NATO, and led the observer/trainer team for UK and JEF joint collective training. Latterly he headed the UK’s joint operational headquarters force development and force preparation branch at the Permanent Joint Headquarters (UK). Twice a Chief of the Air Staff Fellow, he has degrees from Newcastle, the Open (twice), Cambridge, and Pakistan National Defence universities, and was a visiting research fellow at Oxford’s Changing Character of War programme. He has published in Air and Space Power Review, Asian Affairs, the RUSI Journal, and the Journals of the T.E. Lawrence Society and RAF Historical Society, editing the latter two, and co-edited Close Air Support: Case Studies on the Integration of Air Power on the Battlefield (Helion, 2024).

Lunchtime Lecture (London): ‘Suddenly like cavalry’: British Close Air Support in the Falklands Campaign