During the Falklands war in 1982, the United Kingdom conducted a series of long-range strategic bombing raids against the Argentine airfield in Port Stanley on the Falklands. These operations were known as Black Buck. A numerically inferior United Kingdom tried to achieve strategical effects through innovative and daring technological and tactical solutions.
The research question that this paper aims to answer is: How could the outcome of Black Buck be understood through theories on asymmetrical air power? This paper examines the operation through The Underdog’s Model of Arash Heydarian Pashakhanlou and the SPOT-paradigm of Shaun Clarke. The analysis is conducted as a qualitative text analysis, with the aim of increasing the understanding of the operation.
This study concludes that the British success of Black Buck can be understood to a similar extent through The Underdog’s Model and SPOT-paradigm, with the understanding that the factors Intelligence and Concentration were the two major causes of the outcome of the operation, as well as leading up to it. This study contributes to the general understanding of the air war in the Falklands conflict, as well as the employment of strategic air power as an inferior actor in asymmetric aerial warfare.