Ronald Dick
Royal Air Force officer

Air Vice-Marshal Ronald Dick, (18 October 1931 – 25 March 2008) was a Royal Air Force officer who served as head of the British Defence Staff in Washington, D.C. from 1984 to 1988.
RAF career
Educated at Beckenham and Penge County Grammar School, Dick joined the Royal Air Force as a cadet in January 1950. He became officer commanding No. 9 Squadron RAF flying Vulcan bombers in 1970. He went on to be Junior Air Force Member on the staff of the Royal College of Defence Studies in 1972, Personal Staff Officer to the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe in 1974 and station commander at RAF Honington in 1978. After that he became Air Attaché in Washington, D.C. in 1980 in which role he negotiated US support for British air operations during Falklands War in 1982. His last appointments were as Director of Organisation and Establishments in 1983, as Director of Quartering in 1984 and as Head of the British Defence Staff and Defence Attaché in Washington, D.C., in 1984 before retiring in 1988.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ronald Dick” as royal Air Force officer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as royal Air Force officer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20639033. VIAF identifies the subject as 20413123. The Library of Congress control number is n97063178. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1931, 2008, 1984 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ronald Dick” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.