Biography
Arun is a doctoral candidate in airpower and grand strategy at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London and the 2023 Guggenheim Fellow at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.
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 and completed 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), having also served as a research assistant to Prof. Paul Kennedy at Yale.
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
Research
Freeman Air and Space Institute
Freeman Air & Space provides independent, original knowledge and analysis of air and space power issues.
Economic Conflict & Competition Research Group
The ECCRG aims to be an academic centre of excellence for developing sustained, inter-disciplinary research on the study of Economic Warfare.
Centre for Grand Strategy
The Centre for Grand Strategy seeks to bring a greater degree of historical and strategic expertise to statecraft, diplomacy and foreign policy.
News
Freeman Air and Space Institute marks three-year anniversary
The Freeman Air and Space Institute, based in the School of Security Studies, celebrates three years since its inaugural launch.
Collaborative conference in Paris considers the Strategic and Military Consequences of the End of the Cold War
A hybrid conference held in Paris, organised by the Sir Michael Howard Centre and Sciences Po
Research
Freeman Air and Space Institute
Freeman Air & Space provides independent, original knowledge and analysis of air and space power issues.
Economic Conflict & Competition Research Group
The ECCRG aims to be an academic centre of excellence for developing sustained, inter-disciplinary research on the study of Economic Warfare.
Centre for Grand Strategy
The Centre for Grand Strategy seeks to bring a greater degree of historical and strategic expertise to statecraft, diplomacy and foreign policy.
News
Freeman Air and Space Institute marks three-year anniversary
The Freeman Air and Space Institute, based in the School of Security Studies, celebrates three years since its inaugural launch.
Collaborative conference in Paris considers the Strategic and Military Consequences of the End of the Cold War
A hybrid conference held in Paris, organised by the Sir Michael Howard Centre and Sciences Po