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That's the Expl World War interview.

Today I'm joined by Dr. Matthew Powell, author of The Development of British Tactical Air Power,

1943, A History of Army Cooperation Command, and currently at the University of Portsmouth Royal Air Force College, Cranwell.

Dr. Powell, how's it going? I'm very well, thank you. I've been working on the newest book that I'm trying to get

research, which is going to be on the British aircraft industry in the interwar period.

Oh, I will definitely be interested in that when it is available.

I've been reading about that a lot recently.

So we're here today to talk a little bit about the topic of your other book, which is the development of tactical air power.

So I wanted to start off as a lot of these conversations do on my podcast right now with the First World War.

So during the First World War, air power really kind of came into its own and began to have a meaningful impact on ground operations.

So how did the concept of close air support begin to develop and then evolve during the war?

I think if we go even further back before the First World War to 2011 and the first real use of attack as a role of air power

by the Italians in Libya, we can see that the opportunity is there to utilize aircraft

not only in a reconnaissance role, but also in an attack role.

And so we start to see this idea of how would we utilize air power to attack

ground forces and aid ground forces in their advancement. Now the technology used in 1911 is

...