We rely on our political masters to take us to war because they know better... which is how Tony Blair for instance knew there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
News though that a Ukrainian drone manufacturer has chosen an unused hangar at RAF Mildenhall (which ought really to be called USAAF Mildenhall but looks better if it remains on our books) to manufacture the fixed-wing surveillance drones that it developed and built over there.
They will then be tested at the privately-owned airfield at Elmsett, because former publicly-owned ones like Ipswich have long been converted to housing estates with avenues named after aircraft in place of real ones, and Jackson Bollock artworks to reference what went before.
What is most astonishing is that anyone got permission to build an airfield of any sort ~ albeit on farmland ~ even back in 1969, instead of a retail park with shitty statuary. Circa WWII there were as many as seven hundred airfields in the British Isles, but at least we've as many retail parks circa 2025.
Mildenhall doubtless has a nuclear missile with its name on it, but I wonder how the good people of Elmsett, population 788, feel about the situation?
Though there may yet be residents who recall the fateful night in 1941 when bombs doubtless targeting retail parks in nearby Ipswich struck a row of terraces with fatal results?
I used for a while to train would-be flyers at the airfield in Ipswich, driving there on occasion daily from south London, and looking back I have to wonder why. But its art-deco tower and terminal, effectively abandoned, included all sorts of historical means of navigation equipment like VDF receivers; which despite being invented by Marconi on a wet afternoon were still used at Finningley when I was learning myself.
