Jacko,
(Keegan said of Kosovo that it marked a real turning point in the history of warfare. It "proved that a war can be won by air power alone." Diplomacy was tried before the war and didn't work, and Slobodan Milošević caved in weeks before the deployment of the large ground force.)
Interesting. As one of a light blue persuasion, I've always though this quote from Keegan is politely, hoop.
Rather Op ALLIED FORCE / Op NOBLE ANVIL demonstrated the reverse: a modern state with ostensibly lots of a juicy targets can hold out for 79 days as long as there was no credible ground threat to their territory. It was precisely the deployment of the ARRC with 4th Armoured and 5th Airborne Bdes under Mike Jackson that tipped the balance and forced Milošević to withdraw.
Clearly winning a war with Air Power alone, or as the dominant means of delivering decisive effect, is no longer an ambition of the UK (or at least not as expressed under the SDSR). It's as though Granby and Kosovo never happened.
Similarly, it's not clear to me that the decisive effect in GRANBY was delivered by air power - land was clearly the supported commander, not air. Air was an enabler in Gulf I and Gulf II, but it was never going to force the Iraqi army from Kuwait or remove Saddam's regime from power (even if we'd have killed him directly - Dos Gringos notwithstanding). And please don't forget that both of the conflicts you cite we were hardly acting alone - many (most?) of the most important multipliers were Allied, not RAF/RN.
Can we do the highest intensity stuff by ourselves now? Probably not (or not without significantly higher risk appetite than currently exists). But let's remember that we haven't been in a position to do this by ourselves for many years - probably, arguably, since V-Force with Blue Steel (hurrah for whizzy standoff nuclear rocket bombski).
I'm not for one second saying that I'm happy with the immediate future of the RAF FJ force, but then I'm pretty unimpressed with the number of FF/DD, SH, AT/AAR etc etc and the imbalance of force multipliers across the three environments. But unless you can show that there is a serious chance of us doing something like GRANBY again (where?) then it's awfully hard to justify a force structure able to do GRANBY when we are cutting everything else.
We're not in the mid-80s of spending 5% of GDP on defence. And it's not going to be much above 2% for as far ahead as I can see - so it's not going to be much better for a long time - the 2020 in "Future Force 2020" seems about as optimistic as the 2000 in "Nimrod 2000".
And on that happy note,
S41