Arun Dawson is a PhD candidate at the Department of War Studies, funded by the Freeman Air and Space Institute. His thesis uses RAF fighter procurement to offer an original analysis of British grand strategy post-Suez. This feeds into a wider interest concerning how the development, production and diffusion of military technology interacts with international relations. Arun has written for, and lectured, military and civilian audiences on these subjects in the UK and overseas. He has additionally featured as an expert commentator for the media.

Prior to King’s, Arun studied engineering at Oxford where he flew with the University Air Squadron, subsequently completing the NATO internship programme in Brussels. He has been awarded non-resident fellowships by the University of Notre Dame (in grand strategy) and George Mason University (in political economy). As part of his doctoral studies, he was the 2023 Guggenheim Fellow at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

Research Interests

• Air Power
• Defence procurement
• Economics of British defence policy
• War, technology and innovation

Recent Publications

• ‘Concept to Combat: The Royal Air Force and Small Drones Post-Ukraine’ (with Aleix Nadal, under peer review)
• ‘The case for RAF Arctic and High North readiness’, Freeman Commentary (Freeman Air and Space Institute, 2023)
• Higher Level Airspace: An International Analysis of Current Trends and Strategic Drivers (North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 2023), ISBN 978-92-845-0222-6
• ‘Cold Comfort: The Challenges Facing the RAF’s Return to the Arctic’, Freeman Paper 12 (Freeman Air and Space Institute, 2022), ISSN 2754-0510
• ‘Changes in the Pipeline: The Green Energy Transition and USA Futures’, contribution to Global Strategic Trends 7 (Ministry of Defence Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre, 2021)

He has also contributed as a research assistant to projects including Paul Kennedy’s Victory at Sea (Yale University Press, 2022); John Gearson’s Operation Banner Primer: An Account of the British Military’s Deployment to Northern Ireland, 1969-2007 (Centre for Defence Studies, 2022); and Jamie Gaskarth, Maeve Ryan and William Reynolds’ forthcoming study on British defence reviews post-1997.

Teaching

Arun teaches RAF officers on the IOD course at the UK Defence Academy and undergraduates on the History of the International System module at King’s. He has also given guest lectures at military academies from Brazil to Sri Lanka.

Research Project Summary:

Arun’s thesis builds on his Masters by exploring the role of airpower in British grand strategy. Whereas previous scholarship has tended to contemplate it in operational terms alone, airpower’s economic, diplomatic, technological and military dimensions render it an ideal test-bed for the analysis of strategic decision-making in war and peace. Whitehall’s renewed emphasis on grand strategy – as articulated in the Fusion Doctrine and Integrated Review – presents an opportunity to study contemporary conceptualisations of the military-industrial complex. In particular, exploring oligopolistic behaviour and the state’s control over technology transfer will reveal how the Government navigates between the competing priorities of allied interoperability, intra-Alliance industrial competition, and inter-service rivalry amidst budgetary and geopolitical pressures, to configure the future force structure. Arun’s thesis will blend both qualitative analysis and mathematical modelling to explore these dynamics and test those theories which purport to predict state behaviour. The result will yield policy-relevant insights for the RAF as it conceives its sixth-generation fleet.

Supervisory Team: Professor John Gearson and Dr David Jordan