Between the world wars, Britain's Royal Air Force struggled for money as governments cut spending on aircraft development in the name of peace. This film traces how the RAF survived those lean decades by finding work 'policing the Empire,' flying to remote colonial territories that would have taken land forces months to reach and hold, making the air force cheaper and more useful to Whitehall than the army in places like Iraq and the Northwest Frontier. Archival footage and expert commentary track the slow shift in government priorities as the threat from Nazi Germany grew through the 1930s, showing how funding for new aircraft designs and production only began flowing again as war looked increasingly likely. The film lays out the tension between interwar austerity and imperial policing duties on one side, and the urgent rearmament that followed on the other, explaining why the RAF entered the Second World War with the aircraft and infrastructure it did.